By now, we in India are inured to news channels throwing the most controversial statements of the day in our faces ad nauseam, without context or perspective. The print journalist snob in me was under the illusion that newspapers adopted a more nuanced stand. Judging by some of the reactions to Hilary Mantel's "Royal Bodies", it appears not.
"Royal Bodies" was a speech Ms Mantel, the only woman to have won the Booker prize twice, gave as part of the London Review of Books' lecture series at the British Museum and which has since been published as an essay. If you were to go by many of the comments in the press about the speech, including a review carried in Business Standard, you might be forgiven for thinking that Ms Mantel had devoted her efforts to the sole purpose of ripping apart Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William's wife. The Guardian says, "Newspaper reports interpreted the remarks as a direct attack on the duchess. The Daily Mail called it a 'venomous attack on Kate', and the Sun said it was a 'bizarre rant'." All this brouhaha in the press seems to have compelled David Cameron to find time during his visit to India to term Ms Mantel's comments "misguided" and "completely wrong".
The reactions are disproportionate and, more importantly, misguided. Yes, Ms Mantel does refer to Ms Middleton as "a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore", that she had a "perfect plastic smile", and that she appeared "machine made". But even if one were to disagree with her views and dub the comments unfair and uncalled for (though I would advise you to read the essay before passing judgement), what is even more unfair is to reduce an intelligently argued, 5,600-word essay to a few phrases at the beginning, because those are the most "controversial" and thus likely to grab the most attention.
The essay, in fact, lays bare the voyeuristic, obsessive relationship the British public shares with its royalty (entirely one-sided, of course) and the position accorded to many royal women, who, Ms Mantel says, are reduced to "a royal vagina". Neither of the premises is novel, but the manner in which Ms Mantel skilfully elaborates her views - sharp, with a delicious wit - makes for compelling reading. In dissecting how the public treats its royals, Ms Mantel does not get on her high horse but turns the mirror inward; she admits that, when she once met the queen, she passed her eyes over her "as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones". Ms Mantel also talks about an awards function where Prince Charles was present. She realised that if royalty were to linger after public events they might "notice the oily devotion fade from the faces of your subjects," and "see their retreating backs as they turn up their collars and button their coats and walk away into real life". Apart from the lovely turn of phrase, all these incidents add up not to some kind of vitriolic antagonism towards monarchy but a sympathetic portrayal of it. Perhaps it's a hangover from the collective guilt England feels at being party to the death of Princess Diana, on whom significant parts of the essay dwell. Nor is Ms Middleton excluded from this sympathy - tongue in cheek, Ms Mantel remarks that in the first portrait of her, the duchess "wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to bugger off".
The other chunk of her essay talks about the reign of male heir-obsessed Henry VIII and his wives, mainly Anne Boleyn. Here, too, Ms Mantel discusses a range of issues, from citing recent research on possible reasons why it was difficult for him to conceive a male heir (lack of compatibility of blood groups between Henry and his wives), to why, in later life, he was portrayed as sullen and irrational (again, biological reasons), to Anne Boleyn, who might have been a power player but in the end, "it was her womb that was central to her story". She finally ties in her twin themes of royalty-watching and royal bodies in Henry VIII's third wife, Jane Seymour, who was neither pretty nor young, but on whom the focus on body parts is most acute. Ms Mantel says, "Along with the reverence and awe accorded to royal persons goes the conviction that the body of the monarch is public property. We are ready at any moment to rip away the veil of respect, and treat royal persons in an inhuman way, making them not more than us but less than us, not really human at all."
To come back to her lampooning, Ms Mantel might, at best, be accused of being party to precisely what she criticises others of - an obsession with royalty - though even here she concludes by telling her reader/listener to "back off and not be brutes". Instead, she is castigated for what appears to be the double sin of being a successful woman who does not fit the mould of conventional "prettiness" (like Jane Seymour?), and is hence, somehow, jealous of the younger, more attractive duchess. Indeed, the reviewer in Business Standard goes so far as to say: "It is impossible not to espy a hint of that old misogynist feeling: the wildly successful career woman unable to get past her poor looks."
Yes, there does seem to be misogyny, but I'm just not sure it's on the part of Ms Mantel.
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