Diana and us
Diana and us
Power, romance, Austen, and the mediated princess
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Hello friends,
It’s officially the season. The season of giving, of goodness, of romance, of sparkling, uninhibited joy.
And we’ve kicked off the season by watching The Crown season five, while also watching too many feel-good romantic Hallmark Christmas extravaganzas, and as usual we’re thinking too much.
And what we’re thinking about involves royalty, celebrity, power, tradition, Austen - and what it all has to do with the stories we love, and the stories we tell.
And it may not seem like it, but you cannot over-do this connection between royalty, celebrity, romance, story, and how our projections and our ideas on all this create a potent sort of alchemy that has the power to impact history.
This is saying a lot: Yes, when we are watching the marriage, or death, or breakdown of a Royal through the ages, we’re engaging with the symbolism this personage carries in a way that imbues it all with a power and magic that has little to do with them and everything to do with ourselves.
It’s about us. Not them.
And all of these things are wrapped up in The Crown, and also in Jane Austen. And they’re also coming through loud and clear in a unique documentary experience that dropped in the last few months, just in time for not only the 25th anniversary of the tragic death of Princess Diana, but also just weeks before the death of Queen Elizabeth II: The documentary The Princess is powerful mostly for what it leaves out. The film has zero narration and the story is confined to raw media footage, underlaid with a brilliant score that reflects our emotions and helps us reflect on what we are seeing - and what we are seeing is a darker, roller-coaster relationship between the public and a celebrity.
But also we’re seeing, from the disturbing point of view of a cluster of massive telephoto lens cameras, the life of a woman with a lot of heart and flair, and how she navigates the glare as the world projects its hopes, dreams, aspirations and frustrations onto her.
And you could say that in that projection there is also an erasure, as the lifting up and objectification leads to a powerful disregarding of a person’s - in this case a young woman’s - humanity. And not only does this happen with the life of Diana, it happens repeatedly with famous people, especially, you might argue, when they’re young women.
If you’re an Austen Connection regular, you already see where we’re headed - because when we’re referring to the inner life and complicated reality of a young female-identifying person shaking off expectations, claiming her inner reality, and struggling and navigating her way through the glare of expectations and society, we’re definitely in some Jane Austen territory.
[W]hen we’re referring to the inner life and complicated reality of a young female-identifying person shaking off expectations, claiming her inner reality, and struggling and navigating her way through the glare of expectations and society, we’re definitely in some Jane Austen territory.
And we haven’t even gotten to that baggage that comes from the Courtship Plot that Austen was creating within and that a real royal like Diana is living within, as she inherits and inhabits that plot.
So let’s do what we always do here at the Austen Connection. Let’s break it down. Here we go:
See me, feel me
One thing that Jane Austen does that we all love, that we’ve mentioned before, is that even within the expected narrative of the courtship plot, her heroines step out and demand to be seen. We’re “rational creatures.” (Elizabeth). We’re messing things up spectacularly (Emma). We’re not always saying yes (Fanny). We’re awkward and overcome (Marianne). We’re awkward and accusing our host of murder (Catherine, LOL). But we’re always demanding to be heard in these fictions.
And in a way, Diana, also living out the dreaded Courtship Plot, struggles to be seen. And awkwardly.
And already we have a problem, because generally we don’t see celebrities.
This could be an entire thesis but hear us out: Our pop cultures are completely missing the impact that fame has on a person’s psychology. To state it simply, we somehow don’t see and don’t treat our celebrities as human.
We objectify them, doing that thing that Jane Austen was so vigorously pushing back on, and it’s why she creates nuanced and realistic portrayals that challenge us.
Now, you’re saying, for celebrities to be objectified is maybe OK: They’re well-compensated for it. But the reason this is worth saying out loud is because when we understand how we’re interacting with the powerful force of celebrity we understand something about ourselves and our world.
Because fame and celebrity does something to a person when they're in it, and also does something to those of us projecting it, that has a psychological power. When we understand better the inside experience of celebrity we understand something about ourselves.
And whoever it is you’re obsessed with, from Diana, to the Queen, to Kristen Stewart, Harry Styles, Prince Harry, or Colin Firth (yeah, we’re obsessed with all of them) - whoever it is, it’s not about them. It’s about you.
When we understand better the inside experience of celebrity we understand something about ourselves. And whoever it is you’re obsessed with, from Diana, to the Queen, to Kristen Stewart, Harry Styles, or Colin Firth … it’s not about them. It’s about you.
Their power actually comes from you; they are products of your imagination, which is a powerful thing. It makes them.
You probably don’t believe it, but it’s true: In many ways, the power of celebrity is a power we give not them, but ourselves. It’s an alchemy that is more about self-love than its outward projection.
And that’s what’s so cool about it.
As an aside, if this is blowing your mind, not to worry, because everyone gets this wrong, even really smart people whose job it is to not get this wrong. Really smart people who are journalists, some of them celebrities themselves, still get this wrong.
Why we get it all wrong about fame
There’s something about the glare of fame that blinds us to private grief, loneliness, and trauma, when it plays out publicly. It seems it’s impossible for us to not dismiss the grief as part of the show. Spectacle eradicates empathy.
Elton John once told Terry Gross, a legendary and brilliant interviewer of NPR’s “Fresh Air” program, that he simply could not really grow up or have an equal relationship until about 1990 because of his fame and because of the drugs that helped him cope with it. He explains pointblank that his global fame had created a bubble, made him “insular,” and that anyone he was in a relationship with back then felt the experience of sort of being kidnapped by the insanity of it all.
And this thing about celebrity, friends, would be one big digression - we almost edited it all out - except that maybe the best example of this comes with Oprah’s hugely publicized interview of Harry and Meghan in their new digs in California. Oprah, a genius at diving into the psychological lives of her subjects and getting to what’s real, not to mention her status as a celebrity herself who walks in those shoes, nevertheless while traversing all the dynamics of royal life, celebrity life, family, privacy, and security, with the couple, never seems throughout this interview to have it fully in mind: That perhaps the crucial fact of Harry’s life, when it comes to balancing family, security, and celebrity, is that his mother was killed while being chased by paparazzi when he was 12 years old.
So all of this brings us full circle, and takes us back to marriage, romance, the glare of public life, the pressures and powers of our institutions, and to Diana.
The latest documentary, The Princess, is different because this documentary contains no narration, so the story is told completely through raw media footage making it, powerfully, less a story about Diana and more an archive that documents what we’re talking about here: the process of our own - the public’s - creation of Diana.
This footage of Diana and the royal family portrays not only fascinating moments through the lens and even sometimes the off-hand conversations of the media (we’ll intentionally not refer to them as journalists), but also the context of England, starting in the 1980s, showing the world we lived in then, and how we projected our dreams and desires and disappointments about that world onto this figure. Which is what is always happening with celebrity and fame.
Living a Courtship Plot
Because the story we’re projecting onto Diana is a story about a marriage, and about coming of age, finding your power, and navigating through to the pursuit of happiness if not in that marriage than in life.
And because of this Diana’s story recalls the stories of Jane Austen, and not only because we project a fairy tale, as is often said, onto the story of Diana, starting with that massive wedding-gown train she dragged on her wedding day.
But also her story recalls the canon of Austen because we ourselves and our culture is projecting those Austen stories, their romance and their happy-ish endings, from the beginning, right on to this young woman who happened to have the romance novelist Barbara Cartland as a step-grandmother, and whose heavy legacy of royal celebrity is now handed down not only to her sons but also to a biracial American daughter-in-law, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.
And like a Jane Austen character, Diana as seen in all this footage, is searching always and navigating her way through powerful traditions and a society that may not serve, to find a way to connections, the pursuit of happiness and meaning. And like the Elizabeth Bennet archetype we came to project on to Diana, we rejoice in the story of a character we can love - a lively, arch heroine putting it to the establishment.
So let’s look at Diana’s life and how her symbolic story connects to the stories of Austen through a few key moments, delivered in this footage of The Princess by Diana herself, and in her own words, in ways that stand out and help us make sense of this fascinating and tragic story, and what we learn about ourselves, our culture, and celebrity - which is again about Diana not at all, and very much about us and the stories we create.
‘I want to be a wife and mother’
These words are spoken by Diana herself, if anyone were actually listening. And so the first surprising thing to remember that The Princess documentary footage highlights is that Diana showed up ready to do her job as a royal, a wife, and a mother, whatever that means to a young, shy 19-year-old, and ready to give it her all.
And she was so very young, was allegedly a virgin, and seemed clearly full of pure romantic optimism and expectation.
And who was going to tell her otherwise?
Certainly not us, the public, for whom Diana seemed to step up and fulfill all of our own romantic expectations, allowing us to view her as a heroine in a fairy tale, or in a Barbara Cartland or Austenesque romance, with all of the trimmings, whether it be of Kensington Palace or Pemberley.
It’s clear that Diana was expecting everything the storybooks had promised: love, protection, romance, and it seems she shows up - the footage makes it clear - ready to give it her all.
In light of the woman she became (see below), it’s easy to forget that this was a very young person willing to give herself fully not only to her country (if that even entered it, who knows) but also to a man she seemed to fully expect to love for the rest of her life.
A ridiculously young, rosy-cheeked Diana lights up and smiles only once in an initial television interview at Highgrove, when asked about making a family. “Oh yes,” she says with that very rare smile: “I want to be a good wife.”
This all calls to mind Jane Austen’s endings, and leads us to wonder, did Diana read Jane Austen? She probably was assigned Pride and Prejudice in school, surely. If so, perhaps, and one can only hope, she had caught a glimpse of what Austen always shows - that the reality of life is there with the romance, that our heroes are fallible, that even the most privileged among us can be lonely and marginalized, if we do not manage to find the companionship of minds and morals and passions that will sustain us, and that not all endings are happy. We can only hope that Diana already knew this.
‘The Establishment that I married into’
Love proved elusive.
Instead of love, Diana found herself fulfilling a role and a big one and one that involved the stability of an entire country.
As the footage of The Princess and also perhaps the dramas of The Crown season five unfold, you see Diana caught - between the weight of British institution, tradition, the glare, and you also see what’s not there, the absence of a friend, a real family connection, or really anyone, really, who might care.
So when her marriage falls apart, we can see Diana, through the footage, navigating her way through the tensions of Family and Institution.
But this failure and loneliness was just another reason for us to love Diana.
Because Diana isn’t the only one married to an institution. Many of us in fact are married to an institution, and nothing makes this more clear than Jane Austen.
Marriage, equality, women’s rights, LGBT rights, the legality of inter-racial marriages, laws of inheritance, adoption, and hospital visits - if we’re fortunate, our cultures are constantly updating the rules and the institution of marriage to reflect the more inclusive and expansive ways we live and love today. Or are we?
If you grew up in any kind of traditional or fundamentalist culture that is not upgrading those rights, as so many in the world today are experiencing in real time, you can easily identify with a very young woman who has found herself legally bound to an institution that is full of tradition, and ritual, and symbolism, but not so great on simple mental and physical wellbeing.
And if you are living in a culture that has expanded these rights to protect a person entering into the institution of marriage, even so - how is the workload sharing in the house going, and how are the dinner-time debates going?
Basically - we’re all married to the Establishment. Even at the best of times we’re all of us in some way navigating our way through the tensions of Family and Institutions to find peace and self and a pursuit of happiness, which is all so very Jane Austen of us.
Basically - we’re all married to the Establishment. Even at the best of times we’re all of us in some way navigating our way through the tensions of Family and Institutions to find peace and self and a pursuit of happiness, which is all so very Jane Austen of us.
We all exist in this; it’s just magnified for Diana, and her son Harry and his wife Meghan, and also Elton John, and Britney Spears, and others who do it in the public glare. So what do you do?
In the words of E.M. Forster, ‘Only connect’
One of the best and most illustrative moments in The Princess is a scene that doesn’t include Diana or any member of the royal family. It’s a scene in a grocery store where everyday people in recession-wracked England are going about their daily business, when an announcement comes over the “tannoy” that Diana has given birth to a baby boy.
The effect is immediate: Harried shoppers break out in smiles, looking up from their carts and check-out lanes to share in the moment. It’s a moment of connection, and a transcendence from the everyday struggle, through a shared experience.
Diana is that shared experience.
It’s seen again outside the hospital where she is about to emerge with baby William, when you hear the disconcerting football-like chanting of “It’s a boy,” the mania easily recognized by anyone in the vicinity of a World Cup watcher right now.
Why are football fans interested in the birth of a baby royal? This footage lets us in on a reminder that people need to gather round something, and also that people will gather round, and project onto, just about anything.
But especially a celebrity. This is another source of their power - they unite us. Again, something we’re doing, not they.
But amidst all of this projection, this celebration and adoration, and all the weight of tradition, you can see in this footage not connection or authentic stability but rather an untethered loneliness that glares through the tape.
And so Diana goes looking for that connection - she begins forging her path, and perhaps she also finds the connections accidentally. She finds them in royal hand-shaking queues, in clinics, and in hospitals. She embraces children, the elderly, people struggling with addiction, with bulimia, with AIDS.
The footage of The Princess shows her joking, bitterly, with one child in a hospital that there are way too many cameras on her.
But this is what an Austen heroine also does - charts their way through the glare and the noise - think Anne Elliot in Bath - in search of authentic connection.
Get control of your story
One of our favorite unexplored aspects of the trajectory of a Jane Austen heroine is how they have to ultimately make their own choice, and to navigate their way around a myriad of oppressive systems that they can’t control, so they take the one avenue open to them and simply stand, on their own, becoming who they are in some crucial way, the world be damned.
Diana grows up: She’s not a virgin anymore, she knows her body better, she enjoys the sensuousness of the ocean, the ski slopes, she finds connections with new boyfriends, with everyday people, the realness of it, the joy of it. She calls out to children in crowds by name.
She commands now, without even trying, not only attention but also power and influence.
“Work that out for yourself,” Diana says in The Princess footage, speaking to a reporter who’s filming her in what would become an iconic moment at the Taj Mahal and they’re all asking her why she’s alone.
The image, she knew, would always tell her story, and that image was always going to overpower her. This was a first step in Diana’s setting out alone, and making an attempt at wresting some control of her story.
Similarly it’s not often discussed but in Austen when you marry into Pemberley or Donwell Abbey or Mansfield Park, you are not just a spouse in a house. You command a staff inside and out, you sign up to become a leader in a community, you become a part of an Establishment that can wield power and influence, bad and good.
[I]n Austen when you marry into Pemberley or Donwell Abbey or Mansfield Park, you are not just a spouse in a house. You command a staff inside and out, you sign up to become a leader in a community, you become a part of an Establishment that can wield power and influence .
And as we’ve said it can also overwhelm you, consume you, and swallow you whole.
Austen’s stories fantasize that a young woman can wrest a win of minds and hearts and power, and can in doing so wrest control of one’s life within the Establishment.
It’s a fantasy, but not an empty one. The need for such a fantasy comes from a place that’s fascinating to explore, and when we explore these stories about the conquering of a heart, a head, a property, and the Establishment, we learn something fascinating about ourselves and our stories.
Which brings us to the end of 2022
So here and now, this year, at the end of 2022, which has brought the death of Queen Elizabeth II, followed by the death of the great historical novelist Hilary Mantel, and in this 25th anniversary year of Diana’s death, we reflect on what’s behind the symbolism, after all and since the beginning, of the British royal family - the colonialism, the historically violent suppression of independence movements, the whitewashing of our histories and our celebrations.
This is another reason to use art, as did Jane Austen, to look closely at a human life, and try to understand.
And all of this sound and fury in the background to a human life is also of course in the background (and sometimes the foreground) of Austen: How will you survive within this? How will you direct your influence? Will you be able to exert power like a Sir Walter or a Knightley, bad and good, or will those forces overpower you instead?
This powering and overpowering is a fantasy - something to help us work through oppressions, a dynamic that Jane Austen perhaps understood, having experienced the overpowering and having built her imagination and her art around the powering.
A power she gave her heroines but herself experienced only in her imagination.
And we know the end of this story - that it was an imagination that was itself so powerful we’re still projecting that story onto our reality, onto our royals, onto our culture, and onto ourselves.
Hey: It’s the holidays!
Thank you for being here with us, friends!
You’ll see lots of amazing conversations and community, coming up, see below, all dropping into your inbox soon!
Meanwhile, Hope you are able to get into some holiday spirit with sparkling lights, hot spicy drinks, and lots of romance and fantasy sprinkled in.
Yours truly,
Plain Jane
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Cool links and community
This entire post is inspired by the fascinating documentary The Princess - but it’s not for the feint of heart. If you want sparkle and romance, stick with the Hallmark movies, and no shame.
Lucy Worsley Investigates - while this series is billed as murder, mayhem and mystery with royal secrets, Worsley’s wonderful style takes us right into the private grief and humanity of these historic figures, connecting the dots on the exact things that we tend to miss in our histories and cultural storytelling. Episode 1 puts a humanistic light on the lives of royals, as Worsley injects humanity and empathy into an investigation of the two young 15th century English princes allegedly murdered by their uncle, Richard III. She sees beyond the glare of the royal trappings in a perceptive, nuanced investigation into this murky royal mystery. Enjoy!
The death of Queen Elizabeth II earlier in 2022 has also called up reflections on empire and colonialism that the British royalty symbolize. A great person to read about this is British historian David Olusoga, and here’s a wonderful series he created. I only discovered this series a few weeks ago, binged it and am still sharing it constantly and am happy to share it with you. Enjoy.
Along these lines here’s an article by British writer Zadie Smith about historian Gretchen Gerzina’s 1995 book Black Britain, now being reissued, and its impact on her life and writing. Gerzina was one of our first guests on the Austen Connection podcast and you can hear that conversation here.
Upcoming - We’ve not forgotten, we still have some amazing Austen Connection podcast episodes coming up, featuring a live taping from Melbourne, Australia’s Austen Con featuring author Devoney Looser, and also upcoming full episodes with Professor John Mullan and author Robert Morrison. Plus, a special very romantic Christmas conversation on all things romance, Regency, and Austen - with debut author Felicity George on her romance writing and her new book A Lady’s Risk - all coming up!
Stay in touch - you can find us on Twitter at @AustenConnect and on Insta at @austenconnection - and you can also just hit Reply right here to talk to us, or comment for the group here!
"It's about us" == so insightful and so fun to read, all of this. You are exactly right, our projections on to celebrities say so much about us that we can miss. I always followed Diana even as I derided myself for doing so -- she seemed so layered and so very human yet she glittered.
Thinking of Diana as an Austen character is interesting. Every time I read one of your essays I realize how much I have missed in Austen's books.
This one sucked me in and wouldn’t let me go.