How to mourn a princess? I gazed at the newspapers piled on my desk this week and wondered how much more I could take: The same pictures for the umpteenth time; the same stories told; the same clips ceaselessly on radio and television. Was a body so exploited in life now to be exploited in death like that of a medieval saint?
The wax effigies at Stuart funerals or the extravagant rituals of the Victorians descended into bathos. How quickly does public mourning cease to be the collective expression of private emotion, and become mere show business?
When the famous die young, we are shocked as well as saddened. Some dislocation of our lives is respectful. Thus events were canceled, government meetings stopped, newspapers turned into magazines.
Those who control the conduits of state sadness can easily become heady on the project. They nationalize grief and make it totalitarian. In doing so, they risk diluting it.
Yet the public reaction to Diana’s death shown on the streets of London is extraordinary. I noticed that the crowds outside Buckingham and St. James’ Palaces were mostly of young people. These were not queues of pious, middle-aged royalists. Those most moved by her death appear to be partly those whose causes she befriended. Others form a wider, indeed worldwide, constituency, summed up by an East London girl who said simply, “She was always trying to get across to people like us.”
Diana managed to break through the carapace of fame. A rare talent in a public figure, she could both give sympathy and receive it in return. Only in her death are we made aware of this.
The key to the reaction we have witnessed this week lies not in her patronage of particular causes. Their beneficiaries will rightly testify to her generosity. But such patronage by the rich and famous is easily bestowed and easily withdrawn. Diana’s appeal lay–and clearly still lies–in the role model that her brief life offered to a certain sort of young person.
It is this appeal that makes the scale and form of her commemoration so difficult to judge.
When she emerged from late puberty and married the prince of Wales, she was a cardboard cutout princess. The early Diana was adored by the conventional and by a small circle of West London society. There was glamor but no heartwarming personality.
The bond with a new public was forged from the wreckage of her marriage. It was the antithesis of the image projected by royal publicists. Diana suddenly was transformed into the paradigm unhappy woman of today.
Her illnesses, her turbulent emotions, her infidelities, her fascination with publicity, fame, health and shopping struck a chord with people from all walks of life–men as well as women. She won no sympathy as the object of every girlish fantasy. She won it by acting out every girlish worry. Here was the most beautiful and successful person, allegedly in the whole world, crippled by male cruelty and rendered as vulnerable as the ugliest.
The more reckless Diana became with her happiness, the more she acquired the aura of patron saint. She tore at her scar tissue. She bared her feelings to the cameras and enraged the respectable. I can count dozens of women who cheered her on. Hers was the classic cult of psychological transference.
She was a spokeswoman for those with impossible husbands, worried about their appearance, wrestling with divorce, careers, children, trying to match impossible expectations.
All the while, she was searching for love and security. She could get away with a speech in which she pleaded for those who “just want a hug.”
Even those who found Diana an ambiguous personality recognized her ability to project across the barrier that has long surrounded British public figures. She seemed (in a twist for a Spencer) not of the Establishment. When her marriage ended, I think many “royalists” felt she had crossed a pale and was gone. To them, she was a spoiled rich girl who had broken the rules. She became a constitutional outcast.
Yet Diana contrived to parade her emotional turmoil–in interviews and on yachts moored off St. Tropez–without ever losing her dignity. These were not regal performances. They were the self-exposure of a modern woman with panache and a unique access to publicity. For the daughter of an earl, the wife of a prince and the lover of a playboy, this was no mean achievement.
Royal charities normally come to order. Diana’s charity was the sorority of the emotionally dispossessed. A book out later this month by the psychologist Oliver James, “Britain on the Couch” (Century), analyzes precisely the syndrome of which this woman was so potent a symbol.
“Why are we unhappier than we were in the 1950s,” he asks, “despite being richer?” Surveys now show clinical depression as ten times higher among people born after 1945 than among those born before 1914. A generation that is the most comfortable in history also is the most depressed. Women under 35 especially are at risk.
Modern life, says James, seems less and less able to meet our expectations. “It makes us feel like losers,” he writes, “even if we are winners.”
On this evidence, the new anguish of middle-class Britain (and Europe and America) is a realization that conventional “success” is worse than there being no road to happiness. It can so depress the serotonin levels in the brain as to be a direct path to misery. As James ranges from one case history to another, we are left with a bleak conclusion. The 1960s were right. The fragmenting of communities, the pressure of free-market employment, the incentive to short-term material gratification have indeed led to loneliness and depression. The more we expect of prosperity, the less it seems able to deliver.
In reaction, millions now turn restlessly from one therapy to another, from drugs to analysis to violent exercise, even to witchcraft. Diana became patron of many of these therapies. The young seek role models not among the contented but among those before whom the world has dangled every pleasure and yet snatched it away: the much-married actress, the self-abusing rock star, the duchess of York and the queen of them all, Diana, Princess of Wales.
People seem to take comfort in watching the famous find life as hard as they do themselves. Diana was news when happy. She was bigger news when unhappy. The word used time and again by those queuing at St. James’ was that she represented “comfort.”
How can a nation collectively mourn a symbol of such personal and often-conflicting emotions? The government was right to encourage a public rather than a private funeral. Diana was surely the most public of modern Britons, to her occasional delight but final tragedy.
Yet she had no part in the rituals of royalty. Her coffin surely has no place on a gun carriage or with military escort, nor passing along such pompous avenues of nationhood as the Horse Guards, Whitehall and Parliament Square. Surely a longer and less ritualistic route could have been chosen.
Perhaps those who wish to commemorate this brief, extraordinary life will do so in the privacy of personal comparison. They will treasure what happiness they possess in reflecting on how little she enjoyed. She was Tennyson’s “linnet born within the cage/ That never saw the summer woods.”
Memory is always the best memorial.
