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
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
its possible to have a grownup conversation with someone who wasnt
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 Mary 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 princesss sons remember her for the TV cameras, and we

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 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 cameras 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 doesnt make you a free spirit.
Rolling your eyes and shrugging doesnt prove you are brave. And
because people say trust me, it doesnt means theyll 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 cant 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

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 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
Dianas 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 farmers
daughter, Diana married the boy across the hedge she grew up near
the queens estate at Sandringham. As the third daughter born to
Viscount Althorp, she was perhaps a disappointment. The familys
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 Dianas 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

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 downstairs.

Lady Diana Spencer, November 1980 Photograph: Alan Davidson/Silverhub/REX/Shutterstock

Dianas 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 didnt 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 peoples 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

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 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 someones 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 Dianas 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 fte. 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. Dianas 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

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 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 Charless 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 didnt even move
house. But Dianas experience as daughter of a landed family did not
prepare her for Buckingham Palace, any more than Schnbrunn
prepared the teenage Marie Antoinette for Versailles. It was Dianas
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

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 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 womens 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 childs 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 nations 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.

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 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 ones 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.

Prince Charles and Princess Diana, 18 November 1983 Photograph: Manchester Daily Express/SSPL via
Getty Images

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 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, theyre 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

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 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 public life, 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. Its 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.

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 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 Dianas 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 dont 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.

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 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 wouldnt 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.

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 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 doubts and 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 didnt
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

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 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
Wyatts 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 wont be

doing this again. We wont 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.

Illustration by Marc Aspinall

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