The Sociology of Harry Potter: 22 Enchanting Essays on the Wizarding World

by Unknown

  After Lily’s death and Voldemort’s fall, Snape lived in a shadow. He became Potion Master at Hogwarts (Dumbledore couldn’t let him teach Defence against Dark Arts, because of “old sins”), and he dedicated his life to protecting Lily’s son, Harry Potter. Snape never liked Harry; actually he hated him because he was so like James. Nevertheless, even from Harry’s first year at Hogwarts, Snape worked to protect his life.

  During Harry’s sixth year, Snape finally reached his career goal: He became Defence Against Dark Arts Teacher. Concomitantly, though as Dumbledore’s spy, he was also one of Voldemort’s, who had returned to power, most trusted Death Eaters. After Dumbledore’s orchestrated death, Snape became a Headmaster of Hogwarts. He died during the Battle of Hogwarts, killed by Nagini on Voldemort’s order as the latter, erroneously, believed it necessary in order to take possession of the Elder Wand. His last words, whispered to the boy that he hated so much: “Look...at....me... You have your mother’s eyes” (DH: 658; HP7 part II). Snape died immediately thereafter, staring into the eyes of the love of his life.

  Pedagogy of Half-blood Prince

  Relationships with Students

  Every teacher (in both the Muggle and wizarding world) has his/her own style of relating to the students and specific pedagogy / teaching methodology. So does Severus Snape. As a teacher, Snape’s style could be described as being mean, cruel and unfair. It was not Snape’s style to treat his students equally. To some he was intimidating and abusive while to others he showed favouritism. Some students he simply ignored.

  Professor Severus Snape had a perverted need to intimidate some students by degrading and humiliating them. The best example of this sadistic practice can be seen in his treatment of Neville Longbottom. For example, Snape tried to poison Neville’s frog, Trevor, with his own improperly brewed potion. When Snape realized that Hermione helped Neville, he punished them both. Neville was so afraid of Snape that his Boggart looked like Snape. Often, Snape called Neville an “Idiot boy” (e.g., SS 139).

  Snape was downright abusive to other students whom he disliked, in particular Harry. Harry recalls of his first year at Hogwarts that “At the start-of-term banquet, [he] had gotten the idea that Professor Snape disliked him. By the end of the first Potions lesson, he knew he’d been wrong. Snape didn’t dislike [him] – he hated him.” (SS 136, emphasis in original). It wasn’t until Harry’s fourth year that Snape directly told him how he felt saying “To me Potter, you are nothing but a nasty little boy who considers rules to be beneath him” (GOF 516).

  Rather than just intimidating and humiliating Harry as he did to Neville, Snape purposely was nasty to Harry, in and outside class, and wasn’t afraid of losing his job because of mobbing him at school. When Harry did something correctly in Potion class, Snape would break his bottle so that Harry would receive no marks for the assignment. Snape also loved to put Harry into detention, for instance making him clean his cabinet. But the most malicious detention was in Harry’s sixth year, when Snape made him copy (without magic) the list of the records of other Hogwarts wrongdoers and their punishments. When Harry saw his father’s and godfather’s names, he “felt the familiar boiling sensation in the pit of his stomach” (HBP 532). Snape knew how he would feel, so he coldly sneered: “It must be such a comforting thing that, though they are gone, a record of their great achievements remains” (ibid). In fact, several times, and only half joking, Snape actually threatened to poison Harry, like it was the funniest thing in the world.

  In stark contrast to this treatment, Snape was perfectly genteel to other students. Naturally, the main condition was that one is in Slytherin, and that one has some deal of intelligence. In Harry’s generation, Snape’s pet was Draco Malfoy, probably more likely because of his friendship with Draco’s father, Lucius Malfoy, than because Draco was a naturally gifted potion maker[ix]. In third year he made Ron cut Draco’s roots while Draco was pretending to still be suffering from Buckbeak’s attack. In fourth year Snape didn’t punish him when his (Draco’s) spell enlarged Hermione’s teeth. However, when he realized that Draco was supposed to kill Dumbledore, they became very rough with each other. Snape recognized that Draco was too “weak” and had promised Narcissa to help him; and Draco believed that Snape had betrayed Lucius and was now trying to encroach upon his, Draco’s, moment of glory.

  As Dumbledore pointed out to Harry, “indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike” (OOTP 834). As a professor, some students Snape liked, some he hated, and some he just ignored. Hermione Granger was one of the students whom he preferred to pretend did not attend his classes. Hermione was a brilliant student, a “borderline genius” (Rowling 1999). There was no question that she could give the right answer. Sometimes, this habit could be annoying to teachers; and it was especially so to Severus Snape. For instance, he ignored every right answer she gave; he even used to deduct points from Gryffindor for her being an “insufferable know-it-all,” (POA 172). When she would help other students such as Neville, he punished her for “showing off” as well. Were he to accept that she answered a question correctly, he was dismissive of the achievement. In response to providing the correct benefit of using silent spells Snape replied, “An answer copied almost word for word from The Standard Book of Spells, Grade Six... but correct in essentials” (HBP 178-179). To him, Hermione just had a great memory, not a truly magical gift.

  Methodology

  With regard to Snape’s actual teaching methods, he favoured a rigorous, but loosely guided, approach. He disliked the way every DADA professor taught that class. He had his own vision of how that subject should best be taught. Concerning the difficultly level of the material, he stated that Professor Lupin was “hardly overtaxing” the students, adding that he would “expect first years to be able to deal with” what Lupin was covering in their third year course (POA 171). Yet despite his view that more difficult material should be covered, Snape’s teaching methodology involved little explanation of new material once it was introduced. Snape didn’t explain anything. Students had to manage lessons in their own way. For instance, as Potions Master he would often simply list the ingredients and directions on the board and expect the students to figure it out themselves within an allotted amount of time. During a DADA lesson, he told the students to divide into pairs to practice a spell; but unlike Professor McGonagall, Professor Flitwick or even the imposter Professor Moody, Snape did not first demonstrate the spell to show the students the correct way to perform it.

  Snape always used to give students hard and long essays for homework. He assigned anywhere from two full rolls of parchment (POA 173) to twelve inches of parchment (OOTP 234). Moreover, whereas other professors like Binns gave students a week or more to turn in a long essay (COS 148), Snape’s were almost always to be handed in the very next class meeting, just two or three days after it was assigned. When it came to students whom he did not like, he found it very appropriate to punish them by giving them extra homework, i.e., another longer essay (e.g., OOTP 364). With regard to grading homework, Hogwarts grades were unique from O.W.L. and N.E.W.T. scores. In fifth year, Snape decided to evaluate their homework essays based on the exam grading system. He concluded that “[t]he general standard of this homework was abysmal. Most of you would have failed had this been your examination. I expect to see a great deal more effort for this week’s essay on the various varieties of venom antidotes, or I shall have to start handing out detentions to those dunces who get a D[x].”(OOTP 309).

  In conclusion: Snape never explained how to make a potion or do a spell, but he was always unfair, cruel and strict when he was giving grades to students. It is our opinion that he never wanted to be a teacher and that he never enjoyed his job. He didn’t appear to like children or working with teens. However, he stayed because when Harry came to Hogwarts he could fulfil his mission: abuse the boy, make him miserable, and save his life.

  Making of the Man

  Social Structure and Personality

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p; The core theme of the social structure and personality paradigm is that one’s position in the social structure affects individual-level experiences and characteristics such as attitudes/opinions, personality, interpersonal relationships, and life’s choices and achievements. Stryker (1980)[xi] argued that the structure of a society could influence individual interactions in three ways. First, the structure largely determines who interacts with whom on a daily basis. This is clearly evident with regard to Houses within Hogwarts. Members of a given House eat, sleep, study, socialize, etc. with primarily members of their own House. In this way, it is the organizational structure of the institution that determines, for example, who will become friends rather than just whose personalities “click.” Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil were as close as can be and had many things in common; yet were it not for their shared structural location (Gryffindor House) they would not have had the opportunity to form such a tight friendship.

  Second, the social structure determines which symbols and cultural materials people can use and understand. For example, due to their position within the wizarding world, only witches and wizards would have perfectly understood Mr. Weasley’s explanation to the Dursleys of how and why he connected No. 4 Privet Drive to the Floo Network to collect Harry. Like Harry’s relatives, other Muggles would likewise not “understand a single word of this” (GOF 45) due to their differential social location (i.e., outside, and unaware, of the wizarding world). The reverse is true as well. When Dean Thomas yelled ‘’Red card ref!’’ during a Quidditch match, the other spectators did not understand what he meant (SS 188). ‘’Red card’’ refers to the referees in the Muggle game of football/soccer expelling a player for committing an “open and revolting foul” (ibid). Dean, because of his structural location as a Muggle-born who lived until two months prior exclusively in the Muggle world, had learned to associate fouls with receiving the red card.

  In addition to symbols, one’s social position also equips one to be able to effectively use cultural materials that differentially located others cannot manage. For example, at the 422nd Quidditch World Cup, Hermione had to show Mr. Weasley how to use matches, a Muggle fire-starting tool he could not figure out how to work (GOF 85). These cases of knowledge as a function of location in the social structure are explained by the concept of people having “cultural tool kits.” According to Swindler (1986), members of different cultures have at their disposal different “symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views” (277) in their tool kits that provide “resources out of which individuals and groups construct strategies of action” (281).

  Physical location in the social structure is not the only thing that determines the contents of one’s tool kit; temporal location does as well. The generation in which a person was born and the world events that occurred during that time period also influence what one can understand. For example, at the World Cup, Harry was ignorant of the significance of the Dark Mark because he spent most of his life to that point in the Muggle world; yet Ron had grown up in the wizarding world and he too was confused about “what that skull thing was” (GOF 141). Harry and the younger Weasley children did not know why its appearance was “such a big deal” because, as Mr. Weasley explained, they were “too young” (GOF 142). The full weight of the terror of the Dark Mark is a part of older generations of witches’ and wizards’ cultural tool kit. Thus only Mr. Weasley and Bill, the eldest, could appreciate the magnitude of the situation (though see chapter 15 for an explanation of how Hermione’s reading about the Dark Mark in The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts led her to have the same reaction that night as those who actually lived during the First Wizarding War).

  Finally, Stryker’s third argument is that our internal identities are arranged into hierarchies, and the ordering of our identities follows the status hierarchy of a society. A Hogwarts student’s identity as a House Quidditch team member would be expected to be higher on her/his internal identity hierarchy than that of a choir member because the European wizarding community values Quidditch players more than singers (except maybe in the case of the Weird Sisters). Through these three mechanisms – available interpersonal interactions, available symbol referents via one’s cultural tool kit, and identity organization – Stryker argues that the social structure influences individual level experiences and characteristics – including a professor’s teaching methods and how s/he relates to students.

  Structural Influences on Snape’s Relationships with Students

  Snape’s structural location in Slytherin House means that he only had sustained interpersonal interactions with one quarter of the students at Hogwarts. As such, it is easy to see why he favoured students from his own House. They were the only ones his structural social position allowed him to really get to know and develop a relationship with. Moreover, while Professor McGonagall may have seen Neville studying dutifully, Professor Snape only saw Draco, Pansy, and other Slytherin students’ outside the classroom efforts, making it easier to give his students the “benefit of the doubt” when they did not perform up to par.

  Snape’s past interpersonal interactions structured his relationships with students as well. As a child, Severus witnessed his parents’ fights and his father abusing his mother. Sociological studies with Muggles from impoverished circumstances like Snape’s report that “it’s strange what [witnessing domestic violence] does to you, seeing that as a kid. You’d think you’d be like, ‘wow, I’m never gonna treat someone like that, I’m never gonna be violent with a girl, I’m never gonna dominate someone.’ But that ain’t the way it works” (MacLeod 2009: 342). Bandura et al (1961) explains “the way it works.” Results of this classic social psychological lab experiment showed that the children who witness aggressive behaviour in adults were more like to copy that behaviour than the children who did not witness such events. This is not to say that people automatically and unthinkingly do what they see others doing; but it demonstrates that repeatedly witnessing a behaviour places it in one’s cultural tool kit, and thus it becomes a ready option for one’s own future behaviour. Returning to Professor Snape’s relationships with his students, he clearly drew upon these aggressive and abusive behaviours in his interactions with Harry, Neville and other students he did not like.

  Snape’s cultural tool kit also contained a symbol that was widely recognized by all in his temporal location: Lily Potter’s bright green eyes. Everyone in this generation and older, upon meeting Harry, commented that he has his mother’s eyes, so often in fact that Harry “found it a bit wearing” (HBP 69). What’s more, this comment was usually followed with a declaration of how talented and/and or kind Lily was (HP3; HBP 70). For Snape, however, Lily’s eyes don’t just symbolize her talent and kindness, but also, painfully, his lost friendship with and unrequited love for her. During Snape’s interactions with Harry, upon seeing this painful symbol, he reached again for the familiar behaviour he witnessed his father using: abuse.

  Professor Snape, like all witches, wizards, and Muggles, was many things. He was a Potions Master, Head of Slytherin House, Dumbledore’s spy, and a (faux) Death Eater to name a few. With regard to his identities within Hogwarts as an educational institution, his position as Potions master and as a Head of House were the most salient. As a Head of House was a position of leadership, only one of four at the entire school, we can expect that in the status hierarchy of the wizarding world, this position would be ranked higher than that of regular professor. Remember that Stryker (1980) theorizes that people organize their internal identities into hierarchies that reflect the broader social views; therefore, we can expect that being Head of Slytherin House was more important to Snape than being Potions Master. This ordering of importance was visible not just in his favouritism of Slytherin students, but also in his ignoring of brilliant students like Hermione. His identity as a professor, as one who embraces learning and helps satiate students’ curiosity, was second place; and ignoring students who would foreground it allowed him to keep it that way.

  St
ructural Influences on Snape’s Teaching Pedagogy

  As with his relationship with students, Snape’s structural location, past and present, heavily influenced his teaching. With regard to one’s location structuring interpersonal interactions, we can note that lack of interpersonal interactions due to one’s structural location has an effect on individuals as well. Given that Snape knew so many spells upon arrival at Hogwarts, it can be assumed that he studied and taught himself. Moreover, as an unpopular student, it can be assumed he continued studying alone during his tenure at Hogwarts as well. Limited interpersonal interactions with others with regard to learning, therefore, may be an explanation for his “hands off” approach to teaching his students. Having learned with little help himself, he expected others to do the same. His temporal location influenced what interactions he had as well. As a student of Horace Slughorn’s he would have attended Potions classes taught in the same manner that he himself later conducted the class: ingredients listed on the board or in the book, students working independently, professor walking around the room observing but not offering guidance (HP6).

  His position in the wizarding social structure also determines which cultural materials Snape used in the classroom. In particular, he was fond of assigning long essays, sometimes to be completed in as little as two days. However, this method is more a reflection of his position as a Hogwarts teacher than as whatever it was Ron called him that made Hermione say “Ron!” (POA 173). As the students’ surprise at Lupin’s practical lessons and exams demonstrates, Hogwarts’ teachers usually rely on essays as their main pedagogical tool. Professors Binns, Burbage, McGonagall, Sinistra, Sprout, and Vector all assign essays. Even Lupin, who all the students (excepting maybe the Slytherins) loved, sometimes made them summarize readings and write essays (POA 139; 277). So while the length and due dates of Snape’s essays may be reflective of his surly attitude (Professor Binns gave ten days for an essay shorter than one Snape assigned to have been due to two days), his use of this particular pedagogical tool in general was a reflection of his structural location not as a professor but as a specifically Hogwarts professor.