The Dream and its Aftermath
by Julia M. Klein
OCTOBER 15, 2009 TAGS:
An ivory confection of silk taffeta, lace, tulle, sequins and pearls, with a 25-foot train, Lady Diana Spencer’s 1981 wedding gown is the centerpiece and emotional pivot of a memorial exhibition titled, “Diana: A Celebration.”
The British-born editor Tina Brown, whose juicy 2007 biography, The Diana Chronicles, is the most comprehensive Diana tome to date, writes of The Dress: “It hangs now in its glass case … like an artifact from Miss Havisham’s attic, Exhibit A in the museum of a dead dream.”
For an imaginative visitor, the gloomy associations go beyond Dickens, to places darker still. At Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center, through Dec. 31, The Dress is displayed in between Diana’s childhood playthings and her grown-up gowns, a bridge between innocence and experience. An emblem of paradise, it transported Diana to a marital purgatory, or worse. Dazzling and deliberately retro, it evokes the costumes worn by even more unfortunate royal brides, like Anne Boleyn, on their way to execution – loveliest and most compelling (at least in the Showtime version) at the moment of their greatest defeat.
This particular royal wedding, televised eye candy for millions around the world, was supposed to have been a triumph. Schooled in its consequences, we now regard it as the first chapter of a tragedy or melodrama. Unfair, perhaps, but we draw a direct line between Diana’s naïve decision to marry the Prince of Wales and her death 16 years later in a Paris car crash involving a rich Arab, a speeding drunk driver, and reckless paparazzi.
She was too young to die, and, at 20, arguably too young to have married. (The prince, for reasons more antiquated than the dress, required a virgin.) Tina Brown describes Diana as having been caught up in a full-blown fairy-tale fantasy. But metaphors, like life, have a tendency to fail us. Prince Charles was neither Prince Charming nor Henry VIII, though, like Henry, he did have a wandering eye. Torn between duty and what now seems to have been true love, for years he did justice to neither.
Not surprisingly, this exhibition makes no mention of Camilla Parker Bowles, Diana’s chief rival and now Charles’ wife. There’s a glancing reference to Diana’s health problems, but we learn nothing of her lovers, her eating disorder, or her rages, however justified. “Diana’s tantrums, her bulimia, the whole crazy drama – it all feels today like a furious desire to repudiate not just her Windsor present but her Spencer past,” Brown writes.
Of course, this is the Spencers’ show, an exhibition adapted from the memorial display at their ancestral seat of Althorp, where Diana is buried. We see her, tactfully and adoringly, through the eyes of her family, and especially Charles Spencer, the younger brother who eulogized her as “the unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana, whose beauty – both internal and external – will never be extinguished from our lives.”
Diana was indeed a pretty child, her winsomeness evident in pastel drawings by a visiting Polish portraitist and delightful, poignant home movies shot by her father. Earl Spencer raised Diana and her siblings after a traumatic divorce, but in other respects her childhood was uneventful. Diana loved to swim, dive and dance; she was gifted at what the British call “games.” An elementary school report reveals her to have had pleasant manners, though by all accounts she was no scholar. Her late teenage years were spent as a nanny and assistant kindergarten teacher in London, where she shared an apartment that she owned with friends.
It was an astonishingly ordinary existence for someone already linked to royalty. As the exhibition points out, Diana was descended through both her paternal grandparents from the “natural,” or illegitimate, children of James II and Charles II. She was also related to the Holy Roman Emperors and a laundry list of other European monarchs.
Along with The Dress and some of Diana’s childhood playthings – a gingham frog, a stuffed cat, and a collection of miniature ceramic animals that she never surrendered – the main attraction of this show is a selection of dresses that helped define her style. They range from the coat dresses of the English designer Catherine Walker to the beaded, body-hugging evening gowns of Jacques Azagury. The exhibition labels and an iPod tour discuss the evolution of Diana’s fashion sense, but the non-chronological display doesn’t do much to drive that point home. Photographs and film clips show Diana in a variety of settings and outfits, and scenes of her enjoying amusement-park rides with her sons, the Princes William and Harry, will tug at the most hardened heart.
She wore many of these clothes to work, charitable endeavors that she negotiated with increasing seriousness and skill. Testimonials and yet more images underline her compassion and common touch. Her private suffering inspired a luminous sensitivity towards other sufferers -- from AIDS, leprosy, cancer, homelessness and other afflictions. Is it any wonder that hundreds of thousands of mourners wrote letters, cards and messages in condolence books when “The People’s Princess,” as Prime Minister Tony Blair famously called her, met her death? The exhibition provides a sampling of the sentiment, and ends with Elton John’s maudlin rendition of “Candle in the Wind.”
“Diana: A Celebration,” which has been touring the world since 2003, is candid about its aims. Like its subject, it is intellectually slight, charming, and unexpectedly moving. While the show immerses us in pathos, we must supply complexity, metaphor and meaning ourselves. Twelve years after Diana’s death, that has become easier to do.
The British-born editor Tina Brown, whose juicy 2007 biography, The Diana Chronicles, is the most comprehensive Diana tome to date, writes of The Dress: “It hangs now in its glass case … like an artifact from Miss Havisham’s attic, Exhibit A in the museum of a dead dream.” For an imaginative visitor, the gloomy associations go beyond Dickens, to places darker still. At Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center, through Dec. 31, The Dress is displayed in between Diana’s childhood playthings and her grown-up gowns, a bridge between innocence and experience. An emblem of paradise, it transported Diana to a marital purgatory, or worse. Dazzling and deliberately retro, it evokes the costumes worn by even more unfortunate royal brides, like Anne Boleyn, on their way to execution – loveliest and most compelling (at least in the Showtime version) at the moment of their greatest defeat.
This particular royal wedding, televised eye candy for millions around the world, was supposed to have been a triumph. Schooled in its consequences, we now regard it as the first chapter of a tragedy or melodrama. Unfair, perhaps, but we draw a direct line between Diana’s naïve decision to marry the Prince of Wales and her death 16 years later in a Paris car crash involving a rich Arab, a speeding drunk driver, and reckless paparazzi.
She was too young to die, and, at 20, arguably too young to have married. (The prince, for reasons more antiquated than the dress, required a virgin.) Tina Brown describes Diana as having been caught up in a full-blown fairy-tale fantasy. But metaphors, like life, have a tendency to fail us. Prince Charles was neither Prince Charming nor Henry VIII, though, like Henry, he did have a wandering eye. Torn between duty and what now seems to have been true love, for years he did justice to neither.
Not surprisingly, this exhibition makes no mention of Camilla Parker Bowles, Diana’s chief rival and now Charles’ wife. There’s a glancing reference to Diana’s health problems, but we learn nothing of her lovers, her eating disorder, or her rages, however justified. “Diana’s tantrums, her bulimia, the whole crazy drama – it all feels today like a furious desire to repudiate not just her Windsor present but her Spencer past,” Brown writes.Of course, this is the Spencers’ show, an exhibition adapted from the memorial display at their ancestral seat of Althorp, where Diana is buried. We see her, tactfully and adoringly, through the eyes of her family, and especially Charles Spencer, the younger brother who eulogized her as “the unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana, whose beauty – both internal and external – will never be extinguished from our lives.”
Diana was indeed a pretty child, her winsomeness evident in pastel drawings by a visiting Polish portraitist and delightful, poignant home movies shot by her father. Earl Spencer raised Diana and her siblings after a traumatic divorce, but in other respects her childhood was uneventful. Diana loved to swim, dive and dance; she was gifted at what the British call “games.” An elementary school report reveals her to have had pleasant manners, though by all accounts she was no scholar. Her late teenage years were spent as a nanny and assistant kindergarten teacher in London, where she shared an apartment that she owned with friends.
It was an astonishingly ordinary existence for someone already linked to royalty. As the exhibition points out, Diana was descended through both her paternal grandparents from the “natural,” or illegitimate, children of James II and Charles II. She was also related to the Holy Roman Emperors and a laundry list of other European monarchs.
Along with The Dress and some of Diana’s childhood playthings – a gingham frog, a stuffed cat, and a collection of miniature ceramic animals that she never surrendered – the main attraction of this show is a selection of dresses that helped define her style. They range from the coat dresses of the English designer Catherine Walker to the beaded, body-hugging evening gowns of Jacques Azagury. The exhibition labels and an iPod tour discuss the evolution of Diana’s fashion sense, but the non-chronological display doesn’t do much to drive that point home. Photographs and film clips show Diana in a variety of settings and outfits, and scenes of her enjoying amusement-park rides with her sons, the Princes William and Harry, will tug at the most hardened heart.
She wore many of these clothes to work, charitable endeavors that she negotiated with increasing seriousness and skill. Testimonials and yet more images underline her compassion and common touch. Her private suffering inspired a luminous sensitivity towards other sufferers -- from AIDS, leprosy, cancer, homelessness and other afflictions. Is it any wonder that hundreds of thousands of mourners wrote letters, cards and messages in condolence books when “The People’s Princess,” as Prime Minister Tony Blair famously called her, met her death? The exhibition provides a sampling of the sentiment, and ends with Elton John’s maudlin rendition of “Candle in the Wind.” “Diana: A Celebration,” which has been touring the world since 2003, is candid about its aims. Like its subject, it is intellectually slight, charming, and unexpectedly moving. While the show immerses us in pathos, we must supply complexity, metaphor and meaning ourselves. Twelve years after Diana’s death, that has become easier to do.
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Dreamspirit wrote on December 30, 2009 11:11pm
Dreams and fairytales are just that, the truth is realty has very little to do with what people think that they know about other people. Too many people in our world today place their loyalties and values in things, instead of what should really matter in their life. Choosing instead to seek that which they do not have at the moment whether it is cars and things like that or people that they now think that they want in their life’s. Making the people in their lives now things to be dismissed so that they can now have that which they choose to value. Princess Diana had a way to make people feel that they were of value no matter who they were. For that, she will always be the people’s Princess. Yet, she was human who was very valuable to her own fears and self-doubts. A young woman who married into a life that would always pressure her too be a person in which Princess Diana could not feel truly comfortable being, with that having a husband who married her for all the wrong reasons. There for choosing not to value the gem within woman he had at his side. Instead choosing to make it obvious too his wife and much of the world that he wanted a woman other than his wife. A situation that would only bring out the worst in all of those involved. Sadly, many people in our world find themselves not valued by the one who choose them, just to be dismissed for the next person who is seen to be the one worthy to be valued and in their life for now! [Report Comment]
