The princess myth: Hilary
Mantel on Diana
The Wolf Hall novelist on the 20th anniversary of the death
of the Princess of Wales, an icon ‘only loosely based on the young woman born
Diana Spencer’
Saturday 26 August 2017 06.00 BST
Royal time should move slowly and by its own laws: creeping,
like the flow of chrism from a jar. But 20 ordinary years have jog-trotted by,
and it’s possible to have a grownup conversation with someone who wasn’t born
when Diana died. Her widower is long remarried. Her eldest son, once so like
her, shows signs of developing the ponderous looks of Philip, his grand-father.
Diana should be as passe as ostrich plumes: one of those royal or quasi-royal
women, like May of Teck or Wallis Simpson or the last tsarina, whose images
fade to sepia and whose bones are white as pearls. Instead, we gossip about her
as if she had just left the room. We still debate how in 1981 a sweet-faced,
puppy-eyed 20-year-old came to marry into the royal house. Was it a setup from
the start? Did she know her fiance loved another woman? Was she complicit, or
was she an innocent, garlanded for the slab and the knife?
For some people, being dead is only a relative condition;
they wreak more than the living do. After their first rigor, they reshape
themselves, taking on a flexibility in public discourse. For the anniversary of
her death, the princess’s sons remember her for the TV cameras, and we learn
that she was “fun” and “very caring” and “a breath of fresh air”. They speak
sincerely, but they have no news. Yet there is no bar on saying what you like
about her, in defiance of the evidence. Private tapes she made with her voice
coach have been shown in a TV documentary, Diana: In Her Own Words. They were
trailed as revealing a princess who is “candid” and “uninhibited”. Yet never
has she appeared so self-conscious and recalcitrant. Squirming, twitching,
avoiding the camera’s eye, she describes herself hopefully as “a rebel”, on the
grounds that she liked to do the opposite of everyone else. You want to veil
the lens and explain: that is reaction, not rebellion. Throwing a tantrum when
thwarted doesn’t make you a free spirit. Rolling your eyes and shrugging
doesn’t prove you are brave. And because people say “trust me”, it doesn’t
means they’ll keep your secrets.
Yet royal people exist in a place beyond fact-correction, in
a mystical realm with rules that, as individuals, they may not see; Diana
consulted psychics to work out what was going on. The perennial demand for them
to cut costs and be more “down to earth” is futile. They are not people like
us, but with better hats. They exist apart from utility, and by virtue of our
unexamined and irrational needs. You can’t write or speak about the princess
without explicating and embellishing her myth. She no longer exists as herself,
only as what we made of her. Her story is archaic and transpersonal. “It is as
if,” said the psychotherapist Warren Colman, “Diana broadcast on an archetypal
frequency.”
Though she was not born royal, her ancestors were ancient
power-brokers, dug more deeply into these islands than the Windsors. She
arrived on the scene in an era of gross self-interest, to distract the nation
from the hardness of its own character. As she correctly discerned, “The
British people needed someone to give affection.” A soft-eyed, fertile blond,
she represented conjugal and maternal love, and what other source did we have?
Until Tony Blair took office as a fresh-faced Prince Charming we had female
leaders, but they were old and their cupboards were bare of food and love: a
queen who, even at Diana’s death, was reluctant to descend from the cold north,
and a prime minister formerly known as Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.
The princess we invented to fill a vacancy had little to do
with any actual person. Even at the beginning she was only loosely based on the
young woman born Diana Spencer, and once she was engaged to the Prince of Wales
she cut adrift from her modest CV. In the recent documentary Diana, Our Mother,
her son Harry spoke of her as “an ordinary 20-year-old”; then checked himself,
remembering she was an aristocrat. But in some ways his first thought was
right. Like a farmer’s daughter, Diana married the boy across the hedge – she
grew up near the queen’s estate at Sandringham. As the third daughter born to
Viscount Althorp, she was perhaps a disappointment. The family’s previous
child, a son, had died within hours of birth, and Spencer and his wife Frances
had to try again for an heir. The Jungian analyst Marion Woodman posits that
unwanted or superfluous children have difficulty in becoming embodied; they remain
airy, available to fate, as if no one has signed them out of the soul store. By
Diana’s cradle – where the witches and good fairies do battle – stood a friend
of the Queen Mother, her maternal grandmother Ruth Fermoy. When Diana was six,
Frances left her young family. Fermoy took sides against her daughter and
helped Spencer get custody of his four desolate children. Later, promoted to
his earldom, he remarried without telling them. Diana is said to have expressed
her views by pushing her stepmother downstairs.
Diana’s private education implanted few cultural interests
and no sense of their lack. She passed no public exams. But she could write a civil
letter in her rounded hand, and since she didn’t have to earn a living, did it
matter? In Diana: In Her Own Words, she speaks of her sense of destiny. “I knew
… something profound was coming my way … I knew I was different from my friends
…” Like Cinderella in the kitchen, she served an apprenticeship in humility,
working as an upper-class cleaner, and in a nursery mopping up after other
people’s babies. Then the prince came calling: a mature man, with a history of
his own.
By her own account, Diana was not clever. Nor was she
especially good, in the sense of having a dependable inclination to virtue; she
was quixotically loving, not steadily charitable: mutable, not dependable:
given to infatuation, prey to impulse. This is not a criticism. Myth does not
reject any material. It only asks for a heart of wax. Then it works subtly to
shape its subject, mould her to be fit for fate. When people described Diana as
a “fairytale princess”, were they thinking of the cleaned-up versions?
Fairytales are not about gauzy frocks and ego gratification. They are about
child murder, cannibalism, starvation, deformity, desperate human creatures
cast into the form of beasts, or chained by spells, or immured alive in thorns.
The caged child is milk-fed, finger felt for plumpness by the witch, and if
there is a happy-ever-after, it is usually written on someone’s skin.
In a TV interview before the marriage – the “ghastly
interview,” as Diana called it – Charles wondered quizzically, “whatever ‘in
love’ means”. He has been blamed ever since for destroying the simple faith of
a simple maid. But off-camera, Diana was preparing. Her choice of hymn makes
the marriage a patriotic duty, like signing up for a war:
By Diana’s later account, the wedding day was “the worst day
of my life”. But at the time – July 1981 – she looked dazed with happiness.
Even for republicans there was much to enjoy. A great city en fête. The oily
reverence of the commentators with their peculiar word order: “For the first
time through the centre gateway of Admiralty Arch arrives Lady Diana …” Best of
all, the outfits: Princess Anne dressed as an Easter egg, wearing a furious
scowl. Diana’s entrance into legend prompted a national gasp, as she tumbled
from her coach like a bride in a bag. Her gown unfolded perfectly, like a paper
flower. But some palace lackey had erred; the vehicle was too cramped for a
tall flouncing lassie and her frock.
It takes a lot a lot of know-how and behind-the-scenes sweat
to transform Cinderella from dust-maid to belle. Fairytales do not describe the
day after the wedding, when the young wife lost in the corridors of the palace
sees her reflection splinter, and turns in panicked circles looking for a
mirror that recognises her. Prince Charles’s attitude of anxious perplexity seems
to have concealed an obtuseness about what the marriage meant to his bride. The
usual young woman of the era had a job, sexual experience, friends who stayed
within her circle – her wedding was simply a big party, and she probably didn’t
even move house. But Diana’s experience as daughter of a landed family did not
prepare her for Buckingham Palace, any more than Schönbrunn prepared the
teenage Marie Antoinette for Versailles. It was Diana’s complaint that no one
helped her or saw her need. Fermoy had expressed doubts before the marriage.
“Darling, you must understand that their sense of humour and their lifestyle
are different …” The bathos is superb. “Mind how you go,” say the elders, as
they tip off the dragon and chain the virgin to the mossy rock.
What would have happened to Diana if she had made the sort
of marriage her friends made? You can picture her stabled in the shires with a
husband untroubled by brains: furnishing a cold house with good pieces, skiing
annually, hosting shoots, stuffing the children off to board: spending more on
replenishing the ancestral linen cupboard than on her own back. With not too
much face-paint, jacket sleeves too short for her long arms, vital organs
shielded by a stout bag bought at a country show, she would have ossified into
convention; no one would have suspected her of being a beauty. Like many women
in mid-life, she would have lived in a mist of discontent, struggling to define
something owing, something that had eluded her. But in her case the “something”
would have been the throne.
Even in childhood photos Diana seems to pose, as if watching
her own show. Her gaze flits sideways, as if to check everyone is looking at
her. One “friend” told a TV crew that as a teenager, “whenever you saw her
alone she would have picked up some trashy romantic novel”. Leave aside the
casual denigration of women’s taste: if Diana imagined herself – the least and
youngest daughter – as magnificent, all-conquering, a queen, she had a means of
turning her daydream into fact. Diana claimed that she and the prince met only
13 times before their wedding. Did she keep a note? She lacked self-awareness,
but had strong instincts. It must have been child’s play – because she was
anxious to please, or because she was crafty – to seem to share his visions and
concerns. An earnest look, a shy silence, job done. Chaste maids were not too
plentiful in the 1980s. The prince took advice: snap her up, sir.
Diana was no doubt really shy, and certainly unused and
unformed: a hollow vessel, able to carry not just heirs but the projections of
others. After marriage she had power that she had not sought or imagined. She
had expected adulation, but of a private kind: to be adored by her prince,
respected and revered by her subjects. She could not have imagined how
insatiable the public would be, once demand for her had been ramped up by the
media and her own tactics. In her circle there were no solid witnesses to the
nature of reality – only those who, by virtue of their vocation, were
fantasists, exalting sentiment, exploiting the nation’s infantile needs,
equating history with the history of a few titled families. She had a sense of
her own fitness to be princess, and unfitness for any other role. But she had
no sense of the true history in which she was now embedded, or the strength of
the forces she would constellate. At first, she said, she was afraid of the
crowds who gathered to adore her. Then she began to feed on them.
When Diana became the most famous woman in the world, it is
not surprising that less popular members of the Firm were miffed. The queen
herself had been a beauty, but may have thought it vulgar to be too interested
in one’s looks. Diana was allowed to interest herself in little else. Her
dealings with the press and photographers were not innocent. The images had to
be carefully curated – her good side, so to speak. There were unacceptable
angles. And when an image is created by the lens it can fuzz and slip and blur.
Unsure of her boundaries, the princess starved herself, as if her healthy frame
could pare away to the elfin proportions of the models and dancers who
fascinated her. She threw up her food, hacked at herself with a blade. In
Diana: In Her Own Words she sneers at her young self – her tone contemptuous,
punitive. She cannot forgive that girl, naive heroine of a gothic novel – whose
fate is to be locked in a keep by a man of dubious intentions, and to be
practised upon by older women who have secrets she needs to know.
In 1992 Charles and Diana separated. In 1996 the dead
marriage was buried. This was not what had been negotiated, in the 13
encounters. The prince resumed his old narrative, with the woman he should have
married in the first place. Another story had begun to tell Diana. Cut loose,
she opened the doors of her identity and all the dead princesses floated in,
those deposed and exiled, beheaded and shot. With them came the screen idols
and the spoiled glamour girls – Monroe naked and dead, Garbo who wanted to be
alone. As we grow up, we aim to be “self-possessed”, not taken over by others.
But as the novelist Ivy Compton Burnett says, “People have no chance to grow
up. A lifetime is not long enough.”
Isolated by the pique and indifference of the other royals,
neglected, crossed in love and bested by Mrs Parker Bowles, she found
“affinity”, she said, with the rejected. To her credit, she had begun to work
actively to lessen the amount of pain in the world. She visited the sick, and
stopped just short of claiming the healing touch that custom bestows on the
divinely anointed; had she become queen, she would surely have gone about
raising the dead. Legend insists she showed the world that it was safe to shake
hands with a person with Aids. Even in the unenlightened days of 1987, only the
bigoted and ignorant thought casual contact would infect them, but any gesture
from Diana was worth years of public education and millions in funding. She
hung around with Mother Teresa, and did it while wearing couture; she moved
towards suffering, rather than swerving from it. “When people are dying,” she
said, “they’re much more open, more vulnerable, much more real than other
people, and I appreciate that.” Among the weak she recovered her strength –
transformed from peely-wally puking maid to an Amazon heading to battle. She
knew dread diseases would not kill her. Like Joan of Arc, protected by her own
magic, she walked unscathed. Campaigning against landmines, she passed through
explosive terrain. Her armoured vest was inscribed, “the HALO Trust”. Her blond
head gleamed like a fell invitation, inviting a bolt from the blue.
The divorce was a sour one. It is difficult to extract sober
truth from the bitching of the sycophants on either side. Diana won the War of
the Waleses because she was ruthless, and had better legs. Her withdrawal from
publiclife, dramatically announced, suggested that she would emerge as a new
model. Possibly this transformation was under way, but it failed to complete,
till death completed it. Instead she behaved like a daffy celebrity, and her
fans began to laugh at her attempts to hoover up a hero. What kind of mate fits
the bill, if your first has been a future king? The chance of an ordinary life
of trial and error was what she had rejected long ago – when, as her sisters
put it, they printed her face on the souvenir tea towels. But though her sheen
was smudged a little by her failures in love, the marks could be polished away.
It was possible for the public to hold two views of her simultaneously, and
perhaps they were not contradictory: goddesses are not known for propriety.
It’s no use saying to a super-being, “Keep your hands off my husband.” She takes
and consumes, and spits out the tough bits.
By the time of her Panorama interview, late in 1995, Diana
had developed a habit of speaking of herself in the third person. Sphinx-like,
unsmiling and with mater dolorosa makeup, she presented herself as both a
victim and a person of great power, and though she spoke plainly enough, it was
with the mysterious air of one forced to communicate in riddles.
When she referred
to herself as a 'queen of hearts', the blood chilled. She seemed to be reading
from her own obituary.
She was too much for the royal family, she said: wasted on
them. She saw nothing good for Charles. “Who knows what fate will produce?” It
was not a question. In her polite duchessy way, she was cursing him.
But the end of royal status had stripped away Diana’s
protection, both practically and mystically. After the Panorama broadcast there
was a buzz in the air: a doomy feeling, as if her options were running out. She
still played games with the press, but they knew a dirtier game. They spat at
her, insulted her to try to draw a reaction. She teased them, and they chased
her down, not killing her yet. She is supposed to have feared sinister forces,
anticipated that her end was prepared. As every fortune-teller knows, such
hints assume precision in retrospect.
A deathbed, once, was a location dense with meaning, a room
packed with the invisible presences of angels, devils, ancestors. But now, as
many of us don’t believe in an afterlife, we envisage no final justice, no
ultimate meaning, and have no support for our sense of loss when “positivity”
falters. Perhaps we are baffled by the process of extinction. In recent years,
death narratives have attained a popularity they have not held for centuries.
Those with a terminal illness scope it out in blogs. This summer the last days
of baby Charlie Gard riveted worldwide attention. But what is the point of all
this introspection? Even before the funeral, survivors are supposed to flip
back to normal. “Keeping busy” is the secret, Prince William has advised.
Grief is exhausting, as we all know. The bereaved are
muddled and tense, they need allowances made. But who knows you are mourning,
if there is nothing but a long face to set you apart? No one wants to go back
to the elaborate conventions of the Victorians, but they had the merit of
tagging the bereaved, marking them out for tenderness. And if your secret was
that you felt no sorrow, your clothes did the right thing on your behalf. Now
funeral notices specify “colourful clothing”. The grief-stricken are described
as “depressed”, as if sorrow were a pathology. We pour every effort into
cheering ourselves up and releasing balloons. When someone dies, “he wouldn’t
have wanted to see long faces”, we assure ourselves – but we cross our fingers
as we say it. What if he did? What if the dead person hoped for us to rend our
garments and wail?
When Diana died, a crack appeared in a vial of grief, and
released a salt ocean. A nation took to the boats. Vast crowds gathered to pool
their dismay and sense of shock. As Diana was a collective creation, she was
also a collective possession. The mass-mourning offended the taste police. It
was gaudy, it was kitsch – the rotting flowers in their shrouds, the padded
hearts of crimson plastic, the teddy bears and dolls and broken-backed verses.
But all these testified to the struggle for self-expression of individuals who
were spiritually and imaginatively deprived, who released their own suppressed
sorrow in grieving for a woman they did not know. The term “mass hysteria” was
a facile denigration of a phenomenon that eluded the commentators and their
framework of analysis. They did not see the active work the crowds were doing.
Mourning is work. It is not simply being sad. It is naming your pain. It is
witnessing the sorrow of others, drawing out the shape of loss. It is natural
and necessary and there is no healing without it.
Princess Diana during a visit to The Royal Botanical Gardens
in Melbourne, Australia.
Princess Diana during a visit to The Royal Botanical Gardens
in Melbourne, Australia. Photograph: Tim Graham/Getty Images
It is irrelevant to object that Diana alive bore no
resemblance to Diana dead. The crowds were not deluded about what they had
lost. They were not mourning something perfect, but something that was
unfinished. There was speculation that Diana might have been pregnant when she
died. Was something of startling interest evolving beneath her skin – another
way of living? The question was left hanging. Her death released subterranean
doubtsand fear. Even those who scorn conspiracy theories asked, what exactly is
an accident? Why, on the last night of her life, did Diana go below ground to
reach her destination? She need not have gone that way. But she didn’t choose –
she was driven. Her gods wanted her: she had been out too late.
From her first emergence in public, sun shining through her
skirt, Diana was exploited, for money, for thrills, for laughs. She was not a
saint, or a rebel who needs our posthumous assistance – she was a young woman
of scant personal resources who believed she was basking with dolphins when she
was foundering among sharks. But as a phenomenon, she was bigger than all of
us: self-renewing as the seasons, always desired and never possessed. She was
the White Goddess evoked by Robert Graves, the slender being with the hook nose
and startling blue eyes; the being he describes as a shape-shifter, a virgin
but also a vixen, a hag, mermaid, weasel. She was Thomas Wyatt’s white deer,
fleeing into the forest darkness. She was the creature “painted and damned and
young and fair”, whom the poet Stevie Smith described:
I wonder why I
fear so much What surely has no modern touch?
In the TV broadcast last month, Prince William said, “We
won’t be doing this again. We won’t speak openly or publicly about her again …”
When her broken body was laid to rest on a private island, it was a conscious
and perhaps superfluous attempt to embed her in national myth. No commemorative
scheme has proved equal or, you might think, necessary. She is like John Keats,
but more photogenic: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” If Diana is
present now, it is in what flows and is mutable, what waxes and wanes, what
cannot be fixed, measured, confined, is not time-bound and so renders
anniversaries obsolete: and therefore, possibly, not dead at all, but slid into
the Alma tunnel to re-emerge in the autumn of 1997, collar turned up, long feet
like blades carving through the rain.
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