Following Devon author Hilary Mantel’s comments regarding Kate Middleton, Imogen Watson evaluates the public outcy and calls for a closer look at the context.
You can hardly have missed the furore over author Hilary Mantel’s comments about the Duchess of Cambridge, previously Kate Middleton. Newspapers across the country have leapt to the Duchess’s defence; the vast majority lambasting Mantel for the unfavourable descriptions of Kate quoted in a voiced extract on BBC Radio Four.
Well what did she say? In Mantel’s speech, she described the Duchess as, ‘as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character’ and ‘precision-made’, before going on to compare her with both Marie Antoinette and Henry VIII’s famous second wife, and mother of Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn.
But that appears to be where the newspapers stopped reading. Upon hearing the initial news, I decided to listen to it myself and make my own judgements. I, too, heard only the extract, and deeming that enough also condemned the author as being harsh and completely unfair. It was the Prime Minister who sent me running in the direction of a transcript. Because David Cameron waded into the whole affair, I thought it time to give the full version of the speech the benefit of the doubt. Where there’s a quote, there’s a context.
And indeed there is, and it is one largely ignored by the media at large. When the speech is read as a whole, something I recommend you do if you are at all interested, Hilary Mantel is making an argument related to the British public’s relationship with the monarchy: the tendency to watch their every move, every decision, every appearance, to examine their actions in comparison with others’, or even to an extent, to idolise them.
The speech itself is called “Hilary Mantel on Royal Bodies”. It is perhaps a fair point – as she says, even BBC News devoted time specifically to how a pregnant woman may or may not be able to walk in high-heeled shoes. She discusses Kate in comparison to the widely-held perspectives of her husband’s generally beloved mother, the late Diana, Princess of Wales to make a point – a comparison of another future wife of a King. It is wise to point out that the speech is not a fully-fledged review of Kate. Mantel also discusses her impressions of the Queen on a visit to Buckingham Palace. It makes for interesting reading, whether you agree or not.
Arguably, the point could not have been made without the strength of choosing such words as Hilary Mantel did to talk about Kate. However, point or no point, the criticisms of the Duchess of Cambridge are unkind and unwarranted. For someone who is so well-liked, of course the comments came out of the blue. No one, especially not Kate, deserves to be accused of having a ‘perfect plastic smile’, or being ‘designed by a committee’. Of course marrying into the Royal Family brings a certain unfortunate inevitability of attacks and a certain required openness towards criticism but a cause is usually a prerequisite.
At the same time, in this age of twenty-four hour instant news, media outlets appear to feel unable to take some time to do research in order to get to the bottom, in case of being left behind in the race towards a “scoop”, and that is just irresponsible. The comments were unfair on the Duchess, but by enlarging the comments beyond what they were without any perspective in terms of the speech the news was also reported unfairly, and that simply helps no one involved in the story. Question what you read, and what you hear – therein lies the difference.
exeposedev 