Snapecliff - Why Snape is as sexy as Heathcliff

He's as dark as the Other can be. He's quiet and brooding in ways that can be attributed to philosopher and psychopath, both. He's wild, charged with untamed emotions. In a nutshell, this is what makes Heathcliff a romantic character. Let's ignore the fact that he quickly becomes an enraged psychopath with horrific outbursts of violence and the sort of patience and will that is required to destroy two whole generations of friends and family.

He's as dark as the Other can be. He's watchful and carefully measured in ways that can be attributed to genius and psycopath, both. His emotions are wild, but roped in with a visible but exerting sense of self-control. This is Snape, the tragic anti-hero. Let's ignore the fact that he spends most of five books being the cruel tormentor of his true-love's child.

Heathcliff, however, is the ultimate in tragic anti-hero. Not only is it self-fulfilling prophecy that the Gypsy blood should turn him against those who were close and that it was those who were close who enforced the racism and turned the Gypsy blood sour, but that in pushing him away they gave Heathcliff every reason to enforce every idea they projected onto him. Ouroboros as applied to sociology.

As the powers of peer pressure force Heathcliff into the darker, more ruthless parts of his psyche, he pushes his one true love away from him, and she turns to the only people who will give her emotional support, the same peers that are abusing her one true love. It seems that the two classes of people, those of the self-indulging, aloof, cultured class, and those of the wild, free-wheeling travelling class, cannot mix. And what's more, they don't want to mix. What's more dreamy than a man who can hold his own through thick and thin (mostly thick) for a forbidden love?

But even the love can turn sour - unbreakable, yet sour - as the forbidden girl finds a husband called Edgar who is more suitable to her society, and births his child. For a man who has suffered as much as Heathcliff and had to drive his thoughts into unspeakable places in order endure the suffering, the tip over the edge into pure, destructive evil is inevitable.

To add to his suffering, the daughter of his love physically resembles the other man, but maintains the spirit of Cathy. Unable to deal with Cathy's betrayal he projects his anger onto the aspects of Cathy 2 that resemble Edgar. A bit like Harry Potter, inverted. All Snape can see in Harry is the eyes of his one true love, and the insufferable aloofness of manner from the man who stole her from him. In Snape's defence his ignorant aloofness and lack of natural curiosity in people is a little insufferable.

Snape has experienced the same sort of emotional traumas as Heathcliff, almost in the same order as well. He is not a Gypsy, but the moment the Sorting Hat puts him in Slytherin he's as good as shunned without reason like the class of people Heathcliff is attributed to. And yet the Sorting Hat is supposedly better than the self-inflicted social divisions of Wuthering Heights. The Sorting Hat can see innate qualities that are perhaps not so obvious as the assumption 'all Gypsies are cuckoos'. Snape has the Darkness inside him. Let's call it natural curiosity. It's enough to push Lily away from him until he develops a tortured jealousy for the other boy she has befriended. James is even possessed of the same uppity personality that makes Heathcliff hate Edgar.

Oh, if only Snape and Heathcliff could have met. Perhaps a bond over shared tortures could have saved them both from the path of self-destruction.

Only, Snape is the hero that Heathcliff could never be. Where Heathcliff rejected God and found himself on his own, Snape had God to help him out all along... Sorry, Dumbledore, he had Dumbledore, the father figure that Heathcliff didn't have. With Dumbledore's help he was able to channel his love for Lily into causes for good.