humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare

The Goddess of Domestic Tribulations

By Theodore Dalrymple

Autumn 1997

http://www.city-journal.org/html/7_4_oh_to_be.html

I first learned of the death of Princess Diana on Sunday morning at
the prison. The flag was at half-mast, and I asked a prison officer
why.

"Haven't you heard?" he replied. "Diana's dead--killed in a car crash
in Paris while being chased by paparazzi."

I felt a moment of sorrow for a young life so needlessly and
pointlessly ended, but duty called. A hunger-striking prisoner was
close to death: he was protesting what he considered the injustice of
the security precautions taken in his case, though the last time they
were relaxed he had tried to escape by blowing up the Black Maria
carrying him to court. Another prisoner had tried to hang himself. A
new recruit to prison culture, as anthropologists would call it, he
made the mistake of reporting the theft of his radio to the officers,
who had recovered it for him. But he was thenceforth known as a grass,
an informer, the only form of prison life lower than a nonce, or sex
offender; and he thought he had better hang himself at once, before
the other prisoners did it for him. And then there was a prisoner to
attend to who had slashed his forearm some days before and had refused
the operation necessary to stitch him up. He was now busily stuffing
tissue paper and broken bits of plastic spoon deep into the wound.

In short, everything was proceeding much as normal in the prison,
despite the death of Diana. It was only much later that I realized
that a mass hysteria had been unleashed that makes the death of Little
Nell look like a detached clinical report.

While Diana was being killed in the Paris tunnel, the presses of the
Observer newspaper, the Sunday journal of Britain's liberal
intelligentsia, were printing the following item in a satirical column
entitled MRS. BLAIR'S DIARY: "It always amazes me that the press picks
up on [what Diana says] as if it were compelling genius insight of
Aristotelian wisdom and Shavian wit, as opposed to the twitterings of
a woman who, if her IQ were five points lower, would have to be
watered daily." So proud was the newspaper of this delicious shaft of
satire that it headlined the entire column: IF HER IQ WERE ANY LOWER,
SHE'D NEED DAILY WATERING. Elsewhere in the newspaper, a picture of
Diana bore the caption: "Woodentop."

This crudely satirical tone could not survive the tragic events of the
day, of course. But if civilized convention demands that one should
not speak ill of the (recently) dead, it surely does not demand either
that one eulogize them to excess. Nevertheless, the Guardian--owned,
edited, written, and read by the same people as the Observer--soon
began to write of the late Princess in the most nauseatingly fulsome
fashion. Among other miracles, the paper credited her with a
beneficial revolution in our manners: on the Tuesday following her
death, for example, two commentators in the Guardian, one of them a
professor of politics at Oxford University, asserted that she both
created and reflected a more compassionate Britain after the heartless
years of Thatcherite selfishness. She also changed us from a nation of
people who keep our feelings bottled up inside into one of frank and
openhearted self-revelation--a change all for the better, of course.

"She preached a doctrine of hugs, warmth and confession," wrote one of
the commentators approvingly, "a revolutionary doctrine whose enemy
was the frigidity of our habitual reserve." That the loss of reserve
might entail other losses--depth, for example--was a thought not to be
entertained at such a moment.

What accounted for this sudden shift from cruel personal abuse to
absurdly exaggerated respect? Princess Diana was useful both alive and
dead to British liberals, who habitually measure their own moral
standing and worth by their degree of theoretical hatred for and
opposition to whatever exists. Diana was useful because she was both
an insider and an outsider, who could be represented either as a
symbol of the establishment or as an enemy of it. Spurned as she was
by the royal family, she remained an aristocrat who led an extremely
privileged life.

Alive, she was handy proof that people of no particular merit or
intelligence had undue social prominence in this country, which
necessitated radical reforms as demanded by the liberal
intelligentsia; dead, she was equally useful to demonstrate that the
rottenness of our institutions (such as the monarchy) had destroyed a
splendid woman for whom the establishment could find no place.
Solution: more radical reform, as demanded by the liberal
intelligentsia.

What is more certain than that the sun will rise tomorrow is that once
Diana, having undergone temporary secular canonization, has served her
turn to inflict whatever damage can be inflicted upon our
institutions, the Observer and the Guardian will debunk her, in order
to establish their credentials as journals of fierce independent-
mindedness. They will reveal her as a hysterical, self-serving,
scheming, and manipulative minx. The wheel will have made its
revolution.

As for the gutter press--the one field of production in which Britain
undoubtedly still leads the world, and a faithful reflection of the
cultural and educational level of the population as a whole--it
momentarily lost its swagger at the suggestion that the photographers
it routinely showered with money to snap the prin-cess from every
conceivable angle had been responsible for her untimely demise. It
even shrank from publishing the photographs of Diana in the crash.

But when it was established that the driver of Diana's car was drunk,
and that he had been going absurdly fast through the tunnel, the
gutter press regained its confidence and immediately mounted a
campaign to force the queen to express her grief in public and to fly
the national flag at half-mast over the royal palace, though this was
against the custom and usage of centuries. The combined circulation of
these newspapers is 12 million, and perhaps half the population of the
country reads one or the other of them; so the queen bowed to what
must have seemed like popular pressure, though it was in fact the
simulated rage of a handful of editors who were conducting a struggle
to maintain circulation at a difficult time. No one stopped to think
that the tradition of not flying the flag at half-mast over the palace
was a symbolic representation of the idea that, while individuals come
and go, the institution survives them and is more important than they;
or that, by demanding that the queen express grief in public, the
newspapers were demanding either that she express an emotion she did
not feel, or that she should not be allowed to grieve in private.
Either way was to trivialize and cheapen the emotion.

But the queen outwitted the editors. In her television address to the
nation, which they had demanded, she managed to avoid what would have
been patently dishonest avowals of affection for her ex-daughter-in-
law, while avowing admiration for such qualities as her energy--a
distinctly double-edged quality in someone of whose activities one
does not entirely approve.

The new prime minister, Anthony Blair, exactly caught (indeed, in
part, created) the mood of the nation when he called Diana "the
people's princess." The appellation instantly became universal, and
made it doubly difficult to express reservations about the adulation
being offered her memory or to cast doubt on the historical importance
ascribed to her life and her unfortunate death. Because she was the
people's princess, such reservations branded one an antidemocratic
elitist, opposed to the people. A name once conferred and accepted can
stand in the way of proper thought.

But did the people's princess have anything more in common with the
people than the People's Democratic Republic of Korea has in common
with either democracy or the Korean people? Yes and no: she was
undoubtedly a popular figure, though her life was as remote from that
of the people as that of an anchorite who lives in a desert cave.

Her popularity rested upon both her extreme difference from common
people and her similarity to them. She was aristocratic, rich, and
glamorous. Born to the purple, she married a prince: her life had a
fairy-tale quality to it, acknowledged throughout the world. How well
I remember watching her wedding on Peruvian television, which billed
it as La Boda del Siglo, the Wedding of the Century. I little thought--
no one then imagined--that it would end as Los Funerales del Siglo, the
first truly global funeral.

In her, the mystique of royalty to which Bagehot referred in The
English Constitution was replaced by the mystique of celebrity: and
while the former mystique depended upon concealment, the latter
depends upon revelation, usually of the most vulgar, prurient, trite,
and debased variety. The cult of royalty, while the mystique lasted,
suggested to those who followed it that there was a plane of existence
that transcended the everyday world, and that there existed something
greater and more important than themselves; whereas the cult of
celebrity is but a disguised worship of our own, generally
uncultivated, tastes and desires. Quiet reverence for the unseen has
become noisy tittle-tattle about the ubiquitous, which has resulted in
a vicious spiral of ever-coarsening public appetites, because tittle-
tattle must be ever more salacious to satisfy us.

If Diana's life was inaccessible to the commonalty, and therefore the
stuff of dreams, it was highly accessible also. Her prince turned out
to be not so charming, at least to her. His heart was set on another,
even as he walked down the aisle. She had been selected for marriage
in much the same way as a horse breeder selects a horse, and for much
the same reasons: the blood line must go on. Her teeth were good, and
she was fertile. Moreover, the family into which she married,
interesting only by virtue of its position, was not at all normal.
Difficulties ensued.

Diana therefore had a constituency of all those who have been unhappy
in their marriages, whose husbands or wives have deserted or betrayed
them, who have had contre-temps with their mothers-in-law, who have
suffered humiliation at the hands of others: that is to say, a very
high percentage of the human race. Her problems were those that might
afflict any ordinary person, especially any ordinary woman, and
therefore ordinary people were able to identify with her easily. She
was the goddess of domestic tribulations.

When she revealed that she suffered from bulimia, she sealed her
universal popularity. In an age when strength of character consists of
being able to flaunt one's weaknesses to the prurient gaze of millions
of idle onlookers, nothing could establish her bona fides better than
her confession that she induced herself to vomit after eating too
much: just like a thousand or a million salesclerks anxious about
their weight. She is one of us: an alcoholic, a drug addict, a sexual
pervert, a kleptomaniac, an agoraphobic, an anorexic, or one of the
thousand natural diagnoses of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
the American Psychiatric Association (Fourth Edition) that flesh is
heir to.

So universally accepted has the pathologico-therapeutic approach to
life become, that the apostolic heir to St. Augus-tine--that is to say,
the present Archbishop of Canterbury--offered up thanks to God at the
funeral service for Princess Diana's vulnerability, as if an
appointment with a psychiatrist were man's highest possible moral and
cultural aspiration. Of course, prelates of the Church of England
today have backbones of marshmallow; but still it seems to me absurd
to offer up thanks to the Author of the Universe for a princess's
shortcomings.

The other quality that made Diana the people's princess was, of
course, the extreme banality of her tastes and pleasures. As she
herself was the first to admit, she was not clever, at least in the
intellectual sense, though she clearly had intuition. Apart from dress
sense, she had the cheapest taste: in other words, she was not at all
threatening to the man and woman in the street, who knew that she
liked what they liked and that much of her life was lived as they
would live, were they to win the lottery. Even her sympathy with the
poor and wretched of the earth was such as the average man or woman
feels from time to time. In this respect, her similarity to Eva Per=F3n,
who embraced the conspicuously afflicted before the flashbulbs of
photographers, is very striking, as is the similarity of the aura of
sanctity that the public, quite incongruously, conferred upon "Evita"
after her equally untimely death.

That her tastes were, despite her privileged upbringing, utterly banal
and plebeian appeared very clearly at the funeral, where Elton John
sang his bathetic dirge immediately after the prime minister read
Saint Paul's magnificent words in Corinthians. It was highly
appropriate (and symbolic) that this lugubrious booby, with his
implanted wig, should sing a recycled version of a song initially
dedicated to the memory of Marilyn Monroe--a celebrity who at least had
had to make her own way in the world, and who also made a few films
worthy of commemoration. "Good-bye, England's rose," he intoned in a
mid-Atlantic accent that spoke volumes for the loss of Britain's
cultural confidence, "from a country lost without your soul."

You can say that again. In the orgy of sentimentality into which much
of the country sank after Diana's death, and which reminds me of the
hot bath into which I gratefully sink after a hard day at the
hospital, one thing has become evident: that the British, under the
influence of the media of mass communication, which demand that
everyone wear his emotion or pseudo-emotion on his sleeve, have lost
their only admirable qualities--stoicism, self-deprecation, and a sense
of irony--and have gained only those worthy of contempt. They have
exchanged depth for shallowness, and have thought they got the better
of the bargain. They are like people who imagine that the answer to
constipation is diarrhea.

TO SPEAK OF EMOTION CONVEYS SINCERITY, the headline in the Guardian
graphically put it; and that is why the vast crowds outside
Westminster Abbey widely applauded the Earl Spencer's address at the
funeral, despite its obvious and grotesque dishonesty. That a speech
can be heartfelt and mendacious at the same time is a thought too
subtle for people reared on mass media culture. Not only had the great
defender of Diana's children provided a less than stable home
environment for his own four children and implied (more or less) that
the Princes William and Harry were born by parthenogenesis, without
any contribution by Prince Charles, but in castigating the odious
tabloid newspapers he omitted to mention that they were pandering to
the degraded tastes of the general public, 2 million of whom were
gathered outside the abbey, mourning the fact that there would be no
more photographs of Diana in bikinis, kissing the latest of her
celebrity lovers. Indeed, the Earl Spencer (all too predictably dubbed
"the people's earl") omitted to mention that Diana's fame was largely
the creation of that odious press that he had excluded from the
funeral, that the millions of mourners were in effect mourning the
loss of a character from a soap opera, and that her own symbiotic
relations with the reptile press were very far from straightforwardly
adversarial. The good earl was like the anti-Semite of old, who blamed
the Jews for the existence of usury.

He was hardly the only person who missed the connection between the
demand for intrusions on privacy and the supply thereof in an age of
celebrity. A patient of mine attempted suicide with tablets on the day
of the funeral, feeling it incumbent upon him to express his loyalty
to Princess Diana. He was a lonely man in his fifties, living on his
own, who had made something of a cult of the princess. He told me he
cut out and collected pictures of her. I asked him where he found the
pictures that he collected.

"The Sun," he replied.

The Sun, needless to say, is one of those tabloids that have been most
ruthless in procuring pictures of Diana, one of those tabloids that
the earl held responsible for the death of his sister. But the irony
was as entirely lost on my poor patient as it was on the earl.

Diana has already wrought the first of her miracles. A
multimillionaire alcoholic patient has for many years insisted upon
driving while drunk, but the accident in the Paris tunnel has caused
him to forswear his drunken driving, where doctors, courts, friends,
and relatives had previously produced no effect at all. Only two more
miracles to go!

Conspiracy theories abound, of course, and they are already affecting
patients. A French television channel, for example, has put it about
that the royal family had Diana killed to save the embarrassment of
having her marry a Muslim, a theory that will no doubt gain credence,
especially as many suspect that her selection as a lover of the son of
a man with whom the British government has been in acrimonious dispute
for many years was not entirely coincidental. Many already believe she
was assassinated, even without the publication of spurious
"investigative" books, and when a patient of mine told me that her
husband had better return to the paths of marital fidelity "or else,"
and I asked what the "or else" signified, she said darkly, "A road
tunnel in Paris."

So not quite everyone has grown sentimental about the death of Diana,
and even the funeral itself afforded one or two light moments. The
commentator on one of the television channels, for example, made the
Freudian slip of all time when, as Princess Diana's cortege was
passing the Banqueting House, he noted that the magnificent building
was the last surviving part of Westminster Palace, "on the steps of
which," he added, "Prince Charles was executed." The declining remnant
of the population that knows that England once had a King Charles who
was beheaded fell about laughing at this conclusive proof that, after
all, Freud knew what he was talking about.

But there were genuinely moving moments too, as when the 97-year-old
Queen Mother climbed the steps of the abbey and walked down the aisle
unaided, thanks to a hip-replacement operation performed when she was
95. I couldn't help recalling, however, that one of the surgeons who
performed this astonishing technical feat had taken a month's leave
from his hospital and returned as a woman, having previously been a
man. What else can one expect in an age when it has been suggested (by
the serious newspapers) that the royal family's insistence on the
children of Charles and Diana behaving with dignity in public is a
form of child abuse perpetrated by pre-Freudian dinosaurs?

I was reminded that restraint and reserve were once not confined to
the upper reaches of the British aristocracy by another patient of
mine, who consulted me a few days after Diana's death. She was a 75-
year-old working-class woman of dignified mien, who had lived through
more than one tragedy in her life. Her brother died in a submarine
sunk during the war, and her sister-in-law was killed in an air raid,
leaving her the task of bringing up their orphaned child. Her own
husband had died comparatively young, and her first son had died of a
heart attack at the age of 42. ("He had just finished a game of
football, doctor, and was in the changing rooms. He fell on the floor,
and his mates thought he had slipped, and they told him to stop
messing about. He just looked up at them--smiled--and he was gone.")

The bitterest blow of all was the death of another son, recently
killed in an accident in which a heavy truck, carelessly driven,
crushed his car. He was 50. She brought me his photo, her hand
trembling slightly as she gave it to me. He was a successful
businessman who had devoted his spare time to raising money for the
Children's Hospital and to producing programs for its own radio
station.

"It doesn't seem right, somehow," she said, "that he should have gone
before me."

Did she still cry?

"Yes, doctor, but only when I'm on my own. It's not right, is it, to
let anyone see you. After all, life has to go on."

Could anyone have doubted either the depth of her feeling or of her
character? Could any decent person fail to have been moved by the self-
mastery she had achieved, the foundation of her dignity and her
strength? Yet her fortitude is precisely the virtue that the acolytes
of the hug-and-confess culture wish to extirpate from the British
national character as obsolete, in favor of a banal, self-pitying,
witless, and shallow emotional incontinence, of which the hysteria at
the princess's death was so florid an example.