Whisked Away

Saw Twilight tonight and enjoyed it despite the bad montages and cheesy one-liners. Afterward, though, I was reminded of Marjorie William's 1997 article on the death of Princess Diana (I've been reading her collection of essays, The Woman at the Washington Zoo, which has been pleasantly entertaining and provoking). Writes Williams:

"Diana brought to life, on the grandest scale, the archetype of the princess inscribed on every girl's heart. It is written there by fairy tale, by girls' games and jump-rope rhymes, by Uncle Walt and his insidious successors at Disney.... Every girl has, at some age, some totem - a swirling dress, a tattered wand, a spangled tutu - that is her own claim to the throne.

Note, though, that it is the rare little girl who wants to grow up to be queen. To wish to be a princess is not simply to aspire upward, to royalty; it is also to aspire to a perpetual daughterhood, to permanent shelter. To dependency.

Once the hysterics surrounding the paparazzi's deplorable behavior subside, there will be only one clear conclusion to draw from Diana's sad end in a car owned by the Fayeds and driven to its violent end by an intoxicated Fayed functionary: that for all her fame and her thirty-six years and her accomplished motherhood and her millions, the life of a princess prepared her very poorly to look after herself.

And this is why the manner of her death, even more than her life, has such a terrible power for women... As long as Diana was out there, plying her glamorous, uncertain path to a full self, we could at least retain our ambivalence about the myth. We've known for a while that trying to be a princess can stifle you, but it's horrible to think that it could kill you.

This is where men begin to adopt puzzled frowns. Can this old drama really be so powerful in the lives of modern women? In fact, this drama IS girlhood and young womanhood in America: a succession of choices between the possibilities of independence and the seductions of dependence.

It is the rare woman who hasn't a story about silencing her own fears while riding shotgun, as a teenager or a young woman, in a car driven recklessly by a guy she wants to please. I have my own humiliating memory of riding through France... It was one of the few times I've feared for my life in a car. But in the course of four or five hours, I only managed to peep a few times, in my most apologetic, placatory, good-girl tones, that I wished he would slow down. My cowardice is unthinkable to me today. Yet I still have pangs of nostalgia about being swept off to France; and there are times, I regret to say, when I miss that good girl's easy manner and pleasing ways.

This, finally, is the difference in men's and women's feelings about the life and death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The moral of the story is that whether she's riding in a gilt carriage that bears her to St. Paul's Cathedral for the wedding of the century, or in a black Mercedes that bears her to her death, a passenger - which is the most a princess can hope to be - is never in charge. It's a hard lesson for women to learn, and it's one that men knew all along."

My 26 year old friend described it accurately when she stated that Twilight put butterflies in her stomach again. But those are the twitterings of the princess in us - that old fantasy that dies hard, and perhaps not at all. It is easy, as Williams points out, to miss that girl who wishes to be a Princess and the warm affections she seems to garner. But as she points out, there are better things to aspire to, and I have a feeling that all women who wish to become Real People must one day transition from Princess to Queen.