With the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death approaching rapidly, brace yourselves for the next wave of Dianamania—Tina Brown’s recent Diana Chronicles is merely the most high-profile of at least 14 new Diana titles this year. But while Diana’s character flaws or the conspiracy theories surrounding her death continue to enthrall some, perhaps the most interesting question is not about the woman herself, but about the public reaction to her death and what it told us about modern Britain.
For the August issue of Prospect, Andrew Marr and Joan Smith debate whether the “Diana moment” was a change for the better. Yes, says Marr: Diana’s death turned Britain into an emotionally healthier country. No, says Smith: it was the first example of the trend of turning private grief into public spectacle.
Click here to read the debate, and let us know your thoughts on the meaning of the “Diana moment” below.
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[...] With the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death approaching rapidly, brace yourselves for the next wave of Dianamania—Tina Brown’s recent Diana Chronicles is merely the most high-profile of at least 14 new Diana titles this year. … …more [...]
The aftermath of Diana’s death began to remind me of Soviet times: everyone pretending to mourn Stalin. People saying hesitantly ’she wasn’t a saint’ in puzzlement rather than scorn. Apart from a woman I met in a lavatory near Kensington Gardens, who had jumped on a bus from Bristol in distress, I met no-one who felt personally distressed by her death.
Gore Vidal observed at the time that the reaction was a sign of the unhappiness of the people of England ‘ ‘they didn’t know this girl’. She attracted narcissistic identification – suburban housewives thought she was just like them, which of course she wasn’t, except in her expectation that marriage was the route to becoming. She was 36 when she died, yet still referred to as a girl.
To the extent that she encouraged about half the population to fall in love with their own finer feelings, we are now stuck with a population where people think that the fact that they feel something automatically makes both themselves and the object of their affections important.
I don’t think it was just about grief either.
I remember people interviewed in the condolence book queue saying ‘we want to be part of history’. In other words, it was a self-promoting snowball effect where, once the mourning reached a certain ‘historic’ magnitude, people wanted to join in, just to be part of the ‘history’.
I also think this had an unrecognised impact on later public manifestations like the Countryside Alliance and Anti-War marches – each of them the largets ever, with one surpassing the other. As soon as these marches were predicted to reach records sizes, even more people joined, just to ’say we were there’.
Tina Brown got it when she said, during the funeral parade, ‘nothing speaks of Diana’s alienation more eloquently than the fact that she was in Paris on the eve of la rentree’. At first it sounded ludicrous, but then I realised she was right. Diana belonged to a different world where one had to be seen in a specific place at a specific time (if it’s August it has to be St Tropez), and while excluded from the correct set, she also had nothing in common with the people who mourned her, or said they did.
This seemed clear when within one or two years, noone turned up for the anniversary events or even talked about her much any more. Even the recent concert was met with as much bemusement as anything else.
When I heard that Diana had been killed I was genuinely shocked and upset. I hadn’t met her; had no desire to meet her; have not read any biographies about her or watched her famous Martin Bashir interview. However, I felt that a good woman had died in tragic circumstances and that made me sad.
Perhaps the communal grief was a bit mawkish and unusual for us Brits but I don’t think we can simply explain it away by saying that people were self promoting or false. Unlike Jacqueline I know several people who were upset by Diana’s death and unlike D Jones I know of several people who had no intention of becoming ‘part of history’ when they signed condolence books or went to London for the funeral – they just wanted to pay their respects to someone who they felt was a good woman.
As for the suggestions that Diana wasn’t ‘one of us’ – of course she wasn’t and that’s partly why so many people liked her (or the image of her). However, her willingness to share some of her bleaker moments and her struggles perhaps made us feel that she was more ‘normal’ than some of the other members of the aristocracy or royalty. I can’t imagine how awful it must be to be followed everywhere by photographers, to live your life in the spotlight 24/7. And who is the ‘us’ that she was supposed to be like? Try to define the common ‘us’ and I’m sure we’d all describe something different.
When I read Andrew Marr/Joan Smith debate I thought both made really good points. However, I couldn’t help wondering why Joan Smith was so angry about the issue. Perhaps we all have our ‘Diana moment’ – for some it was moving and sad, for others it was an irritation or a small moment of distraction. Whatever the ‘Diana moment’ was (or wasn’t!) for each of us let’s stop trying to make them all the same or judge others as being wrong or false if they don’t match ours.
I found this article interesting in that neither Andrew Marr nor Joan Smith really took to task the launching point for the debate: Diana as a mediated shared experience. They both concerned themselves with the resulting emotional display, and whether this was a good or bad thing for Britain. The reaction could be seen as a symptom of the contemporary sense of lost community. Many of us in our mid twenties to early forties don’t really know our neighbours, yet will hug a stranger to share our sufferings and concern about a news story. And therein lies the rub.
The experience is no longer shared, but our opinions of the experience. Through chat shows, radio phone-ins, reality TV, blogging, and the rise of ‘amateur expertise’ we find a myriad places now where people will share their opinions about what’s going on in the world, without actually having to experience it. It’s not a community such as might have been found in war time (where, for example, both you and I had to deal with the everyday reality of war). Rather, our ’shared experience’ is the one we share by reading it on the same website, or watching the same 24-hour news channel.
We now live in a community where the experience is mediated in some way, that we then opine about (so, for example, the latest Big Brother eviction, George Bush as president of the USA, Tsunamis in the far east).
The legacy of Diana will be as the mother of one of the Kings of England. The legacy of the ‘Diana moment’: the moment of her death, the emotional outpouring, the scorn, and the everyday suffering was, I believe, the first real crystallisation of the mediated shared experience, where people’s cathartic reactions and emotional outpouring were shared and understood by each other. Years ago, in Ireland, we would have been told to ‘cop on’ (pull yourself together).
I remember a conversation I had with two close (male) gay friends of some public repute at the time of the Sarah Ferguson “toe sucking” incident. They were relishing the story in a manner that was almost prurient to the extent that I began to feel uncomfortable. I raised the “invasion of privacy” aspect, pointing out that Ferguson was separated from her husband, on a private holiday with her children, and the (male) photographer concerned had stalked her, spied on her and photographed her from a long distance. I asked them how they would like it? What had amazed me was that in all the public hooha about the story, nobody had raised this issue, let alone demand the photographer should be prosecuted, and nobody was even asking where it would all end.
My friends poured scorn on me. It quickly transpired that they loathed Ferguson because she was overweight and unstylish unlike the beautiful, photogenic and style icon Diana. Apparently this was relevant to the issue. The conversation descended into a vigorous argument which ended with me saying “Fine. Enjoy the persecution of this woman, but it will end in a place you won’t like.” They didn’t have a clue what I was talking about but they were to find out a few years later.
In my mind the seemingly irrational outpouring of grief over Diana’s death at the hands of the public-driven media was not irrational at all – all those who participated knew, if only sub consciously, the blood was on their own hands. That includes Mr Marr.
In my mind the seemingly irrational outpouring of grief over Diana’s death at the hands of the public-driven media was not irrational at all – all those who participated knew, if only sub consciously, the blood was on their own hands. That includes Mr Marr.
powerful stuff this. I tend to agree…