Self-Sacrifice/Voldie'sGoal-Bellatrix-Lucius-Snape/ShadesOfGray

[Kirstini]

No: HPFGUIDX 78550

 Catlady (always one of my favourite posters. Did I mention that?) 
wrote:

>>Yes, but there can be self-sacrifice for Evil. Barty Jr did it, 
altho' perhaps not on purpose, and Bellatrix seems willing to do so.

<snip> Here Catlady quotes Abigail:

 << Bellatrix Lestrange is a sadist - Voldemort offers her an oppor- 
 tunity to indulge her desires, whereas her own society might expect 
her to be a woman of leisure, prettying up her husband's arm. >>

Yes, but you make it sound as if she thought it out and made a 
rational decision. That doesn't correlate with the passionate 
devotion she showed in the First Pensieve Scene. I believe she made 
an *emotional* decision: she "fell into" hero-worship of Voldemort. 
Certainly the reasons for the hero-worship include their shared trait 
of sadism: she maybe read of his horrors in the newspaper and felt 
vicarious gratification, leading her to muse: "What a man!" I think 
she was sublimatedly-erotically aroused by his display of POWER, 
magical power displayed by acheiving immortality and social power 
displayed by sending his followers to kill people.<<

Something that occured to me when I read this was a potential real-
life model for Bellatrix. I've previously expressed a vague interest 
in a Voldemort/Bellatrix SHIP, although not a huge shipper. Recently, 
I've been reading various biographies of the Mitford sisters. They 
were an upper-class family in mid-20th Century England. There were 
six of them, five of whom managed to hold the headlines for a good 
twenty years as they mixed themselves up in various sorts of world 
events. JKR has often said that Jessica Mitford, who became a 
communist and human rights activist, much to the disgust of her 
family, was her heroine. There's a lot of her in Hermione, and JKR 
even named her daughter after her. Therefore I think it's fair to 
assume that she's familiar with the first volume of Jessica's 
autobiography, Hons and Rebels (I think it's called Daughters and 
Rebels in the US, funnily enough), which deals with WW2 and the 
period leading up to it. The sister nearest to Jessica in age, Unity 
Valkyrie, fell in love with Hitler. She moved to Germany and stalked 
him until she could arrange a meeting, and then became very close to 
him. She was known as his mistress in the newspapers, although no-one 
from her family has ever confirmed that they had anything other than 
a political relationship. She worked closely with the British Union 
of Facists when at home, and eventually shot herself when Britain 
went to war with Germany, living out the war years as a mental 
patient until her death in 1948. The subliminated erotic relationship 
you described above touched a chord with me, and I was wandering 
around for a while trying to work out why I found the description so 
familiar.

Then something else occurred to me. The sister just older than Unity 
was Diana. Diana was a famous blonde beauty (and having seen pictures 
of her, I can quite readily conclude that she would have been a lot 
more beautiful if she didn't look like there was a funny smell under 
her nose), who eventually married Oswald Mosley, leader of the 
British Union of Facists. Diana's loyalty was always to her husband, 
but she went over to Germany with Unity several times, and got to 
know Hitler quite well. She was just as instrumental as her husband 
in promoting facism in Britain, and was imprisoned at the bequest of 
her own sister (Nancy, the fmaous novelist)for the duration of the 
war. If anyone's interested in taking this further, Diana died last 
week, so the newpaper obituary pages are rather full of her. The 
Independant published a final interview with her last week, which is 
available in their Features archive.

I'm not trying to say that JKR intends Bellatrix and Narcissa to be 
versions of Unity and Diana, nor am I suggesting that either sister's 
destiny is quite so easily analogised. However, I think that there is 
certainly potential for additions to the Lines of Influence 
installation in the Canon Museum...

Whilst still on the subject of the Sisters Black, something I noticed 
on a recent re-read is that Andromeda is still alive. Here's Tonks,on 
p52 (Bloomsbury):
"'...My mum's got this knack of getting stuff to fold in neatly...'"
Present tense. I don't know why I'd assumed Andromeda was no longer 
with us. Had anyone else?
 Jessica Mitford made a marriage that her family didn't approve of 
too, you know... 
 

Catlady had more to say, too, taking me to task about my 
forgetfulness in my recent TBay post:
>> But that started in GoF with Rita Skeeter, undoubtedly an evil-
doer, therefore either evil, or at least amoral when it comes to her 
career, but there is no sign that she's a DE, and I believe she 
isn't. In some way, it started in CoS with Lockhart undoubtably an 
evil person, but not in alliance with Voldemort or Tom Riddle's 
memory.<<

I did include Rita Skeeter, but I put her in the "amoral" rather 
than"evil" category. And Lockhart...oops. I have a feeling that I may 
have unconsciously passed him over because he didn't fit in with the 
original formulation of my theory. I'd say he was amoral rather than 
evil too. Yes, the memory wipe is extremely unpleasant, but I'm not 
entirely sure that Harry ever gets any real sense of how evil it is, 
as Gilderoy is so utterly comic throughout that the intensity is 
blunted. I don't have any sense of him as evil myself, and a quick 
trawl through the Filks reveals that many other people feel similarly 
to me. I may write another post fairly soon interpreting the role of 
DADA teacher through my new theory, but I'm kinda theoried out at the 
moment. But my wrist is feeling well and truly slapped, Ma'am...
Kirstini