Well yes. Here is my first HP related thread! Call it a welcome back present and an apology for my prolonged absense.

Anyway. I've been thinking a lot about this. Do you think that Bella had some deep dark secret that haunted her past? For example, do you think she had a child that died or she had to give away? Do you think that there is some horror that has made her the cold and sinister woman that she is today?

Post your thoughts here! (As you can tell. I'm a Black family obsessive and they can also be brought into this)

I believe there must have been something that provoked her to become as evil as she did, either that or mental illness, I'm not sure.

i think that maybe she was least liked as a child, and Narcissa and Andromeda were favoured over her by her parents. I think that maybe she went to hell and back as a kid, twisting her mind and warping her into what she became... also i think that maybe Rodolphus (i think that's his name) had something to do with it, maybe he wanted her to be like him? idunoo..

Yeah. I agree with both of you. I think that Bella had a hard time growing up, and she was desperate to prove herself to her parents, whom I feel she was very close to. Her father in particular. (I don't think that she would have gotten along with her mother).

As for Rodolphus, I think he did influence her to become the way she was, and I don't think that they particularly loved eachother. Jo did say that Bellatrix married him because it was expected of her. I think in a way, that would have been painful for Bella. I think she wanted to feel loved by someone, and Rodolphus was hardly her happily ever after.

Andromeda leaving would definitely have made an impact. Bella had lost a sibling to a muggle born, and there was no way of getting her back.

I don't think she was overlooked by her parents, I think quite the reverse. I think she was pampered and embraced her parent's pureblood madness. She always has that smug, haughty nature about her, even on trial she sat on the chair as if it was a throne. I think she like most tyrannical upper-class people in history treated people below her rank with disdain and hatred. Poor people and people related to muggleborns would be disgusting to her and someone like Voldemort, who took muggle persecution to an extreme, would be a sort of heroic figure. So no doubt he bent her mind slightly by manipulation and showing her fantastical things.
Azkaban might have done some damage as well. But I know the idea for Bellatrix and kids comes across strongly in HBP Spinners end. I'm just glad she doesn't have kids.

Bellatrix despite her evilness is one of my favorite charecters. I think Bella started out ok but was quickly taken in by the example her parents set for her. I also think things would be different if she had been sorted into a different house than Slytherin. Maybe her veiws would have changed andshe would have married some one other than Roldolphus and never become a Death Eater. Her sister Andromeda turned out fine. There could have been a different life for Bella ha she made other choices.

I don't really think there is a deep, dark secret to Bellatrix. I think it is simply because Bella is a pureblood; she grew up with a thirst for power. Then, the Death Eaters began popping up. Regulus, Lucius, Narcissa and Rodolphus all joined the Death Eaters at some point, and I think she wanted to compete with them and have a higher social standing than them - she wanted to remain in power, and not be overlooked by her family.

Yeah, I agree. She was so twisted into believing that she was better then everyone just because she was a pureblood and she was Voldermort's right hand man...well woman that she just got too...thickheaded I guess you could say. But look what happened to the both of them.

most definitely. i mean no one is born as evil and crazy as j.k rolling made bellatrix appear in the books. i'd say some tramatic experience happened when she was a young child and she just kind of took it out on the world. Also i believe she really bought into the whole pureblood is better then muggleborn or halfblood, even more so then the Malfory's did. and that would mean she just instantly hated more then half the wizarding community.

i honesly beleive she is just... well as muriel would say it "gaga"

some people are just crazy.

I wonder why Bellatrix is mad. In the HBP movie, her madness is so obvious.
She resorts to physical violence. She seems to enjoy it. She's a Death Eater and a woman. Maybe that's her problem. Maybe such a female character wouldn't be believable, unless there's an explanation, in this case, insanity.
I mean, other Death Eaters are cruel as well. But they're not insane, you'd say, they're maybe sick, sadistic, but nothing else.
I don't know if she's an interesting character. She always does what you've been expecting, no surprises.

Bellatrix is one of the more interesting Harry potter villians, in my opinion. I think that her her malicious and unforgiving nature are not from a failed attempt to become a mother. She takes too much pleasure out of dystroying conventional beauty. My only conclusion is that she was born, or learned from a very young age, an extremely skewed view of evil, and to stop at nothing in order to "puify" the wizarding world.

Her ability to kill and tourture without any emotion similar to guilt or remourse is evidence that she could never have felt any motherly emotion for anything good. She expresses such childlike glee when she accomplishes tasks that are pure malignant evil that I can only conclude she was a child when such acts were promoted, be it by parents or siblings.

Bellatrix was different from her siblings, however. She is by far the most evil and dangerous. I feel as if bellatrix was treated special as a child. She was probably the favorite of her parents, succubing to their pureblood mania, and wholeheartedly committing herself to the mass hatered and prejudice that would eventually lead to the tourture and killings of innocent people.

In the Gaunts, Rowling shows that marrying your cousins creates a vain of instability. Sirius tell us that 'all the pureblood families are related', both Molly and Arthur are his cousins in different ways. I think this applies to Bellatrix, the potential for her to be evil is in her genetics somewhere.

However, that could not have been tapped into if she hadn't been indoctrinated into the belief that being pureblood made you superior and that anyone else was to be held in the deepest of contempt. She is a pampered, pureblood princess.

Rowling shows that Bella had a choice in believing this however, both Sirius and Andromeda reject whole heartedly. I don't think that she loves Lestrange, she just marries him because it is expected of her. They are hardly ever shown together, and we don't really know that much about him. The love of her life is Voldemort, but it is a one sided obsessive love, not a true love that it shared and returned.

With Bellatrix Rowling is showing, yet again, that it is the choices that you make in life that count. Bellatrix chooses to believe the pureblood mania, she chooses to hate and not love, in the end she chooses to be the way she is.

Honestly I think, like the Gaunt family, that there was a grain of insanity in the family and Bellatrix got it. This combined with the pureblood mania she was brought up with created the insane psychopath we know as Bellatrix. Of course we only see her after Azkaban which wouldn't have helped the whole insanity gene theory.

I agree witth darthpotter89, but what i wanna know is how come andromeda turned out good when her 2 sisters are death eaters??

A good reason for Bella's sick obsession could possibly be because she is attracted to Voldemort. How someone could be attracted to him, I can't quite say. But she secured a good pureblood marriage as was expected of her by her family to Rodolphus Lestrange, but oddly, the couple don't show any romance between them, unlike Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy who obviously love each other.

I'm completely useless when knowing anything about bellatrix.

All i know is that she was born into a bad family, just as sirius was.
So there was bound to be some problems in her personality.

She didn't understand Love and never could and learned through Voldemort of hatred and power.

Bellatrix was just one of those selfish, jealous children.

I feel, that seeing as she was the eldest of her siblings, she was given less attention and had to do things on her own(<---speaking from personal experience here). Bellatrix may have been ignored by her mother and wasn't able to project motherly love to others because she had not experienced it herself, which would explain why she could kill without thinking twice about it. Also, Bella might not have felt as important as a child and grew up hating her childhood. I think she wanted to prove herself and make her parents proud of her.

Or, in another thought of mine, Bella was the star of her parent's sky and she was taken in to their muggle-hating lives and she wanted to follow in her parents footprints and make an impact, or so she thought, being raised the way she was. I think that she thought that being disrespectful to anyone who was not up to her or her parent's standards was how everyone was supposed to act. She was taught that wrong was right and right was wrong and Azkaban was no help in setting her straight.

Oh! I have another theory. Perhaps as a child she was given so much attention and all that jazz that she became so cruel and wicked. I think that her parents could have seen Andromeda being the youngest and most needy(of help doing things) as Andromeda being the weakest link and that is why she truned out the way she did.

There is definitely a reason for why she is the way she is there are many possibilities though her child hood is probably the most likely reason. We got the impression from Sirius that being a Black child wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I’ve always believed that she learned her favourite form of punishment through firsthand experience. She was brought up to be the way she is, and in some twisted way maybe Voldemort was the first person to give her the attention she always craved.

I think she was so brainwashed with the pure blood pride stuff from her parents and family that when Voldemort came along she saw an opportunity to prove to her parents that she truly believed aswell. That way she was no way she would end up like Andromeda. From then her love for her master and her obsessed with pure bloods drove her slightly mad.

I think there is something we don't know about Bellatrix. It would be interesting if jk rowling did something about that. She is portrayed as being like some phsyco! i would love to know why she is so crazy!

Well i think that in case of Bellatrix there may or maynot be more than what JKR tells cz she came from a family who had their whole lot of ancestors as slytherins and taking this in acc. it can be frm birth that she was 2wards dark magik yeah regarding the evil part of her she like othr death eaters had a master to serve to have a goal in life and she had her best intrest towards Voldemort so to be the closest to her master she turned his way only....
what do you all say?? And her kind of service when she livd at azkaban for 13 years she had all her guts thrown away like this

Firstly, what we were given in the book was mere basic background, but it provided enough for us to get an initial idea of what to expect. Bellatrix was born into a family obsessed with blood purity and punished those deemed ‘traitors’ for rebelling against these ideas. We know this from family accounts, and the Black family crest which reads ‘always pure’ in French.

Now. She married her husband (a pure blood wizard) because it was expected. She never speaks of him, shows no concern he’s in prison and really, ultimately, only needed him to get in with the Dark Lord.

The woman herself - she is a sadist. She enjoys hurting others and gets a great amount of satisfaction (probably both emotionally, and sexually) from inflicting pain/torture on others. I don’t, however, think she’s a psychopath. Bella feels emotion. She’s capable of love, of concern and knows the difference between right and wrong. She just doesn’t care – mind marred by her blood ideals.

I think she's always been like this, since childhood. She's the type of kid you can envisage playing with bugs until they day - just for the hell of it. I don't think that enjoyment of power over another being ever left her.
Contrastingly, Voldemort is not capable of feeling emotion. Why, then, does he chose to rescue her from the Ministry rather then letting her go back to Azkaban (will come on to the effects of prison on her in a second)? I think, although he can’t feel love, he feels something when he’s with her. And that slight elevation in emotion (even though it’s not identifiable as love to him, or anything positive really) it’s enough for him to want to keep her around.

I think she needs something like this. Someone to *want* her... I"m not sure if Rodolphus ever did. And I'm not sure where that stemmed from. I mean, she had a privileged childhood, but it's possible the love and care was replaced with riches and possesions.

So anyways, Bellatrix picked up on that, and her previous devotion to his cause then became a devotion to him. She loved him. Fanatically (she doesn’t seem to do things by halves - childhood link to perfection/need for power and control).

Azkaban reportedly took a beautiful woman, and turned her gaunt, pale and manic. Emotionally, she was probably pushed over the edge. Isolation and torture will have set up her need for contact with other people, leading to a heightened sexual/seductive nature to her, one that she’s probably not aware of because she’s lost the ability to know where the social line is.

The fact that Voldemort will have praised her for her loyalty to him will only have cemented her ideas that what she does is the right thing. On some level I think she knows she can never have the man she wants. So she compensates, flirting, working, torturing for the attention off him that he doesn’t give.

As for her past with this, I agree to some extent. I've always seen her as very close with Narcissa, and probably Andromeda before she was shunned (part of me thinks that was hard for Bella to do). I think she juts got caught up in it all - when you've had family values printed on you from an early age it's near impossible to ignore them. Rodolphus and Voldemort furthered that and further fragmented her already precariously held together personality.

I think a lot of it stemmed from her family and childhood. A pureblood family would most likely want a son so that he could inherit the family name, titles etc. but instead they got 3 daughters (I'm guessing it's like this) so they would have gotten some disapointment from their parents for this.
So if from her birth she was already a disapointment to her parents she would have tried her utmost from then on to get their approval and pride. One method of doing this would be to open herself up completely to te pureblood mania that her family were famed for.
I think also she would have tried to become the male heir that her parents craved, she probably became strong, independant and powerfull in her mid-teens by immersing herself in the dark arts. She then later joined the deatheaters, a group that is mainly made up of men, which also suggests that she is trying to prove herself just as good as a man.
She married Rodolfus to please her parents by making a good pure-blood marriage, but he proabably didn't respect her so she sould try and get his approval and respect by having an aptitude for torture, murder and other such deatheater activity.
Because she was so devoted to, an had so many reasons, to get involved with the torturing and murdering she would have developed a need and obsession for it and so grew to thrive on it. It was her method for survival, her way of living.
Because Voldemort was the only one who actually was impressed with her natural ability as a deatheater (Rodolfus probably wasn't too happy when she outstripped him as a deatheater as I assume she did)she took her obsession to please to him, as she had found a master who would reward and appreciate her, so she would do anything for him.

That is my theory anyway. I wasn't planning on writting that much but there you go.

I don't think that in anyway Rodolphus had much to do with Bellatrix's mental state.

Here was a man, whose wife loved and completed devoted herself to another. Others have said that possibly he neglected her; I think it was the other way around. Consumed by a burning desire for Voldemort, Rodolphus would have appeared in Bella's eye, inferior to her true love. JK said in DH that the way Bella addresses Voldie is as a lover (Chapter Thirty-Six - The Flaw in the Plan).

To me Rodolphus was to Bella little more than a pureblood match, she never really loved him, and he was just a substitute.

The sad part is we don't know whether or not He loved Bella. Maybe by just being that substitute is enough to prove that he did. Maybe he was forever trying to win her affections, forever trying to be the man she wanted, yet here was just another opportunity for Bella to inflict pain.