Abstract
One in a series that examines the way memory shapes people and culture, Remembering Diana analyzes news reports and commentary to distill the legacy of Diana, Princess of Wales, whose funeral in 1997 was viewed by some 2.5 billion people worldwide.
Seidler is a social theory professor at the University of London, and he poses a simple question, one that came to him as he and his family joined the London crowds that mourned Diana: Why would so many people behave as if they had lost a close relative or friend?
“This was far from the wave of mass hysteria that some reporters talked about with easy disdain. This was not hysterical grief,” Seidler tells us, “but it was deeply and personally felt.”
Dissonance between the scenes Seidler witnessed and authoritative media accounts he encountered over the years eventually prompted him to conclude that it was Diana’s ability to bend the nation’s power structure that people had recognized and come to grieve. Seidler is the author of several books, including recent titles Embodying Identities: Culture, Difference and Social Theory (2010) and Urban Fears and Global Terrors: Citizenship, Multicultures and Belongings after 7/7 (2009).
Seidler believes that to dismiss people’s outpouring as irrational and un-British—as many reports did—is to misunderstand societal shifts that coincided with Diana’s brief reign and crystallized in response to her death. Those changes include heightened awareness of marginalized people (because of government austerity measures and the global AIDS crisis) and greater cultural and ethnic diversity because of increased immigration. Seidler also notes that the rise of celebrity culture, fed in part by Diana’s own televised tell-all interview in 1995, had left some mourners feeling complicit in the media chase that led to her death in a Paris car crash.
Seidler argues that British institutions and the people who lead them have been changed in at least three areas, each traceable to the princess’s own identity transformation and the media’s compulsion to document it. Broadly grouped, these areas are as follows: Diana’s influence on more humane interpersonal relationships, especially between parents and children; a remaking of the monarchy as a symbol of compassion; and a renewed interest in altruism.
As psychology has showed and this study of our response to Diana’s life and death underscores, personal and societal change is not magically conferred by loss itself; the only way to achieve positive growth, either individually or in society overall, is to work at it. To do that work, Remembering Diana applies contemporary social theory, which posits that one key to making sense of a society is a greater understanding of the role of human emotions and memory in shaping us, one by one.
In chapters like “Memories, Myths, Icons and Images”; “Citizenships, Multicultures and ‘Community’”; “New Capitalism, Authority and Recognition”; and “Global Media, Future Hopes and Cultural Memories,” this book identifies ways that Diana’s story, as revealed by the media, became imprinted on ordinary Britons and so led to evolving expectations. A repeated set of examples is relied on, among them Tony Blair’s “people’s princess” speech in 1997, Queen Elizabeth’s lowered head as Diana’s cortege passed by, Martin Bashir’s “Panorama” interview with Diana in 1995, and the ethnic, cultural, and sexual composition of crowds that mourned her.
Remembering Diana argues that a Diana-like reinvented approach to authority could better inform our responses to issues as unlike as the Arab Spring; the redefined role of heterosexual men; the 2008 global financial crisis; the threat of radical Islam; the London Olympics and Paralympics; and emotional intelligence, among others. Yet the book attempts to address this wide perspective while relying exclusively on British news sources and without placing the fact of Diana’s death into wider context.
For instance, I counted one passing reference, on Page 97, to Mother Teresa, who died six days after Diana and was perhaps the only female contemporary whose star power rivaled Diana’s. News reports routinely compared each woman’s life and the public response to their deaths; I would have welcomed even a brief social theory perspective on this juxtaposition, which need not have hijacked the book’s premise.
In fact, Seidler finds Diana’s influence just about everywhere, from the choice of music at the marriage of her son, William, to Catherine Middleton in 2011, to the post-Diana attitude in British schools. “Pupils are not prepared to be servile towards their teachers,” Seidler observes, tracing a student’s refusal to be “dissed” by authoritarians to Diana’s own refusal to go quietly after her divorce. He states, “The people had somehow taken her as their own.”
Exactly how people did this is what we want to know. Answers would address the worthwhile task Seidler set for himself: Why did people who never knew Diana mourn as if they did? But “somehow” litters this text: “She somehow recognized their invisible suffering.” “People somehow felt that for the time they were with her that what they thought and felt somehow mattered.” “Somehow Diana was able to touch a deeper aspect of humanity . . .” Readers will find this book difficult if they are distracted by regular generalizations or frequent use of italicized type for emphasis. A reference to Seidler’s visit to Kensington Palace in early September 1998 to join other mourners surely should be 1997, the year Diana died; the typographical error suggests hasty writing or editing or both.
Armchair psychoanalysis abounds: “Unless Charles was prepared to work on himself emotionally, it would have been hard for him to free himself from his relationship with his parents . . .” and, “(Diana’s sons) were not to fear their inner emotional needs, nor were they to feel that reaching out to others had to be a sign of weakness and a threat to their male identities.”
Still, noteworthy are the many extended and thoughtfully selected excerpts by leading thinkers, journalists, and essayists, making Remembering Diana a helpful source for anyone seeking to remember a bygone era and imagine one that might have been.