Blame the nearest woman
Mary Beard takes a look at the whole “blame the woman” phenomenon in connection with the bizarre way the UK gutter press has “reported” on Meghan Markle. (Buzzfeed has a piece that places stories on The Other One next to stories on MM and the contrast is quite startling. I don’t know for sure of course whether the examples are representative, but it seems likely that they are since otherwise Buzzfeed would get swiftly eviscerated. The creepiest one I saw before I stopped reading was “aw how sweet the way Kate cradles her bump” compared to ” ew look at Meghan virtue-signaling with all this touching her bump.”)
I wrongly thought that the Harry and Meghan story would be a flash in the pan, quickly overshadowed by all the really important things in the world. But as it has turned into a full-grown bonfire and has become important for the issues that it raises, I think it is worth having a more serious look at what the Roman world might tell us here…
More than a couple of decades ago, I ran a final year course in Cambridge on the “Roman Emperor: construction and deconstruction of an image”. It was partly an attempt not to look beyond all those unreliable stories of Roman emperors (Domitian killing flies, Caligula getting his soldiers to collect pebbles on the beach), but to ask head-on what those stories told us about the way emperors in Rome were perceived, how they related to imperial power (or lack of it). It was also an attempt to look at the structures of how “palace cultures” are perceived and explained by contemporaries outside them…
One of the most obvious things to come out was the way women were repeatedly used as explanatory tools for otherwise unexplained events. Now in the case of Meghan Markle, you would have to be blind not to see a strong vein of “popular” racism in some of the treatment of her. But there is also what I call the “Livia Phenomenon” at work here.
If you’ve ever seen the BBC I, Claudius you’ll know where this is going.
It is not just Robert Graves and Sian Phillips who have given us the image of the emperor Augustus’ wife as a schemer and poisoner, stopping at nothing to get her own way behind the throne. That goes right back to the ancient world itself, and to the writing of Tacitus and Suetonius among others. The basic principle is this. Things happen behind palace walls that we don’t understand. People die, some appear to fall from favour, others come unexpectedly into prominence … or even onto the throne. In the early Roman empire, Livia was the economical explanation for all of that. If someone died, it wasn’t a mysterious or unlucky bug, it was Livia’s poison concoctions. If an unlikely princeling got lucky, it was thanks to her, etc etc. Now, we have no idea whether any, all or none of this is correct. But there is just as good a chance that Livia spent the forty-plus years of Augustus’ reign minding her own business, as that she spent it in the pharmaceutical cupboard.
It is, of course, predictable low-level misogyny, bolstered then as now by unreliable leaks from “palace sources”. It was used against Nancy Reagan, who became a convenient solution to the question of why Ron did odd things, and against Cherie Blair too. And now Meghan Markle is in the firing line.
It’s interesting that this doesn’t apply to Melania Trump. She got heat for that “I really don’t care” jacket, but that was a blip. There’s no need for a Melania in this case because Trump is so very open and public and ostentatious with his crimes and lies and abuse. Mystery is not the issue with him.
Anyway it’s interesting, how persistent and shameless misogyny still is, along with racism and snobbery and the rest of the poisonous brew. Who needs poison in the soup when it’s all over the media?
And I don’t remember much about Laura Bush – a couple of times she was mentioned, but not usually as an explanation for why Dubya did the things he did.
Now, if we want to talk about Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama…
It would seem like a Republicans v Democrats thing except there is, as Beard points out, Nancy Reagan.
But it’s perhaps mostly a Republicans v Democrats thing.
And there’s Barbara Bush, but her reputation was the opposite of her reality. Most people saw her as a sweet, motherly woman.
Lady Macbeth.
Mandy Rice Davies and Christine Keeler.
Brigitte Macron.
Then there are the relentless attacks on women in politics who lack (insert quality here) because they have never been a mother. We had it with Julia Gillard, our first female Prime Minister, and only a week ago, the Queensland premier was attacked on the same basis. Look at her – childless! How can she lead? When anyone paying attention would know of her desire and struggle to conceive, her endo, but that isn’t of concern when all you are trying to do is destroy a political opponent. And the arsehole who led this attack? Another woman, burnishing her leadership credentials by parading her motherhood!
In recent years, Republicans have often used the wives to “soften” the politician husband’s image. For instance, it was “allowed to be known” that Barbara Bush was pro-choice, which made G.H.W. Bush seem more moderate by association. Laura Bush was a little fuzzy on the abortion issue, too, and even on gay marriage to some extent (more of the “we shouldn’t politicize it” rather than actual support).
With Trump, Ivanka has tried to play the role, probably as much for her own image as her father’s. How many articles did we see in the first two years of this presidency about how Ivanka was really really trying to convince Daddy to lock up slightly fewer children in cages, etc.? I don’t seem to see them as often any more; not sure if Ivanka gave up, the reporters got tired of being used, or I just don’t notice them.
And how could I have forgotten?
Yoko Ono.
Roj, and it goes back even further. I am just polishing up a play that combines Jacosta, Medea, Gertrude, and Ophelia in a waiting room in the afterlife discussing how women have been blamed, forced to do things like murdering their own children, and so forth, all because of actions of the men. The women blame it on the playwrights, but of course, we all know it is deeper. The playwrights are responding to society and their view of women, and in the process, helping create it.
Medea, though, can be read as a feminist play.
And Shakespeare, oddly enough, is a real outlier in the whole misogyny in literature field. One Jacobean play after another had a familiar plot involving a woman who turned out to be a cheating whore who spread’em for another man. With Shakespeare, on the other hand, the plot was flipped: it was about a man screaming about the whore who betrayed him and turning out to be dead wrong. He used that plot over and over and over again, and as far as I know no one else used it at all. Much Ado, Cymbeline, Othello, The Winter’s Tale – the suspicious man is wrong wrong wrong, and wicked for being suspicious.
Yes, I think that’s what I’ve always liked about Shakespeare.
I saw Measure for Measure for the first time a few years ago, and this scene stopped me dead. Angelo tells Isabella that he’ll get her brother out of jail if she has sex with him.
‘Isabella. Ha! little honour to be much believed,
And most pernicious purpose! Seeming, seeming!
I will proclaim thee, Angelo; look for’t:
Sign me a present pardon for my brother,
Or with an outstretch’d throat I’ll tell the world aloud
What man thou art.
Angelo. Who will believe thee, Isabel?
My unsoil’d name, the austereness of my life,
My vouch against you, and my place i’ the state,
Will so your accusation overweigh,
That you shall stifle in your own report
And smell of calumny. I have begun,
And now I give my sensual race the rein:
Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite;
Lay by all nicety and prolixious blushes,
That banish what they sue for; redeem thy brother
By yielding up thy body to my will;
Or else he must not only die the death,
But thy unkindness shall his death draw out
To lingering sufferance. Answer me to-morrow,
Or, by the affection that now guides me most,
I’ll prove a tyrant to him. As for you,
Say what you can, my false o’erweighs your true.’
As you can imagine, I’m not exactly a follower of royal news but I’d say the examples are representative. There’s obviously some good old-fashioned racism at work there, but I wonder if the attacks are so blatant because there are two convenient excuses attackers can use if they’re accused of racism: she’s American and she’s divorced. I know the American part is racist, too, but for a different reason. It’s easy to pretend that those two things together are practically unforgivable for a royal marriage. I mean, look what happened last time etc.
latsot, slightly OT, but last time, if you mean “That Simson woman”, was a blessing in disguise. She saved the UK from entering a war against Germany with a NAZI sympathiser as King. In my quiet, conspiratorial moments, I muse if she was a plant to ensure the removal of an unsuitable King when politics had no way to remove him.
Roj, I agree, I was illustrating the dog whistle. It would have been clearer if I’d used quotes.
Mrs S was, it appears, also a Nazi sympathiser. There was a fairly favourable review of an odd book I came across somewhere the other day on the internet, published in a reputable publication (perhaps the LRB?); the book alleges that the fact that Mrs S was a divorcee was used as a pretext for getting the King to abdicate – the real reason was that both were Nazi sympathisers. the reviewer found it pretty likely.
Tim, Roj
There’s always this, of course: https://christianseiersen.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/prince_harry_nazi.jpg
But of course there’s a long history of the British royal family being nazi sympathisers. I’d be amazed if you could find one of the germ line that wasn’t/isn’t.
No link to the Beard piece. Though the Buzzfeed link is shocking enough.
Whoops; fixed.