by Marilisa Palumbo
From the splendor of the marriage with Harry, in 2018, to the renunciation of the giant Spotify to the podcast of the Dukes of Sussex. So the actress let the fairy tale degenerate. And now also in the crosshairs of feminists, from Camille Paglia to Germaine Greer. Even “his hers” America seems to have had enough. Now who to blame?
At the entrance to St George’s chapel, inside Windsor Castle, Charles, who holds Meghan by the arm, turns towards her smiling, the tender gaze of a father, even if “on loan”. The shot captures behind them the sumptuous floral arrangements and the violins that will accompany the soon-to-be duchess to the altar, where Harry awaits her, a little awkward and very much in love with her. The timeless but also very modern tale that airs worldwide on May 19, 2018: another American is entering the British royal family with full honours, over eighty years after love for the divorcee Wallis Simpson led Edward VIII to give up the crown. An actress, a self-made millionaire, a feminist and biracial woman, with a white father and an African-American mother. Traditional songs in the aisles of St George are mixed with the notes of wonderful gospel songs. The world has changed, what can go wrong?
American exile and the accusations of racism
Flash forward: May 6, 2023, exactly five years later, another live planetary ceremony. Elizabeth, the queen who seemed immortal, died in September, Charles, the prince who seemed destined never to be king, is crowned with his beloved Camilla in Westminster Abbey. Meghan Markle is not there. Harry is, but on the sidelines, and will be in London for less than 24 hours. In California, his wife, son Archie and little Lilibet Diana are waiting for him. The American “exile”, the “Megxit”, begins on January 8, 2020, when, on Instagram – and where else? – The Dukes of Sussex announce their decision to step down as senior members of the British royal family, split their time between the UK and North America, and become financially independent. In the middle success of everything. The accusations of racism against the royal family in an explosive interview with Oprah Winfrey; a Netflix series that a series of complaints against the Windsors, an autobiography, Spare , written by Harry with the wizard of autobiographies (the same as Agassi’s Open, so to speak) in which altercations between brothers are told that lead to physical clashes.
The (profound) differences with Diana
Hundreds of covers, background stories, inferences. At the beginning of the new life overseas, the British tabloids were sometimes even obscenely cruel, the Americans sympathized. The Sussexes had chosen California not only because Meghan’s homeland: in the country that separated from the Crown at birth, but which perhaps for this very reason experiences a unique fascination for the monarchy, they thought they could maintain celebrity status without the restrictions of the role. And Americans idolized Harry’s mom, Lady Diana. The famous feminist writer Camille Paglia, in a 1992 essay that made history, Diana the Huntress , explained the cult of the princess as a reference to a series of archetypes in the collective consciousness, from that of Cinderella (Lady D. was an aristocrat, but as a girl she had also been a maid, and had a “stepmother”) to the mater dolore (a modern Maria who cries but also loves rock’n’roll). Meghan for failing to move anything like that. Critics of her say she lacks authenticity: authenticity, the magic word, the holy grail of every American politician (ask Hillary Clinton). Australian feminist Germaine Greer, known for The Female Eunuch, publicly wonders if the actress is faking her love for Harry.
The fate of the ethnically ambiguous
Those who defend it argue instead that behind the accusation of being “false” are hidden deep-rooted prejudices. Questions about Markle’s authenticity are steeped in racial and racist politics, she wrote on Vox Brooke Erin Duffy, from the faculty of gender studies at Cornell University. As scholar Lisa Nakamura has argued, public figures deemed “ethnically ambiguous” (Markle is biracial) galvanize Internet sleuths to search for the “truth” about their identity. But even black commentators such as Alicia Montgomery on Slate define the duchess’s surprise at the discovery that there is institutional racism in the British royal house as worrying and irritating (from the series: where is the news?). Kind of like when the Suits actress, a grown woman living in the contemporary world, claimed she didn’t quite know who Harry was of hers when she first met him. It’s true that fairy tales provide for the suspension of disbelief, but in short. Somewhere between the fifth and sixth hour of the Harry and Meghan series, which suggests that there is no one more in love, more socially aware, more grieving, my natural sympathy for the couple, wrote Joanna Weiss in a controversial article in Politico, began to turn into annoyance, and I realized that the ego has its limits.
Narcissistic like Musk and Trump
Weiss puts Meghan in the bunch of some extreme narcissistic figures – from Elon Musk to Donald Trump – who have used attention as a bargaining chip and ego as fuel and who would have tired the public opinion by now. Also in the 1992 piece, Paglia wrote that Diana was capable of projecting her personality without the use of words. Her means of her are photographs and films: she could, with good reason, be the last star of silent films. Later the princess would also speak, of course, telling the whole truth about her in front of the BBC cameras, but perhaps Meghan and Harry exaggerated with this sort of psychoanalysis session in front of the world. Even the constant reference to her, Lady D, while triggering feelings of solidarity towards Harry, an orphaned child who until adulthood thought that his mother wasn’t really dead, but that she had hidden away and could go back to hug him, sometimes sounds a bit exaggerated. Like in the episode two months ago in New York, when the police denied a spokesman who, speaking of an almost catastrophic car chase by the paparazzi, had wanted to evoke the accident in the Alma tunnel in the collective imagination.
The prince and his wife are naked
Diana used the media, which were her allies until they devoured her, the press seems to have had enough of Meghan even in her America. Polls put the Dukes’ popularity in free fall: what will the Sussexes do now that Spotify has canceled their multi-million pound contract because the royals have fallen short of the productivity benchmark and a streaming company executive has called them fucking crooks? Now that there’s no idea how they’re going to honor the $100 million deal with Netflix and that many brands don’t want to be associated with them? What will they do, but above all: who will they blame? Before they could point the finger at the villains of the royal family, but now? Now, according to detractors, they are naked in front of the lack of real talent. Empathy for Markle, trapped in a designer cage, only goes so far, wrote Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. Noting how the dukes at the time of the “separation” from London had requested the trademark for hundreds of items, from socks to hooded sweatshirts, with the Sussex Royal logo, Dowd’s magnificent pen sank the blow: (all this) makes Wallis Simpson’s exile in the Bahamas, spent matching the color of the walls with her face powder, seem like a monastic experience.
The lesson of the Obamas
At the beginning of their marriage, when Meghan traveled with Harry to Africa and danced with the girls who could identify with her, or when she cooked with the women of the multi-ethnic association that helped the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, the two really seemed to be able to give the monarchy a new patina of modernity. Instead of giving up real influence to be an Instagram influencer, Dowd writes, the Duchess could have been inspired by the Obamas, who rose above racist attacks and worked to change things from within institutions. From inside, like Meghan that day with gospel songs in St. George.
July 22, 2023 (change July 22, 2023 | 16:21)
© REPRODUCTION RESERVED
2023-07-22 14:23:12
#Meghan #Markle #anatomy #failure #years #squandered
