Growing Down With Harry: Why The Harry Potter Books Became a Moral Sinkhole

Snape’s Worst Memory, from the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix film

In Harry Potter’s third year at Hogwarts, his nasty, bullying Potions master, Severus Snape, tells him openly for the first time how much he hated Harry’s dead father, James: ‘He, too, was exceedingly arrogant… Strutting around the place with his friends and admirers… the resemblance between you is uncanny.’ This comes as no surprise to Harry, who has been told long ago that Snape has it in for him because of his dislike of James. However, even though he knows virtually nothing about his father, he’s certain that Snape is recounting his own twisted version of events: ‘My dad didn’t strut. And nor do I.’ This recurrent narrative throughout the first four Harry Potter books makes the revelation in the fifth into one of the most unforgettable chapters in the series. Through a magical device called a Pensieve, Harry witnesses an uncensored version of Snape’s ‘worst memory’ – a version that, unlike Snape’s earlier accusations, he can’t write off as hopelessly biased, because it plays like a videotape. Snape’s worst memory shows a fifteen-year-old Snape being tormented by James in an exceptionally cold and vicious manner. James taunts an unarmed Snape, hexes him, then hangs him upside down (to add insult to injury, using what we later find out is a spell Snape invented), flashing his underwear to watching crowds; finally, he threatens to strip him. James isn’t motivated by anything much in attacking Snape in this way; he does it because he’s bored, because he can, and because he wants to show off to some admiring girls, including Harry’s mother, Lily.

Harry is deeply disturbed by witnessing Snape’s worst memory. It never occurs to him to try and make excuses for his father. Indeed, his instant reaction is: ‘he knew how it felt to be humiliated in the middle of a circle of onlookers, knew exactly how Snape had felt as his father had taunted him, and that judging from what he had just seen, his father had been every bit as arrogant as Snape had always told him.’ Harry seeks an explanation for what he’s seen from his father’s two best friends, Remus and Sirius. Neither understands Harry’s shock and horror. Indeed, they are happy to explain away James’s actions by claiming that this was a relationship of equal enemies, not of bully/victim, and that James had right on his side: ‘James and Snape hated each other from the moment they set eyes on each other… Snape was just this little oddball who was up to his eyes in the Dark Arts, and James… always hated the Dark Arts.’ They suggest that James was being ‘an idiot’ because he was ‘only fifteen’ (ignoring Harry’s fair retort, ‘I’m fifteen!’). Nevertheless, Harry continues to feel uneasy; this question about his father’s character is never resolved, even though the narrative itself quickly forgets it.

Snape’s worst memory is the only significant moment in the Harry Potter series where the bully is allowed to be a character whom we know to be on the Good side, and the victim a character who (at the time) was on the Bad side, which is another reason why it is so memorable. Throughout the rest of the books, only Bad characters are called out for their bullying behaviour. If you’re Good, you can get away with anything. For brevity, I’ll focus on one extreme example; the Weasley twins, Fred and George, brothers of Harry’s best friend Ron. The Twins are portrayed through the books as Good characters, culminating in Fred’s heroic death in book seven; they are also sadistic, cruel and at time, borderline psychopathic.

The Twins are a lot nicer in the movies than they are in the books!

The Twins do too many horrible things for me to list them all, but they are consistently depicted picking on those younger and smaller than themselves, usually, but not always, members of their own family. The most persistent victim is Ron. The Twins start with childhood ‘pranks’ (they give him an Acid Pop that burns a hole through his tongue, and try to get him to make an Unbreakable Vow that would probably have killed him) and continue into adolescence; they destroy his confidence when he becomes part of the Gryffindor Quidditch team so thoroughly that he can’t play properly until they’ve left the school. Their position as classic bullies who always ‘punch down’ is summed up by a conversation in book six, where Ron admits anxiously that ‘I’d better pass my [Apparition] test first time… Fred and George did.’ His older brother Charlie failed, but ‘Charlie’s bigger than me… so Fred and George didn’t go on about it much.’ While their younger sister Ginny learns to stand up for herself later in the series, they target her when she’s still a shy, nervous eleven-year-old: in book two, they think it’s funny that she’s scared of Slytherin’s monster stalking the castle (after the monster has already almost killed a fellow student who sits next to her in one of her classes) so they ‘[take] it in turns to cover themselves in fur or boils and jump out at her from behind statues’ and only stop when their older brother tells them to knock it off because Ginny is having nightmares.

Reflecting on Snape’s worst memory, Harry compares his father’s behaviour to that of the Twins, and thinks that he ‘could not imagine Fred and George dangling someone upside-down for the fun of it.’ This positions the Twins as harmless pranksters and James as an exceptional bully. However, even though the intention of this paragraph is clearly meant to underline how bad James’s behaviour is, Rowling can’t quite stop there; Harry goes on to think, ‘not unless [the Twins] really loathed them… perhaps Malfoy, or somebody who really deserved it…’ Here, in a nutshell, is the moral sinkhole at the heart of the Harry Potter series. We know, by book five, that the Twins do things that are this bad all the time. As it happens, they bully people that Harry knows and likes, so even this doesn’t quite work out, but Harry admits here that this behaviour would be OK as long as it’s directed towards somebody who really deserved it. Unfortunately, in the world of Harry Potter, you ‘deserve it’ if you are Bad, and you are Bad because you deserve it. The Twins are Good, so they can’t be bullies, no matter how they treat other people.

The films somewhat inexplicably save any remembered interactions between young!Snape and young!Lily for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II.

As an aside: I’ve been thinking about why Snape’s worst memory shows James as so cruel, when it sits so uneasily with the rest of the text, and when Rowling clearly isn’t interested in exploring the long-term ramifications of Harry’s discovery. By book six, James is Good again. The answer, I think, is that Rowling is, as ever, focused on plotting. Snape’s worst memory exists in the text as a clue, as something we can go back to when we discover, in book seven, that Snape Loved Lily. It’s not really meant to upturn everything Harry knows about his father. Snape’s worst memory is Snape’s worst memory because he argued with Lily and lost her friendship, not because of James’s bullying. Of course, what we also have to take away is that, for Snape, being humiliated, hexed and stripped in front of the school wasn’t the worst of his memories, because it simply happened too often.

Better essayists than me have pointed out that the morality of Harry Potter is shot, so I won’t dwell on that issue here, but I’d like to discuss one of the reasons why. Rowling has frequently said that she wanted the series to ‘grow up with Harry’ and get darker as it went along. The series’ morality becomes much more simplistic in books six and seven, so it certainly doesn’t become more morally serious (which for me, is really the only relevant meaning of ‘growing up with the reader’). However, I’d agree that, from books three/four onwards, the series takes violence, suffering and death more seriously as Harry encounters it head-on. Unfortunately, this means that re-reading the early books can feel very tonally jarring, because the cartoon, schoolboy violence that Harry encounters in books one and two suddenly feels much more serious than it was meant to be. (The Acid Pop incident that I mentioned above, for example, is framed as a joke in book two, and in the context of that book, doesn’t feel so horrific.) The problem is compounded by the fact that characters like Fred and George – who are fun and even caring in book one – fail to ‘grow up’ with the series, and so seem increasingly sinister by the later books, because they’re doing things that might make sense in a certain kind of children’s literature, but now the stakes are raised, they look like villains. Snape’s worst memory is a pivot on which the series could have turned; instead, Rowling doubled down on her original plan for the last two books, cut off all the interesting offshoots that were sprouting from book five, and delivered a miserably bad ending.