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All Hail Bellatrix Lestrange, The 'Female Monster' 'Harry Potter' Needed

All Hail Bellatrix Lestrange, The 'Female Monster' 'Harry Potter' Needed

“I killed Sirius Black! I killed Sirius Black!” Bellatrix Lestrange chants with the cadence of a deranged preschool teacher butchering nursery rhymes for sport in “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”

Bellatrix is high off murdering Harry Potter’s godfather and only living “family” member, but the real joy is rubbing it in. You coming to get me?” she taunts Harry. “He knows how to play. Itty-bitty-baby-Potter.” Her words are punctuated with feral cackles, uttered through teeth caked in plaque, the residue of her time spent wasting away in Azkaban.

When I read the “Harry Potter” books growing up, I had a strange affinity for Ms. Lestrange. Yes, she is a psychopathic Death Eater who worships the Dark Lord and reaps pleasure from the suffering of innocents. But Lestrange also embodies a combination of power, liberation and an unabashed lust for life (and death) I found enticing. Even while using the Cruciatus Curse to scramble the brains of noble wizards beyond salvation, she’s always having the most fun in the room.

Lestrange is a villain, and a deliciously cruel one at that. And yet, in fables and fantasies, antagonists are often the female characters endowed with the most agency, freedom and style. As Leslie Jamison wrote of the “evil stepmother” figure that reappears in classic fairy tales time and time again: “She is an artist of cunning and malice, but still — an artist.”

There is something, if not admirable, at least enthralling about a woman who rebels against norms and expectations to feed her own delusions and desires, who embraces the inner “female monster” so many fight to suppress.