Dolls are meant to be played with, then put aside
So, Princess Kate is missing. I did not intend to turn this into a British royalty blog but here we are. (The other topic I was going to write about was a woman’s actual confirmed obituary, so even if Princess Kate turns out to have been buried underneath the Tower of London this one will be cheerier.)
What spurred me into writing about what everybody else is writing about was of all things a column by Zoe Williams. The general message is that something nasty has happened to the prince and the princess, and they should be left alone to deal with it without speculation. Despite all of Williams’s pieties about inequality and the injustice of menial lives,1 she ultimately blames online trolls for everything and admonishes any curious lessers to shut the fuck up. This seems like perhaps it’s less borne out of a desire to protect the royals and more born out of bitterness that online trolls often write at the same level as established columnists (this isn’t necessarily a compliment to online trolls, but still). Barring apocalyptic nuclear war, print journalism will die out well before the royal family does, which is sad but it’s no reason to act as if MadameNoire1992 typing out “girls… Kate is DEAD” is a grievous breach of human ethics. Royal subjects have been gossiping about what they’ve been subject to since the institution started, which is the tradeoff for getting to be the one who has subjects in the first place.
Besides, are Will and Kate really trapped in that terrible a deal? As Williams even says, there has to be some purpose to royalty. A monarch and their family are supposed to serve as religious symbols and as figureheads for various imperial holdings. Without religion or empire, a royal is supposed to at least lend their support to various charitable causes. And if they can’t do that, they have to at least be nice.
William and Kate are supposed to at least be nice. One of the reasons that Charles and Diana’s marriage failed was that the selection criteria were blindingly archaic; the bride had to be a bona fide virgin and therefore very young, and she also had to be of the correct kind of aristocratic family. By marrying an “older woman” (over 20) with a non-aristocratic background, William was supposed to have laid the foundations for a long-lasting marriage. Even the breakups were signs that this was a modern, healthy relationship between two equally educated young people with basically suitable temperaments, not the binding into marriage of a teenager to a repulsive older man.
Now that even with all these precautions, the marriage has possibly gone sour (or ended in mysterious death!), the narrative has changed; William just couldn’t find anyone of his own age in his own class to marry him. Feminism and the anointing of capitalism as the natural order have affected the aristocratic families of Britain just as they have the rest of the world; girls who once would have been expected to grow into well-off wives and mothers are now expected to act upon the world in their own right. The kind of woman who might have been thrown in William’s way in the past can now go into business without shame, access a world-class education without debt, create art without suffering poverty, and generally trade on the glamour and riches of her name to attract whomever and whatever she likes. Even if she wants to live as a traditionally wedded socialite, she can do so with a man who isn’t going to use her as a very public broodmare. Who would give all that up to enter the royal cage?2
Enter Kate Middleton. In the essay that’s probably going to define Kate for life, Hilary Mantel described her as a woman who “appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished.” A middle-class (in the American sense) woman whose greatest and only possible ambition was to get married, get pregnant, and stop there.
The problem is that it’s not enough to be a womb any more, it’s not enough to be a jointed doll. You need to be able to sell the clothes that they’re hanging on your wooden limbs. You’re supposed to show hustle, for god’s sake. Kate’s marriage now devalues her; she’s only there because true queens—in both the bloodline and in the X-the-app-formerly-known-as-Twitter sense—had better things to do.
I have no idea whether Kate Middleton is sick, divorcing, dead, or alive. However, while I hate to step on the toes of Hillary Mantel of all people, we plebs can’t write a happy ending for this couple. Gossiping about the royals may not be the most edifying way to spend your limited time on earth, but in this case the couple isn’t held hostage by some army of online trolls. Just as it was in the days of Henry VIII, the happy ending ultimately still relies on the whims of the husband, and whether he wants to stay in the marriage—and if not, what he’s willing to grant his former wife.
If there is some sort of breakup on the horizon, Kate can come to a better end than her predecessors, in that the couple presumably can divorce without the lady losing her life. (In this light, the “ghoulish” online queries over Kate’s death aren’t trolling but natural recognition that royal splitups have often ended fatally.) But even a modern divorce in which the parties “grow apart” isn’t the swelling-strings-and-rose-petals point where the fairy tale is supposed to end.
Maybe this really is the end of the Cinderella myth—the idea that even a poor (well, comparatively poor) girl, with enough beauty and loyalty, can charm her way into the heart (or at least the money) of a prince. Now, as Kate possibly has proven, being beautiful and sticking to one man’s bed is no longer enough, you have to demonstrate that you’re valuable to more people than a mere prince to deserve the prince in the first place.
Put another way, even Disney princesses have jobs now.
Williams seems to think that the most pressing desire that any human could have is to have their life story known by strangers, and that royalty’s greatest sin is that takes away attention that otherwise would have been more equally bestowed. I imagine that had she been given the choice, the royal maid that Williams eulogizes would have happily been anonymous for all time for a chance at the jewels, dresses, banquets, and all the other comforts of her mistresses and masters—or at least for a chance at work that didn’t involve a bucket and a mop.
This is one of my few brushes with firsthand gossip but I used to hang out with a woman who said that her family was in the same circles as royalty, and she talked about them as if they were bringing down the Anglo-Saxon race with their stupidity. I have no way to know if she was speaking from experience or if she was pulling a trick on a naive American, but taking her at her word there was no reason why anyone would give up a lifestyle that allowed every personal freedom possible to marry into this particular bunch of lowbrow nuts. I think she ended up going off to arrange nature trips in one or another naturally beautiful former British colony, which, again, if you have the run of an entire former imperial domain, why constrain yourself to a drafty palace? The whole thing is such a con!