The Social Climbers from Cokeworth and Beyond
At the outset, I must disclose that I'm not British, so I might not be equipped to discuss this compared to others in our fandom. However, I think that the major theses of this essay are universal.
1. everyone wants to gain higher status or signal their high status,
2. this is almost entirely subconscious (almost everyone who makes it into Slytherin is already high-status - few other people would admit to being “ambitious and cunning”, especially if they’re… ambitious and cunning.),
3. doing this too obviously fails,
4. When a society-wide status game becomes too obvious, the game changes,
5. People (subconsciously!) choose to participate in status games that reward them and adopt traits they already possess as values; as a corollary, they seek to expose status games they’re bad at and disparage people with traits they don’t have.
As I understand the way the UK brand of classism works, the paradox that traps the lower classes is that their class is regarded as evidence of a character flaw, a proxy for stupidity, laziness, lack of refinement, and ignorance; while (overt) attempts to move up the ladder by bettering themselves are regarded as "stepping above one's station," on the one hand, and as class treason, on the other. That is, for a working class man, being smart, hard-working, and refined is perceived as being cunning, ambitious, and fake.
As an outsider, UK social conventions seem foreign to me, if not outright ridiculous. British literature is replete with Oliver Twists and Charlie Buckets (and, well, Harry Potters). The virtuous and impoverished discover their noble heritage, or else fate rewards them for their virtue and elevates them. Ambition, in other words, is a flaw; not wanting to better oneself is also a flaw. Conveniently, nobles cannot have these flaws because they definitionally already have high status.
The problem with status games is that they collapse as soon as they become obvious. Overt status-seeking fails every time, and nothing works better than appearing to not care. There is nothing uniquely British about any of this, only about the form the status game takes, and about the steep penalty that losers pay.
So: Severus Snape is a half-Muggle wizard from Spinner's End, Cokeworth, a Muggle dunghill that no magical nobility has set foot in in eons. To boot, even the Muggles know it's the bad part of town, and the boy (or his family, at least) has a reputation that precedes him. And yet, he dares to look down at Petunia and claim Lily as a peer. Almost miraculously, Lily accepts the offer and strikes up a friendship with the boy, even as she initially rejects the notion that she's a witch or indeed that it's a good thing to be.
Severus and Lily dream of Hogwarts, the promised land where they would finally belong as true equals, even as housemates. Severus is aware of the importance of blood in some fashion - he hesitates before he tells Lily it’s not important. But he also expects Lily to get sorted into Slytherin with him, so clearly he doesn’t have the complete picture. Does his hesitation mean he doesn’t want to hurt Lily’s feelings? Or that he’s worried about his own standing in that world? My theory is that he hoped Lily’s natural talent (and his) would compensate for their background, and that it truly would not matter, even if it might for other, less gifted wizards. Lily is astute in worrying - she knows that one’s background matters in the muggle world, and she’s about to go from a world where her sister can at least condescend over Severus to a world where she might be the lowest. Severus tells her his truth: What matters is talent. Birth and status are a proxy for talent. We’re talented, we’ll be okay. He’s right, to a degree, but tragically, he misunderstands a lot. The system demands that status be associated with virtue and talent, but without punishing the high-status unvirtuous and untalented. Talent and virtue could help someone move up - but only if they continue to play the game, only if they accept its rules.
But in the magical world, the existence of someone like Severus Snape cannot be tolerated: He undermines every assumption that's baked into the system. He's smart. He’s talented. He's hard-working and seeks to excel. He openly wants to climb the ladder and be a Slytherin. When his social betters are rowdy, he mocks their preference of "brawn over brain," and when his social betters attack him like animals, he calls them animals. It is almost unsurprising that the system almost killed him, silenced him, and humiliated him. It was almost inevitable that he would align himself with the powers that worked against the prevailing order. “They were a motley collection,” says Dumbledore about the proto-DEs: “a mixture of the weak seeking protection, the ambitious seeking some shared glory, and the thuggish gravitating toward a leader who could show them more refined forms of cruelty.”
Tragically for Snape, he is virtuous, despite coming from Spinner’s End. Trelawny supplies a description of the lad right before he must have proudly rushed to the Dark Lord to doom himself:
“[...] Snape [...] was seeking a job at the time, and no doubt hoped to pick up tips! Well, after that, you know, Dumbledore seemed much more disposed to give me a job, and I could not help thinking, Harry, that it was because he appreciated the stark contrast between my own unassuming manners and quiet talent, compared to the pushing, thrusting young man who was prepared to listen at keyholes.”
Trelawney doesn’t know the truth, and she confabulates a narrative that serves her self-image (conveniently ignoring that Snape got hired too, which somewhat undermines her thesis). She’s not alone in doing such things.
As an adult, Snape is refined and superior 99% of the time, so much so that it took six books for most people to uncover his humble beginnings (at least, it did for me). He is the Head of Slytherin. He is associated with the Malfoys. His predecessor in the same job is a member of the Sacred 28! Snape has climbed the ladder, and very well at that. Nobody mentions his origins.
Yet, he’s suspect. But the suspicions levelled against him are framed as due to his sinister ambitions, not his highly unlikely ascent to Slughorn's old position. That he’s simply very very very very very good at potions, for example, isn’t enough for Sirius, who has no knowledge of Snape’s sketchy past: “Ever since I found out Snape was teaching here, I’ve wondered why Dumbledore hired him.” His conclusion: “I just can’t see [Dumbledore] letting Snape teach at Hogwarts if he’d ever worked for Voldemort.”
In reality, Dumbledore didn’t let Snape teach so much as emotionally manipulated him into accepting the job he didn’t want, directly as a result of Snape having worked for Voldemort. But in Sirius’s mind, a high-status job like Slughorn’s position must have been conferred upon Snape, and would never have been conferred upon him if he was unworthy, because he’d worked for Voldemort.
So yes, it's possible to climb and escape. But only covertly, and only by at least paying lip service to the system’s underlying assumptions. And if anyone climbs too high up, they’ll be suspicious. Otherwise, the system won't survive. Young Severus never obeyed these unspoken rules, and the rules must be enforced.
The person who makes the status game collapse must be destroyed, along with his reputation. If the man on top (say, James) likes a girl, and that girl cares more about the man on the bottom (Snape), the man on the bottom must be exposed, literally and figuratively: Severus is weak. He is incompetent to defend himself. Nobody else rushes along to help him, and he ends up needing a girl to come to his rescue. He uses slurs that James would never utter, so noble he is, even as he's engaging in violence against someone because he "exists". Of course he’s the lowest of the low, just look at him!
But it's not Snape's existence that is the problem, or else James could have let him die. Even a dead Snape would have been a dissonant note and an anomaly: If Snape had died by werewolf, he would have still been worthy of Lily's grief. That could not stand. James, though, is remembered as virtuous and talented and bright. So much so that Lupin invokes his talent and intelligence as the reasons he went after jealous Snape, who just wants his Order of Merlin. Of course no one seems to remember that Cedric Diggory was popular and talented, and yet never went after anyone. But from the status-game lens, James almost had to go after Snape and the system had to let him. James enforced its rules in life, and he was sainted in death.
As an adult, Snape remained suspect, so much so that people questioned even Dumbledore, the paradigm of virtue and nobility, for his association with the man. To survive in the system, Snape embraced and played on his own deceptiveness and untrustworthiness: "I hoodwinked Dumbledore/the Dark Lord. I'm obsessed with the Dark Arts, I'm still striving for a position I'm not worthy of, and Dumbledore trusts me enough that he won’t hear a word against me and also doesn’t trust me enough to give me the job I truly want."
Let's look at two other climbers, and their downfalls: Percy Weasley and Tom Riddle.
Percy didn't correct his boss when he called Percy 'Weatherby'. He might have even told Crouch Sr. that his name was Weatherby himself, and who can blame him? The Weasleys have a reputation. They tell themselves Arthur is suppressed for his Muggle-loving ways, but they're poor because they have more children than they can afford. Better to be a Weatherby than be held back for his associations with the Weasleys at work, and mocked as a suck-up at home, by people who side with the obviously dangerous Harry, the kooky Dumbledore. And so, Percy’s mother cried while Percy cozied up to Umbridge, mistaking her success for virtue.
As an aside, Umbridge, too, is a fraud. She pretends to be a noble Selwyn using a trinket she bought from a back-alley petty thief. Yet, the system tolerates her because she reinforces the notion that noble origins are important by taking the trouble to lie about her own, and allows others to continue to believe they are virtuous by doing the dirty work herself, such as sending Dementors to Privet Drive. No wonder Hermione Granger scared Umbridge so much: the girl did not even claim a relation to the magical Granger family when Slughorn offered her one!
Now, Tom Riddle. The diamond in the rough. The orphan who proves that nothing—not even growing up in a muggle orphanage—could stifle true virtue. He is a prodigious talent, a striking man, charming and brave. He saved the school from closing when nobody else could. He must have noble blood, look how modest he is! But even if he doesn't, the system can allow him to exist: he might be a Slytherin, but he's not nakedly ambitious. He goes to work in retail, for Merlin's sake.
But Tom can't allow the system to exist. He doesn't want the nobles to accept him. He wants them to bow to him. And so, he puts on a mask: Percy Weatherby, Dolores Selwyn… and Lord Voldemort. Nobody would bow to Tom Riddle, but they very much bowed to Lord Voldemort.
Still, he pays homage to the idea that class reflects virtue. Still, he lets the system's assumptions go unchallenged (this is in line with reality: revolutionaries often appeal to hidden tradition and the past to justify their actions, for better or worse). He needs allies, high-status ones, powerful ones. He needs to let them believe they would thrive in his new world, and that in fact the current world order is keeping them down.
The counter-intuitive proof is Lily Evans.
Voldemort is no Umbridge. Umbridge is terrified of the notion that magic could choose just anybody. She views it as a rare gift that must remain rare, deeming her own magic as proof that she belongs with the Selwyns. But Voldemort would never be so crass. Too many Umbridges would give the game away, and he understood this. He saw the Gaunts clinging to their purity even as they lived in squalor. He also saw the Riddles, noble but powerless against his magic.
The system he was trying to build could not be as transparent as Umbridge.
Lily, however, was proof that a talented, charming, and attractive witch could enter the noble fold, marry into a good family, and jump multiple steps up the ladder without breaking a sweat. She was like a noble born in a Muggle-Born’s body. She reinforced the belief that the system is just. In fact, it's not even a system. It's just nature. The people in power have power because they are worthy of power.
Like Lily, Petunia intuitively understood status. She had to tell herself wizards are freaks and lunatics: How else to tolerate the knowledge that not only her sister, but the awful Snape boy from Spinner's End, had something she didn't and could never have? Well! She doesn't even want it! She's disgusted by it, even.
Even if no reader could possibly believe Petunia, Petunia believed herself, enough to succeed in doing what her sister did: marry up and be praised by Vernon's sister (who also believes in the importance of blood) as hard-working, decent folk. She could never play the magical status game, so she devalued magic, taking pride instead in how normal she was.
The Evans girls were both excellent at this game.
So: Voldemort had to have Lily, the woman who played the game so well, even as no one explained the rules. If he didn't have her, the other side would, and this could not stand. If Severus was the anomaly that threatened to expose the empty status game for what it was, Lily was the exception–the exceptional Muggle-born–that proved the rule.
Except… she would not join his new world order. The girl who took the awful Snape boy’s hand was still there, and still virtuous, despite also being adept at the game. Unlike Voldemort, Umbridge, or Percy, Lily was not assuming a role or a new identity to move up. She never pretended to be something she was not. Unlike Severus, she didn't try to move up while refusing to accept the system's assumptions. To put it more cynically, she was herself, and the system rewarded her. So why would she want it destroyed?
And then, she conceived the child of the prophecy. She, not Alice Longbottom. Only she could produce a genuine threat to Voldemort. And like Snape, she didn't have to die, only to submit. To Voldemort, her death had no value in and off itself. She was worth more alive, and so she was given a choice: Give Harry up, and live. He would have liked it better to expose Lily for what she had to be: another servant. But she wasn't, and so she had to die. We know how that worked out for everyone, and why.
That is: We know that the social climber who never left Cokeworth embodied virtue in such a way that the system that rejected him indeed finally collapsed.
Thanks to Snape, Hermione could be a mudblood, and proud. She could marry into a pureblood family without rejecting her heritage to be accepted (as Lily seems to have done, though I admit this is speculation on my part), going as far as making Ron pass a driving test. Percy could return to his family and be proud of being a Weasley.
At long last, the world Severus and Lily envisioned as children, where they could be magical and it was the only thing they would need to belong and prosper, could exist.
I like to imagine that the house in Spinner's End is now a museum, perhaps with a statue, honoring the man in the Muggle dunghill he wanted so badly to leave. Because the truth is that someone like him could only ever have come from there. It's not a reflection on his character that he did; it's a condemnation of the system that Cokeworth ever existed, and that Severus never found a place that truly accepted him after all, and ended up staying there.
As for me, I will try to cultivate an awareness of my own status games. Honestly I think I’m pretty good at it. So, maybe more importantly, I’ll try to have compassion for the nakedly ambitious and the frauds. Their only true crime is being low-status; the same behavior would be unnecessary or even cute in someone else.
After all, no one in-universe ever thought to wonder why Snape ended up a Death Eater when he should have had many avenues to success in the magical world, with his talent. No one ever thought to sympathize with him. Only to view his tragic decisions and his obvious status-seeking as proof that he was indeed unworthy. But The only difference between a poser or a wannabe and those who do manage to integrate is that the latter are better at believing their own narratives or at choosing the competitions they partake in to ascend. Nobody can opt out of the game, and so nobody should be punished as severely as Severus was, just for being bad at it. Merlin knows he learned to play the hard way.
