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It was a relatively simple assignment, something different today, Professor Vector had said. Ten inches on Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. They were to select a figure, either historical or literary – because since the war, Professor Vector had become most fascinated with all things Muggle – and apply Burke’s categories. Honestly, Hermione could have written it in her sleep, from structure to contrastive analysis to conclusion, because even before she’d received her Hogwarts letter, she’d been reading Burke. Obviously.
Instead, today, as she sat there with her quill poised and dipped in ink, she found herself stuck on the first line.
She recalled, again, Professor Vector’s brisk introduction; how eighth-year N.E.W.T. students were expected to engage with “aesthetic theory as moral philosophy” while developing their skills in Arithmancy, which meant discussing how people respond to power, to terror – and, to grace. Neville next to her had, surprisingly, chosen Titania; in the row behind them, the Ravenclaws were whispering about Morgan le Fay and Dumbledore. Hermione waited, and waited, then, instinctively, compulsively, she scribbled down a name before she could turn her own gaze inwards and question what in the world she was doing.
Bellatrix Lestrange.
She hadn’t finished the essay in class; had barely been able to get a word down, really. So now, sitting at one of the library desks after a bland-tasting dinner, Hermione opened Burke’s work again. This copy was old, with its margins positively full of several someones’ neat – and then, some less neat – annotations. There would be nothing in them for her, though; this was something she’d derive from herself only.
She read the most familiar passage first: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger (…) is a source of the sublime; that is, it produces the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.
Pain and danger – strongest emotion.
Bellatrix’s laughter suddenly struck, as if it were coming from the next library row, breaking Hermione’s arms out in vicious gooseflesh – breaking her mind, momentarily, ajar – but before she could succumb to the snare-like tendrils of trauma, she began to write.
Bellatrix Lestrange cannot, under any circumstances, be understood through the language of beauty. She belongs, solely, to the sublime. That which is beautiful invites love; that which is sublime provokes awe. Where beauty soothes, the sublime…
She paused for a second, then wrote,
… wounds.
She broke pace again, looking at the sentence, and then she underlined wounds. Burke would have approved of that verb, she thought grimly, but with a nostalgic fondness from remembering her eleven-year-old self at the Wellcome Centre Library and the way the personnel had all looked at her like she was a lost child. Burke, he’d insisted that terror was the highest pleasure available to the imagination – provided one survived it.
She nibbled her lip, then continued.
Her presence was an argument for fear as a form of sinister intimacy. She, inadvertently, taught others to know themselves by the limits of their own endurance. She commanded without the need to persuade; her power was not rhetorical, but elemental.
It was almost clinical; it’d earn her good marks from Vector. It was also true. Because Hermione could still feel – would probably never unlearn to feel – the specific vibration in the air of Bellatrix entering a space; how the oxygen thinned, then charged, then turned to suffocating sublimely suffocating.
Burke would have called that astonishment; the freezing of cognitive thought that occurs when the mind is confronted with magnitude.
. . . But Burke had probably never been tortured to the edge of insanity and back by a Cruciatus, or had his ‘filthy’ blood status fleshed out in his own… blood.
Can’t go there.
Hermione dipped her quill again, then continued.
To encounter her was to face the profoundest of immensities which Burke describes. She was not vast in stature – physically speaking, she was rather small – but in intensity. In her, the possibility and propensity and predisposition to destruction rather became its own kind of form.
She stopped to flex her fingers; rereading the sentence, wondering whether it read too much like her own mind’s stark nudity; too much like something pulled from a… confession. She looked around; the library was nearly empty, only a few seventh-years murmuring near the window in the opposite row, across the main corridor.
Safe enough.
She turned to Burke’s section on the beautiful next; turned to smoothness, delicacy, proportion, and began a new paragraph for this.
Bellatrix was extraordinarily beautiful once, before her imprisonment to Azkaban in the autumn of 1981. But her beauty, as it was, belonged to the surface, then eroded. However, the sublime within her had sown the seeds far long before the surface crumbled to tatters.
Alright – perhaps too Keatsian, definitely too personal; she was almost startled by the line she’d written. She hadn’t formed it in her mind, it had just… crystallised. As recollections did, meticulously unprompted. She scratched out to tatters, but left the rest.
When she continued next, her handwriting began to waver.
The Beautiful, Burke writes, is that which inspires affection. Yet affection is a kind of safety, and Bellatrix Lestrange offered none; not even to her own family members, per the Ministry’s recorded testimonials. What she offered, instead, was uninvited vision of the clarity left when disconvoluted fear and abject terror erase everything lesser.
Hermione stopped again, realising her armpits had gone moist; that her hand was trembling, shaking from her wrist to the fingertip of her index. Right away, she set the quill down.
This was supposed to be analysis. But this was… becoming not that.
She sighed, flexed her wrist, then turned another page in Burke. The argument itself was safe ground. Proportion, harmony, delight. She could do this. She could, again, explain that in her sleep. But her own sentences were beginning to flee from plain theory like Dementors from Harry’s Patronus, and that would not do; her essay had a deadline.
She drew a near-straight break-line across the parchment and began again, slower now; letting the words materialise before her eyes, before pressing the quill’s wet head to the page.
According to Burke, beauty depends upon submission. We love that which does not threaten us. We call smoothness, delicacy, and smallness beautiful because they reassure us that we remain in control; that the beautiful can be controlled – even soiled. But Bellatrix Lestrange did not reassure. She threatened reversed the current. Those who witnessed her were not masters of their own perception; they were seized and immobilised by it.
Now that sounded right. She added,
In the presence of the sublime, the mind delights in its own annihilation.
Hermione paused, pen lifted. Delights. Always that word. Burke’s word. But he’d meant the thrill of an oxymoronic safe danger, like the pleasure of watching a thunderstorm from the safety of standing behind one’s bedroom window. And she, she had never been behind glass. She had been spine on wood – unfiltered.
Her handwriting was beginning to slant, but still, she continued.
If the beautiful is the promise that we may approach without having to fear harm, then the sublime is the knowledge that the harm is already done.
She stared at the line. Too bare, wasn’t it? – but she couldn’t make herself erase it. Not that one. Instead, she forced herself further back into the expected academic register, gathering authority.
Bellatrix Lestrange functioned, in this sense, as an emblem of the sublime’s moral danger. Her intensity, unchecked by psychological reason, transformed power into spectacle. She demanded a witness to her strength of destruction. She created obedience not by persuasion but by sheer force of being.
That was safer. Detached, observational, but safer. It could stand in a classroom without anyone looking at her like she was… what she was.
And right away, the memory under the words clawed its way up her calves. First the weight of Bellatrix’s hawkish, pathological gaze, then the awful recognition of being seen by someone who meant – in absolute, unconditional, unsoftened terms – to demolish you, turn you into cruor, into a pool of grume.
Hermione swallowed against the lump in her throat, against the dagger in her arm, the leather corset against her own chest, and wrote,
The sublime cannot love; it consumes. Yet I think there must have been a moment, before the consumption began, when even she mistook her own fire for mere light rather than extinction.
Hermione stopped again, aware of how her pulse had began to speed up. But she only whispered, “Keep it formal”, and returned to her task.
Burke’s taxonomy, though useful, arguably fails to account for figures who embody both fascination and fear; those figures whose power attracts even as it annihilates. Bellatrix Lestrange was one such figure. The question, then, is not whether she was beautiful, but whether beauty itself can survive its proximity to, and inseparability of, her terror.
That one felt neat. Perhaps even almost publishable. And yet, when she looked at it, she couldn’t quite tell where exactly the philosophy ended and her own projections began.
But – did these really need to remain unfused?
Could anything related to Bellatrix Lestrange remain unfused?
The midnight strike suddenly reverberated through the library windows; startled, Hermione sat back in her chair, looking around. The seventh-years had gone; the rows across the corridor were darkened. Madam Pince must – unbelievably – not have realised Hermione was still here. Quickly, she capped her ink and gathered her notes.
The essay wasn’t fully done. But it was passable. And although she’d never ever in all her years at Hogwarts said the following sentence out loud, much less thought it, it was clear, that for this – for this topic of her own choosing – passable would have to do.
Hermione dressed by habit, her fingers clumsy with her shirt buttons. Her eyes felt needlessly tight in their sockets, as if she’d gone to sleep, but then halfway through, proper sleep had just become something she’d forgotten to act on while still lying there. Her flashing dreams had encompassed a storm raging above the Black Lake – whose irony was not lost on her in the slightest.
The essay was rolled up in her bag. She hadn’t reread it. When she thought of the words she’d left unedited, her stomach did a nauseous little summersault, but not from regret alone. It was more like trepidation, or a sustained injury, whose bruise hadn’t yet finished taking colour.
Her pathetic attempt at breakfast was barely half-eaten when she remembered the due time and hurried up to Professor Vector’s.
“Miss Granger”, said Vector, without looking up from her desk. “Title?”
Hermione fiddled with the roll, then cleared her throat, and managed, “Bellatrix Lestrange: Ode to Terror”, then realised she’d actually – actually – said it out loud, despite her nausea.
Vector’s quill-hand paused her notations. Slowly, her dark eyes rose, staring at Hermione. But then, after a moment, “Oh, my. Burkean, I hope.”
“I… I tried.” Hermione quickly laid the parchment roll on Vector’s desk like a pathetic little gift, then hid her shaky hands behind her back.
Vector unrolled the essay and appeared to scan it over, before giving a quick nod. “A daring choice of subject, Miss Granger.”
Hermione bit her lip again, but she nodded, despite feeling like she was baring her very soul and all its… wounds. All of them, dressed and undressed and redressed, and the ones still silently seeping.
“May I ask, why her?”
Vector’s tone was thankfully only curious, not probing, and Hermione’s mouth did open, but nothing resembling sensibility followed the act. She could have said, because no one else fits so perfectly. Or, because she was the purest form of power I’ve ever seen. Or, because I can’t stop thinking about her or dreaming about her. Or, because her presence was so eviscerating, I sometimes wonder whether it happened at all, since I’m still breathing. Or, fifty other things.
“It seemed… appropriate”, was what Hermione managed, eventually.
Vector studied her for a bit longer, then looked back at the pile of essays. “Very well. We’ll discuss them next week. I’ll see you then, at the latest.”
The words were ordinary, too ordinary, so Hermione stayed still, waiting; waiting for the essay to change category, for Vector to correct herself and treat her essay not as a claim to be defended, but as an admission of trauma. But, no. Vector expected her to just… show up. Meaning… Hermione wasn’t being handled, or made made an exception for, or expected to excuse herself, to sit this one out, for a pretext.
She wasn’t a wound to manage. She was – here, now – a mind still capable of being questioned.
She thought of Burke’s line about delight in terror, and how easily words could be mistaken for understanding – and yet Vector’s chosen ones left no room for mistakes. Her semantics were clear – and like the thawing of frost-bitten feet, the relief washed over Hermione, ebbing her nausea away. For the first time since the war, the absence of gentleness felt like care.
– end –