Princess Diana’s enduring legacy, from conspiracy theories to drag culture

ROYALS
Dianaworld: An Obsession
Edward White
Allen Lane, $39.99

Some believe she was a republican, some a monarchist.

Others argue she was more English than the royal family itself: born into the House of Spencer, she had deeper roots in Britain than the German Windsor bloodline.

It’s within the margins of this contradictory and contested public image that Edward White situates his new biography, Dianaworld. The book is less interested in the royal’s personal life and more in examining the “story of a cultural obsession”. That is, how Diana as a phenomenon has rippled through popular culture and acted as a vessel for the fantasies of millions.

“In the half century of her existence as a public entity, Diana’s mythology has been moulded, burnished, and appropriated by an enormous cast of people,” White writes. She is a figure that endures in the zeitgeist owing to her sudden death in 1997, her sanctified image of motherhood and her postmodern media image (with her face recycled over and over).

A kind of phantasmagorical cultural autopsy, the book charts how Diana – the icon as well as the person – has shaped British politics, fuelled conspiracy theories and even influenced drag culture. In her lifetime, Diana had many adoring fans but, unlike many other celebrities, was also able to genuinely relate to people’s identification with her. “I can talk to them because I am one of them,” she once said.

An unsettled public image, one that spoke to motherhood, family and even destiny, encouraged many to connect their own emotional lives to Diana’s. From gay men coming out of the closet to Pakistani women suffering through arranged marriages, people mediated their own experiences through Princess Diana to find comfort in her outsider story.

But was Diana ever knowable? To some, she was damaged and broken; to others, calculating and deliberate. These inconsistencies made for an unstable public persona, one where the truth could be subjective and often hard to pin down. Getting to the “real” Diana was a press and public addiction, where Diana doing anything – and nothing – could yield profound insights.

As with so many celebrities, Diana’s reticence in talking publicly meant paparazzi photos became less real and more representational to her mythology. Images of the princess taking William and Harry to McDonald’s have taken on a “folkloric aspect” to her parenting style. Shots of her on a yacht barely interacting with Prince Charles stand as enduring clues her marriage was to end.

With a kaleidoscopic style, Dianaworld interrogates the many parts of Diana’s complex celebrity to reveal how she became “an avatar through whom to lead a second life”. From Diana impersonators to everyday British women, conservatives to liberals, White draws on past diaries, news stories and interviews to capture the outsized impact the luminary had – and still has – on millions.

One angle White smartly examines is Diana’s impact on British cultural and political life. Many Britons took pride in her as “a source of national self-worth” during a time of the country’s decline in the 1980s, while her fashionable but rarefied royal identity embodied a new “consumerist Britannia both replicable and irreplicable”. Her own crying in public helped shift public attitudes, creating “a portal to a future Britain of emotional openness”.

While White is often perceptive unpicking the many contradictions about Diana and her dizzying effect on people, he is not without his missteps. An over-academic style can sometimes take hold (from “liminal” to “iconicity”) while some analogies can be jarring (like Donald Trump, “Diana cast herself as a people’s tribune who refused to be silenced by a bullying, elitist establishment”).

In its panoptic survey of one life and legend, Dianaworld may give few new facts on this royal, but it makes an intelligent and inventive marriage of biography and iconography.

At a time when we show no sign of abandoning our obsession, White reveals with astuteness how the People’s Princess persists mostly because anything can be projected onto her deified image.

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