Danusha V. Goska

"She Was One of Us"
Princess Diana, Her Public, Misogyny, and The Press
The Bloomington Voice; The Weekly Newspaper of South Central Indiana
VI: 38 (September 18, 1997): 6-7.

At first, incomprehension did not attempt to wear the mask of superior expertise. Simple bafflement covered Larry King's face. "What is it about this woman?" he demanded of his guest, not a Diana fan, but a psychiatrist. As of three days after the funeral, the New York Times had run no fewer than three editorials explaining that Princess Diana was a media fabrication, her mourners empty souls seeking an unattainable self fulfillment through tabloids. The story was "piffle" best explained by the likes of "Freud and Krafft Ebing." Diana was a "shallow" bulimic self mutilator who was responsible for her own fate. Television's Bill Maher jeered "How can these poor, toothless old women slobber, 'She was one of us?' Diana was nothing like them." Newsweek's George Will portrayed himself as the true tragic victim of the week's "fake," "revolting," "degrading" events, the last sane man in a world gone mad. It was, he told us, just like the Nazi Nuremberg Rally.

Celebrity worship is nothing new. Male social life has always been organized around pecking orders compelling fealty to some icon, from an anthropomorphized Sky Father to Patton, Einstein to Mick Jagger, Michael Jordan to Steve Jobs. The ability to feel empathy with people never met, indeed with fictional heroes like Hamlet or Odysseus, has long been used by the elite as evidence of their superiority. A recent Sunday Times magazine cover story lauded a professor's deep and weepy "love" for Herman Melville. No psychiatrist was called to explain this man; rather, he's been given tenure and prestige for his celebrity obsession.

Diana was not new and difficult because she was a fabricated celebrity; she was new and difficult because she was a woman, and fuckable. The media week after Diana's death was remarkable for one thing: perhaps never since the invention of movable type had the image of a woman so dominated the news. A PR man writing to the Times, an agent speaking on NBC, pointed out that they could never manufacture a fraction of the devotion Diana inspired. "I know rock stars who would kill for this adulation," the agent said. And, indeed, women, the poor, gay men, the young, Asians, Africans, kept repeating, "She was one of us." Rather than confront the discomfort this caused, pundits scrambled for theories.

To Maher's eyes, to many, the only important quality in a woman, her physical appearance, separated Diana from us. Her heart did not, and we saw. Every woman, no matter her class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or age, is told the same lies: be younger, be prettier, be thinner, be more virginal, more helpless in the ways of the world, blonder, richer, and you will be rewarded. None of us could ever be more young, more pretty, more anything than Diana. Yet, just like us, she was punished. Her prince, the most right of Mr. Rights, in the midst of preparations for their fairy-tale wedding, sent love tokens to his mistress. Her in-laws used her as a brood mare and then callously dismissed her. When all this broke her heart, and her broken heart showed, they labeled her crazy. They manipulated her beloved children to keep her in line. She succumbed to a charmer, who broadcast her intimate access to make himself look the big man. She sought relief in food and self-mutilation. It is a measure of misogyny's power that Diana's traumata are treated as comic. A hurt man who grabs a gun is a social issue; a hurt woman is, to many, a weirdo we'd do best to first laugh at and then ignore.

Like the rest of us who have lived through one or more of these challenges – and I know no woman, of any class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or age, who has not – Diana must have felt tempted to succumb. To act as crazy as they told her she was. To surrender to addiction. To become as embittered as she had a right to be. To betray her own heart and attempt to play the game by their rules.

She didn't. She became more beautiful; she became an even more powerful force in the nurturing of her children; her smile and eyes gained a sidereal radiance; her body, a disciplined strength, an athlete's stride. Through her own hero's journey, she transubstantiated hurt into love. 1987, the year Diana made history by shaking hands with AIDS patients, reporters first noted coldness between her and her husband. A kindergarten teacher, through a quirk of fate, stumbled on to the world stage, and never became a shark, never stopped leading from her heart.

On ABC's "This Week," Cokey Roberts protested that no eyewitness could dismiss the mourning as "fake." Sam Donaldson scoffed. "She was beautiful," he fumed, "and glamorous." Roberts was silenced. In their expressed contempt for female beauty, in their rebuke of their audiences for appreciating, even needing it, Donaldson, Will, The Washington Post's David Broder, and the rest echo such noteworthy social reformers as Torquemada, Reverend Dimmesdale, Ayatollah Khomeini and Pol Pot. Fits of hysterical laughter from women might be excused, here – suddenly to be lectured by men in the unimportance of female beauty. But I think the Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler fortunes are safe. Has everything gotten so politically correct now that we need to say this out loud? Men are in thrall to feminine beauty. Evidently, though, many are terrified by being asked to accord it any respect. And so, though any man condemning a flower or a painting for its beauty exposes himself as a lunatic, a man can condemn and belittle feminine beauty and yet hope to avoid detection for what he is – a misogynist.

Diana joked about her own academic weaknesses. In her beauty work, however, she showed a rare wit and wisdom. As any photo reveals, her nose was too big, her mouth too small; altogether she was too tall, and either too fat or too boney. If it were catalogues of features that moved us, our hero would be Michele Pfieffer, not Diana. Diana's beauty was her own creation, the result of very hard work and expert calculation. Women like Diana know that every selection of dress, of fabric, hemline, color, cut, conveys a message that the most methodically prepared doctoral thesis could never encapsulate, and does work that the best speech could not undo.

Many have chosen to browbeat Diana's fans with paternal comparisons to Mother Teresa. This is disingenuous in the extreme. Conflict is essential to story; story is essential to life. Mother Teresa's life: "Woman decides what she wants to do at 18, goes off and does it, uninterrupted and with increasing success for the next seventy years, dies with her faith unshaken in the God of her choice." Cause for a smile and a prayer, but not the roller coaster epic Diana's public life had been. No. The fault here is not in Diana's fans, but in the division of women into Madonnas or whores, never both, never anything in between.

In Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell wrote, "There is a word in Sanskrit, upadhi, which means 'disguise,' but also 'attribute,' The ultimate truth being without attributes, cannot be contemplated by the mind ... therefore 'attributes' or upadhis, are assigned to it; for example ... the property of being a face, and of being beautiful."

Beyond the upadhis of Diana, Princess, and Teresa, nun is the same beautiful face. Like every woman, Diana and Teresa had to come to terms with what to do with men's attraction, clothes, and the traditional female role of nurturer. Mother Teresa's choice to become a nun was informed by the wisdom of the female monastic tradition: what men fuck, or can fuck, they trivialize. A chaste woman encounters a respect that a mated woman will never know. Like Diana, who used her marriage to Charles, Teresa also used her status vis-a-vis men as an entree to wider service. Those very pundits who go on and on about how little beauty and attire matter, also go on and on about Teresa's garment: a white and blue cotton sari costing one dollar. They know, they cite, the fabric, its color, its cut, its cost. And yet they tell us how little clothing matters. Teresa was not fooled; exactly like Diana, she knew what clothing communicated, and she spoke that language, fluently and forcefully, just like Diana, to further her nurturing work.

The other word used to trivialize Diana is "emotion." Embarrassed newsmen tried to make it something else: "How much of this astounding outpouring over the death is really an expression of love for her? And how much represents something bigger?" asked NPR. They needed something bigger than love. As the pundits have so paternally reminded us, emotion is not news, is not an event of moment. As Robert McNamara, the man who brought us the Vietnam war, recently said, "I try to separate emotion from the larger issues of human welfare." If we want to understand world events, we must never ask how Yasser Arafat or Bill Clinton feels. According to the pundits, the unreeling of world history has nothing to do with a mother loving her children, a compassionate woman visiting the sick, a beautiful woman appearing in a place of despair to offer hope. An image gives this notion the lie. It is the image behind many beloved photographs of Diana and Teresa, both. It is the image of the Goddess, in the person of Mary or Green Tara, Isis or Gaia, the most clung to image in history.

Many centuries ago, Lao Tze wrote, "If there is to be peace in the world, there must be peace in the nation. If there is to be peace in the nation, there must be peace in the cities. If there is to be peace in the cities, there must be peace between neighbors. If there is to be peace between neighbors, there must be peace in the home. If there is to be peace in the home, there must be peace in the heart." In any of her upadhis, she is central: The Queen of Hearts.

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