About the Validity of Snape’s Worst Memory

[Disclaimer: Lots of SALT!!]

Introduction

Some people have said that SWM doesn’t count because it actually never happened. Usually, they say Severus invented or changed the memory, or it was too subjective to represent faithfully what actually occurred. This way, they hope to present Severus as “the true bully” and a manipulator, as well as argue that in reality, the Marauders were the victims.

I laughed a lot at this last concept. But I guess it goes along with trying to glorify the Marauders’ bullying by making it as though they were justified and Severus deserved it.

Today, I want to show two things:

Why Snape’s Worst Memory (SWM) is valid;
Why even if SWM was biased, Snape’s memories and trauma are valid.

I/ Why SWM is valid and happened the way Harry saw it

The first thing we could say is that if SWM and Snape’s memories in general are unreliable and cannot be used for any substantial argument upon the characters and the story, then it means that Severus never called Lily or anyone else of her birth a Mudblood, or that at least, this cannot be held against him precisely because anything that happened in Snape’s memories might be fake. By all means, thank you for giving such an effective argument in Snape’s defense!

A funny thing is that both Lupin and Sirius confirm that they, with James, bullied Snape and harassed Lily the way Harry saw, but they never truly, directly confirm that Severus called Lily a Mudblood, nor anyone else. So following this theory, everything that happened in SWM could have been real–or more precisely, what Lupin and Sirius confirmed–except this particular part, which they never argue about.

Now that I’ve explained the… interest in considering SWM real, I can go and prove its accuracy.

When Harry explains what he saw in the Pensieve, Lupin and Sirius prove the validity of Snape’s Worst Memory by confirming its events, and actually adding more to it.

He therefore plunged immediately into the story of what he had seen in the Pensieve.

When he had finished, neither Sirius nor Lupin spoke for a moment. Then Lupin said quietly, “I wouldn’t like you to judge your father on what you saw there, Harry. He was only fifteen —”

“I’m fifteen!” said Harry heatedly.

[…] “And,” said Harry doggedly, determined to say everything that was on his mind now he was here, “he kept looking over at the girls by the lake, hoping they were watching him!”

“Oh, well, he always made a fool of himself whenever Lily was around,” said Sirius, shrugging. “He couldn’t stop himself showing off whenever he got near her.”

Lupin confirms the validity of Snape’s Worst Memory yet again in HBP:

“My dad used [Levicorpus],” said Harry. “I saw him in the Pensieve, he used it on Snape.”

He tried to sound casual, as though this was a throwaway comment of no real importance, but he was not sure he had achieved the right effect; Lupin’s smile was a little too understanding.

“Yes,” [Lupin] said.”

Of course, there are lots and lots of other clues that prove the Marauders were plain old bullies, and proud of it, such as the detention cards, the Marauder’s Map’s motto (“I solemnly swear I am up to no good”), McGonagall’s admission that they were perhaps the most troublesome students she encountered in Hogwarts, or the fact Sirius and James had to buy Two-Way Mirrors because they spent so much time in detention they figured out a way to talk to each other during them. The point is, SWM is already valid because the perpetrators cannot deny what happened and can only — awkwardly — try to make it as though it wasn’t all that bad.

If the memory was truly modified, then we’d have seen something “not right” with it, just like we did with Slughorn’s tampered one.

As several of the boys tittered, something very odd happened. The whole room was suddenly filled with a thick white fog, so that Harry could see nothing but the face of Dumbledore, who was standing beside him. Then Slughorn’s voice rang out through the mist, unnaturally loudly, “You’ll go wrong, boy, mark my words.”

The fog cleared as suddenly as it had appeared and yet nobody made any allusion to it, nor did anybody look as though anything unusual had just happened.

[…]

“Sir, I wondered what you know about… about Horcruxes?”

And it happened all over again: The dense fog filled the room so that Harry could not see Slughorn or Voldemort at all; only Dumbledore, smiling serenely beside him. Then Slughorn’s voice boomed out again, just as it had done before.

“I don’t know anything about Horcruxes and I wouldn’t tell you if I did! Now get out of here at once and don’t let me catch you mentioning them again!”

[…]

“As you might have noticed,” said Dumbledore, reseating himself behind his desk, “that memory has been tampered with.”

“Tampered with?” repeated Harry, sitting back down too.

“Certainly,” said Dumbledore. “Professor Slughorn has meddled with his own recollections.”

“But why would he do that?”

“Because, I think, he is ashamed of what he remembers,” said Dumbledore. “He has tried to rework the memory to show himself in a better light, obliterating those parts which he does not wish me to see. It is, as you will have noticed, very crudely done, and that is all to the good, for it shows that the true memory is still there beneath the alterations.”

And yet, we never see a fog appearing in SWM, or hear a voice that sounds unnatural. Nothing strange happens in there, all the events unfold logically.

Let’s ask the important questions: Why would Severus edit his own memory and leave it the way we see it? If Snape altered his memories and knew he was going to show it to someone, why would he portray himself at once weak and condemnable?

If he truly wanted to modify the memory to, I don’t know, “make himself look more of a victim than he really is”, then I don’t see why he wouldn’t just erase the part where he calls Lily a Mudblood to prevent anyone blaming him for it. It’s not difficult to know Harry wouldn’t let that pass, since his mother is Lily herself, a Muggle-Born like Hermione.

In fact, why even humiliate himself as a victim in the first place, especially with the risk of Harry telling his Worst Memory to everybody in Hogwarts so that he can harass Snape and take pleasure over the memory of his torment at the hands of his father and godfather?

That’s the first things Snape fears Harry could do:

“So… been enjoying yourself, Potter?”

“You will not tell anybody what you saw!” Snape bellowed.

Modifying memories is something that Slughorn does:

“Because, I think, he is ashamed of what he remembers,” said Dumbledore. “He has tried to rework the memory to show himself in a better light, obliterating those parts which he does not wish me to see.”

But not Professor Snape. If he truly wanted to “show himself in a better light” and get sympathy points, notably to Harry – for some reason? – then he would have erased that part of the memory long ago. Snape is the first one to blame himself for this act, to the point that as he is dying, he decides to give Harry once again his Worst Memory so that he can remind Harry of all the biggest mistakes and wrongs he’s done before he became a spy. Snape doesn’t shy away from telling Harry the truth, even if it paints him in a bad light.

Plus I gotta say, the idea of accusing Snape, an actual victim of bullying, of “playing the victim to get undeserved empathy from people”, by accusing him of holding an agenda to make the Marauders look bad for being bullies, is such a disgusting, abuse condoning and victim-blaming excuse. That’s called secondary victimization as a matter of fact. He’s not Quirrell for heaven’s sake, he’s the opposite and for a reason.

Can we really say that we were watching the Memory through Snape’s point of view? Not really. Harry sees his parents’ murder through Voldemort’s own eyes, hearing Voldemort’s thoughts, such as his derogatory comments about Muggles and his sadistic amusement at seeing the Potters calm and helpless before attacking. In Snape’s Worst Memory, Harry is a spectator, free to move as he wants, maintaining his own point of view and opinions on what he’s looking at, and he certainly doesn’t hear any of Snape’s thoughts.

And even if it were true that “we saw the scene from Snape’s point of view », it doesn’t invalidate it. A certain event memory is the same regardless of the perspective taken, either the victim’s or the executioner’s. If A kills B, it won’t make much of a difference to take the memory from either of them since in both memories we’ll still get the global message that A killed B.

The theory that the memory is merely subjective and so ought to be biased in a way that discredits it isn’t really coherent either because Harry sees and hears things that Severus wouldn’t be able to know from his own perspective without a magical tool.

Harry stared at Wormtail for a moment, then back at James, who was now doodling on a bit of scrap parchment. He had drawn a Snitch and was now tracing the letters L. E. […] Harry looked down at his father, who had hastily crossed out the L. E. he had been embellishing, jumped to his feet, stuffed his quill and the exam question paper into his bag, which he slung over his back, and stood waiting for Sirius to join him.

If Pensieves were subjective, then there is no way Harry could have known that his father was drawing a snitch and writing LE on it, before crossing it out, since Severus, by that time, is several rows and aisles away in the Great Hall, so immersed in his OWLs exam paper that he doesn’t really take care to check his surroundings. He certainly wasn’t in Harry’s place, looking over James’ shoulder to know what he was writing on his parchment.

We are able to pick up details that normally we wouldn’t pay attention to. Which is what the Pensieve was designed for.

Snape cannot see everything around him; if we only saw things from his perspective, then most of Snape’s and Harry’s world in the Pensieve would be plunged in the dark or blurred. Because, you know… no one can know what’s really occurring in their back.

If Snape knew what was happening around him… then he certainly wouldn’t have come up close to the Marauders, let alone without a wand ready in his hand just in case.

“This’ll liven you up, Padfoot,” said James quietly. “Look who it is. . . .”

Sirius’s head turned. He had become very still, like a dog that has scented a rabbit.

“Excellent,” he said softly. “Snivellus.”

Harry turned to see what Sirius was looking at.

Snape was on his feet again, and was stowing the O.W.L. paper in his bag. As he emerged from the shadows of the bushes and set off across the grass, Sirius and James stood up. Lupin and Wormtail remained sitting: Lupin was still staring down at his book, though his eyes were not moving and a faint frown line had appeared between his eyebrows. Wormtail was looking from Sirius and James to Snape with a look of avid anticipation on his face.

“All right, Snivellus?” said James loudly.

Finally, if you want to know whether there’s authorial intent behind that, J.K. Rowling has explained how the Pensieve works in at least one interview:

MA: I think this was addressed in the sixth book, but, “Do the memories stored in a Pensieve reflect reality or the views of the person they belong to?”

JKR: It’s reality. It’s important that I have got that across, because Slughorn gave Dumbledore this pathetic cut-and-paste memory. He didn’t want to give the real thing, and he very obviously patched it up and cobbled it together. So, what you remember is accurate in the Pensieve.

[…]

ES: I thought for sure that it was your interpretation of it. It didn’t make sense to me to be able to examine your own thoughts from a third-person perspective. It almost feels like you’d be cheating because you’d always be able to look at things from someone else’s point of view.

MA: So there are things in there that you haven’t noticed personally, but you can go and see yourself?

JKR: Yes, and that’s the magic of the Pensieve, that’s what brings it alive.

ES: I want one of those!

JKR: Yeah. Otherwise it really would just be like a diary, wouldn’t it? Confined to what you remember. But the Pensieve recreates a moment for you, so you could go into your own memory and relive things that you didn’t notice at the time. It’s somewhere in your head, which I’m sure it is, in all of our brains. I’m sure if you could access it, things that you don’t know you remember are all in there somewhere.

According to Rowling, modifying a memory works by a process of “cut-and-paste”. It actually fits what’s written in the books. Let me explain:

The whole room was suddenly filled with a thick white fog, so that Harry could see nothing but the face of Dumbledore, who was standing beside him. Then Slughorn’s voice rang out through the mist, unnaturally loudly, “You’ll go wrong, boy, mark my words.” […]

The dense fog filled the room so that Harry could not see Slughorn or Voldemort at all; only Dumbledore, smiling serenely beside him. Then Slughorn’s voice boomed out again, just as it had done before.

“I don’t know anything about Horcruxes and I wouldn’t tell you if I did! Now get out of here at once and don’t let me catch you mentioning them again!”

Slughorn has kind of “registered” himself saying, for instance, “You’ll go wrong, boy, mark my words”, then he cut the memory of himself saying this and pasted it inside the old memory that he wanted to edit. But because he couldn’t recreate all the scene–Tom Riddle Jr, a younger self, the classroom, and all the details that come with it–because he could only cut-and-past his voice without the visuals of the scene, the Pensieve compensated by creating a fog to fill in the empty space.

This is why mist appears around Harry and Dumbledore during the parts where Slughorn adds his voice.

It means that unless you are able to recreate the scene to perfection, with all the details only the subconscious can pick up and keep track of, then it is virtually impossible for Snape to edit, by cut-and-paste, the memories and recreate new scenes without us knowing that the memory is fake. The only thing you can do is copy and paste memories of things that truly happened, in a new sequence that tells a patched up, fake story. But the events of SWM are too tied together and too complicated to be recreated and shown in a deceptive way.

Furthermore, one’s Occlumency level is not correlated to one’s capacity for creating a fake memory.

“Professor Slughorn is an extremely able wizard who will be expecting both,” said Dumbledore. “He is much more accomplished at Occlumency than poor Morfin Gaunt, and I would be astonished if he has not carried an antidote to Veritaserum with him ever since I coerced him into giving me this travesty of a recollection.”

Merely showing aspects of them, hiding things, or inventing a new sequence, that leads the Legilimens to interpret the Occlumens’ thoughts a certain way; or just throwing the Legilimens out of one’s mind.

“It is true, however, that those who have mastered Legilimency are able, under certain conditions, to delve into the minds of their victims and to interpret their findings correctly. The Dark Lord, for instance, almost always knows when somebody is lying to him. Only those skilled at Occlumency are able to shut down those feelings and memories that contradict the lie, and so utter falsehoods in his presence without detection.”

If Pensieves weren’t objective and to be trusted for the mere fact they contain subjective and thus biased memories, then we wouldn’t spend half a book (HBP) looking them up to learn Voldemort’s past and deduce the Horcruxes. Nor would anyone use memories to prove one’s innocence or guilt in a trial before they’re sent to Azkaban.

Perhaps still one more reference that argues in this direction? Here’s what Rowling wrote in Pottermore:

The Pensieve is enchanted to recreate memories so that they become re-liveable, taking every detail stored in the subconscious and recreating it faithfully, so that either the owner, or (and herein lies the danger) a second party, is able to enter the memories and move around within them. Inevitably, those with things to hide, those ashamed of their pasts, those eager to keep hold of their secrets, or protective of their privacy, will be wary of an object like the Pensieve.

I don’t take Pottermore or interviews as true canon either way… but there you have it.

I could add that traumatic memory is known to be intense but fragmented, even confusing, which unfortunately is still used by assaulters in court to discredit the testimonies of the victims, arguing that it makes those memories unreliable and possibly made-up. As said in this ScienceDirect article:

Foa and Rothbaum proposed that the emotional intensity of a traumatic event interferes with encoding processes of attention and memory, leading to a disjointed and fragmented narration that is relatively brief, simplistic, and poorly articulated. Similarly, Ehlers and Clark suggested that difficulties in conceptually processing the events lead to poorly elaborated and inadequate integration of traumatic events into autobiographical knowledge. Accordingly, greater disorganization or fragmentation in trauma memories is associated with the onset and maintenance of symptoms of acute stress disorder and PTSD.

Thus, memories of a traumatic event are characterized by very vivid recollections of the event including many sensory details and, at the same time, difficulties in facing the memories and in learning to put the details into coherent speech and chronological order. Because traumatic events are stored differently than memories of everyday events, this pathological representation of traumatic memories is suggested to be responsible for the core symptoms of PTSD.

Traumatic Memories – an overview

The fact that we see Snape’s memory in a linear way and from the third person rather than in feelings, violent flashes and broken sequences, proves once more than this was an objective point of view.

So to discard SWM by arguing that it’s fake is illogical, incoherent with what we learn in the books, and contradicted by the aggressors themselves… amongst other clues, of course… it’s quite literally a stretch. Perhaps before claiming this is fake, the detractors should prove it is in the first place. Because as far as we know, we got all the evidence that argues SWM is valid, that Pensieve memories are reliable, and that the Marauders can reasonably be deemed guilty of the crimes we witness in OotP. As if their own admission wasn’t enough.

But by all means, I see that people really want to play with the theoretical game of Snape’s Worst Memory not actually happening like it’s been presented. So let’s do it as well, and I have lots of theories.

II/ SWM is subjective but it happened mostly the way we saw

It’s quasi identical, so it doesn’t actually change much. Moving on…

III/ SWM is biased and the violence was exaggerated

Snape’s psyche “exaggerated” the violence we witness in his memory.

It means that Severus truly suffered a lot from whatever happened to him and lived and remembered his Worst Memory like it was portrayed: in a more traumatic way than we could have expected. No matter what “objectively” happened, in psychology, it’s always important to consider how the individual subjectively lived and felt the traumatic event, so it’s absolutely not a reason to discard SWM. It also indicates a case of trauma that affected Severus’ brain to the point of messing up with his memory function, which in turn confirms that the trauma was severe and thus the violence was as well. Ignoring it just because it may have his feelings of the event muddling with it, is the mindset of a fool or an abuser. It is unacceptable to attempt to discard someone’s suffering as if they were being just a bit too sensitive, as well as argue that the victim’s recounting of the story isn’t valid for the very reason they are personally affected by the ensuing trauma. Or else no victim would have had their testimonies heard and taken into account in trials

And what if Snape’s feelings of the events are affecting Harry’s emotional state rather than the memory per say? Doesn’t matter. Because what objectively happened there, and how Snape lived it, is horrible. Take James using Scourgify to choke and gag Snape with soap. Scrougify here is the wizard equivalent of waterboarding a child, or force-feeding him soap, or thrusting that child’s head into a bucket of soapy water and holding him there until he nearly drowns.

Just because… he exists.

There is no real need to exaggerate the violence of this scene, when you already got this.

So this is not an argument that makes anything better.

IV/ SWM is biased and the violence was tampered down

Snape’s psyche actually did the opposite and tampered down the violence of those memories… thanks to dissociative amnesia. Well yes, if you can argue one way, you can argue the other.

Basically, Severus has shut down the most traumatic parts of his Worst Memory. Something that occurs a lot in victims of trauma, as a matter of fact. The violence portrayed in the Pensieve was only a glimpse of what truly happened and Severus’ psyche, unable to cope with the extreme pain and needing to repress it, has forced the memory to mutate and contain less trauma as a form of self-protection, which is the goal of dissociation. It would explain why Severus is so much of an effective Occlumens, why he can dissociate from memories and emotions to the point of fooling the Dark Lord himself. It fits with his occasional apathy:

His eyes were cold and empty, and made you think of dark tunnels.

Who knows: maybe Severus wished he’d only had his underwear and then genitals exposed, so it stayed at that in the memory. Perhaps worse occurred than simply having his genitals exposed to his classmates and all the school. When Harry summarized what they did, Sirius and Lupin would have gone with Harry’s less incriminating explanation of the repressed version of SWM, so that they could cover their image and pretend the worst never happened.

Perhaps Severus’s psyche went further and convinced itself that Severus must have done something horrible, so that it could give a sense to the trauma of the Marauders’ gratuitous assault. As such, Severus gave himself a “reason” to have “deserved” it all, and in that purpose, fabricated the memory of having used swearwords, cut James’ cheek with a spell in self-defense, or worse even: having referred to Lily as a Mudblood. Whereas in reality, Severus never said that.

What we witnessed was basically the kindergarten, sweet, happy version of the full cruel truth.

As I said, if you can argue that the memory was exaggerated, you can also argue that the memory showed merely a kinder trauma, and Severus, less of a victim.

Conclusion

Snape’s memories are valid. They are proven as factually accurate in the books, and we can reasonably argue that they are reliable. Even in a scenario that poses Snape’s memories as more or less biased, there is little to no reason to argue this means Snape is obviously a villain in truth; it could just as well be that we are experiencing, without knowing it, the consequences of a trauma so heavy it altered his brain.

As Dumbledore says:

“[…] some wounds run too deep for the healing.”

But since Lupin and Sirius admit that they are guilty with James of being unwoke bullies, and that we have more evidence proving that fact, we know that they truly are guilty of the crimes we saw in Snape’s Worst Memory. As if Snape’s visible lasting trauma wasn’t proof in itself.

So with all that clear and out of the way, we can study the HP books with the reasonable premise that Snape’s memories are valuable evidence and finally go forth.

Sources: