Country life
Excuses, excuses
Leanda de Lisle
Last year I praised Anthony O'Hear's essay 'Against Nature', which was pub- lished by the Social Affairs Unit. It attacked environmentalists for thinking with their hearts rather than their heads. But I was one of only a few fans. Now the Social Affairs Unit has produced a book entitled Faking It, The Sentimentalisation of Modern Society. The Green issue is covered again, but this time by a Dr Jo Kwong. Anthony O'Hear chose to write about Diana, Princess of Wales as 'sentimentality Personified and canonised'. It made him famous overnight. But what for? Professor O'Hear claimed to be sur- Prised by the response to his essay on the late Princess. I believe him. I don't think he'll be offended when I say he didn't say anything very new about the Princess. The Point was not so much to judge her, as examine our attitudes. However it appears, we're not that keen on self-reflection. (Strange, really, when you consider the vogue for psychoanalysis. But then psycho- analysis seems to be used principally to find Others to blame for our problems, rarely as a Way of learning about or taking responsi- bility for ourselves.) The Professor's words were used instead as an excuse to talk about what we all really think about Di. Again.
Here in the country, people used to talk about her all the time. The favourite story last summer concerned her charity dress- sale at Sotheby's in New York. Over the years she had given away many of her old dresses to friends and relations. Suddenly she demanded them back and was furious to discover their owners of the last several years had had them altered to fit their taller, shorter, thinner or fatter figures. The story showed her to be at once generous and amazingly self-centred. Hard headed (the sale raised a fortune for charity), yet completely batty. No wonder we were all confused. No wonder she was such a fasci- nating topic of conversation. But since she died I've hardly heard her mentioned.
I think most people would like the Princess to rest in peace. We've found other things to talk about. But tabloid newspaper sales dropped after the Princess of Wales was killed. After a few weeks they were so desperate they were publishing pic- tures of clouds that looked like her. With- out pictures or news there could be no comment. Now, thanks to an academic writing for a tiny audience, there was a story and it made the front pages. But how dull it seemed without a flesh and blood character at the heart of it.
Politicians, who clearly hadn't read the Professor's article, attacked him for talking about her at all. But it was clear that damn- ing him justified their week. Independent- thinking columnists claimed a silent majority loathed Di mania and maybe they were right. But I just found myself feeling terribly sad. A woman who was so human, so full of life, who twisted and turned in so many unexpected ways, was now merely a cipher. A way of making money and a way of being.
But what relationship does the Diana phenomenon have with other social issues? Dr Kwong's article on sentimentality and the environment was less widely comment- ed on than Professor O'Hear's 'Against Nature'. The other articles in Faking It fared little better. The sheer weight of press attention on Diana alive or dead sep- arates her from everything else. Besides, however sentimental she might have been, I can't see her lining up with the Greens. Not because she was brought up in the country, not because her brother is a landowner, but because she was the per- sonification of conspicuous consumption.
`Ugh! What's this food doing in my chemicals?'
Previous page
