The Duchess has shown us that we can tell our own stories—the unpleasant, unglamorous, painful parts included.
Meghan Markle Is Rewriting Her Fairy Tale Ending
I grew up in the 1970s, the daughter of a dedicated feminist mother who taught me girls could be, and do, anything we wanted.
I also grew up on fairy tales. Despite my mother’s best intentions, Disney and the Brothers Grimm made their way into our ranch house. Which meant that, in addition to the messages of “Free to Be…You and Me,” I was also being absorbing the lessons of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and Snow White—that someday, my prince would come; that he would see that I was special, even dressed in rags and covered in soot, or felled by a spell, a pricked finger, or poisoned apple. He would claim me with a kiss and whisk me away to a castle, for a life of wealth and ease, where we would live happily ever after.
Not only did I have movies and illustrated stories to drive home that point, I had the British monarchy. I was eleven when Diana Spencer married Prince Charles. I remember waking up at five in the morning, one of the 750 million people around the world to marvel at the romance: the beautiful bride, the adorable flower girls, and the wedding dress, with its endless train and hot-air-balloon-sized skirt.
She’s so pretty, I thought. She’s so lucky. To my eyes, it looked like the happiest of happy endings; a fairy tale come true.
When Princess Diana died, I was a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer. I mostly wrote features, but that night, I was covering a shift in the newsroom. It was a holiday weekend—a traditionally slow news time— and my best friend had promised to prank me by calling in breathless reports of plane crashes and other natural disasters. When the city desk phone rang and I heard my friend saying, her voice low and tense, “Turn on the TV,” I said, “Ha ha ha.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not kidding. Turn it on.”
I turned it on and stared in disbelief, watching footage of a terrible car crash in a tunnel in Paris. Dodi al Fayed, who'd been dating Diana, was declared dead at the scene. Diana herself had been rushed to the hospital in critical condition. I told the city editor the news, and, for the only time in my career as a journalist, I heard someone say the words, “Stop the press!”
By then, we’d all learned how much of an illusion Diana’s fairy tale turned out to be. We knew that the princess, at just 19 years of age, had been plucked from a part-time job teaching preschool, chosen less for her beauty or wit or kind heart or gentle nature and more because she had the right lineage and an intact hymen. We knew that her husband, 13 years her senior, had been, for the entirety of the marriage, inconveniently in love with someone else. It was gowns and jewels and smiles in public, bulimia and loneliness and suicidal despair in private. When Diana finally broke free, she was one of the most famous women in the world, less person than prey to the media that covered her relentlessly, eventually causing the high-speed chase that led to her death. Her sons were just 15 and twelve when she died. I still get teary when I picture them at Diana’s funeral, walking behind the horse-drawn carriage that carried her coffin; the envelope on its lid that read MUMMY.
You’d think we—the monarchy, the media, all of us around the world—would have learned. Diana would be the last sacrificial lamb. But when Diana and Charles’ older son Prince William married Kate Middleton, the breathless, occasionally cruel coverage of the bride and the nuptials felt like déjà vu. Kate—a college classmate of Prince William’s—was older than Diana had been as a bride. In the lead-up to their wedding, Kate endured her own time in the tabloid crucible, where she was dubbed “Wait-y Katie” and portrayed as a schemer from a social-climbing family desperate to get her hooks into a prince.
AdvertisementEven after all of that, Kate’s married life looked much like Diana’s had. Kate’s job was to wear pretty clothes, maintain her slim figure, do charity work, make public appearances and, most importantly, pop out heirs.
It wasn’t until Diana’s second son got engaged to Meghan Markle, a (divorced! Older! Biracial!) American woman, that some of us dared to hope for an updated fairy tale. Surely Meghan and Prince Harry would be different kinds of royals. Surely this woman wouldn’t be forced into the same mold that broke Diana. Surely this story would be different.
Not so much. Meghan was met with judgment everywhere she turned—with racism, both overt and implicit, which as Meghan herself pointed out, is different than rudeness, with reporters and royal-watchers who critiqued her every move and critics who gleefully cast her as a self-centered, self-promoting witch who'd brainwashed her man and torn him away from friends and family. She was quickly compared over and over—and unfavorably—to self-effacing, maternal Kate. (Never mind that—although she was never the subject of racist attacks—Kate too was targeted in the media before Meghan came along to be her foil.)
As the Duchess of Sussex’s interview with Oprah Winfrey illustrates, the monarchy and the media were both perfectly prepared to sacrifice another young woman on the altar of propriety and tradition; another character to perform in the century-spinning drama that is the British monarchy.
Every WTF moment of Oprah Winfrey’s masterful interview with Meghan and Harry hit like a bomb. We learned that the Firm—as the monarchy is unflatteringly called—took away Meghan’s passport and her car keys. (!) We found out that they refused to let her get help when she was thinking about suicide, for fear of how it would look. (!!) We heard how her son was denied the title of “prince,” and the security that comes with it, and that an unnamed family member was worried about how dark his skin would be. (!!!!)
In two hours, I went from being only slightly interested in, and the tiniest bit cynical about, the former senior royals, with their celebrity pals, their Montecito mansion, and their Netflix deal, to being ready to swim across the Atlantic and defend Meghan’s honor with my bare hands. I was that impressed with her ability to accomplish what, for so many women, is the hardest task in the world: To say, out loud, in public, I’m hurting. I can’t do this. I need help; to walk away from toxic people, even when they are members of her husband’s family; to prioritize her own health and well-being; to put on her own oxygen mask first.
I believe that maybe—finally—this will be the end. Not the end of the British monarchy, which will find a way to keep wobbling on, but the end of something even more ubiquitous and toxic: the princess fantasy that so many girls and women continue to consume, the one where landing the prince is a woman’s main job, and then it’s just all balls and gowns and happily ever after.
I think about my own daughters. I was determined to keep them away from the princess fantasy, but I truly believe that they were implanted with a Disney chip in the hospital, a switch that got flipped when they turned three. They adored dressing up as Cinderella and Tinkerbell. When we took my younger daughter to Disneyworld for her fifth birthday, she begged for a makeover at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, and, at bedtime, refused to remove her Cinderella rig, eventually falling asleep in costume, from hair glitter and rhinestone tiara to plastic “glass” slippers.
AdvertisementMy girls know their Cinderella, their Sleeping Beauty and their Snow White. But they were also raised on bookish Belle, on Merida and Mulan, powerful, strong-willed young women who want more than a man; on Anna and Elsa, whose quest for true love involves a sibling, not a suitor. They’ve been taught that there’s no more shame in getting help for a mental health problem than there’d be in getting a broken leg splinted or a fever treated; that you don’t have to wait for a royal kiss to heal you, you can get help and do it yourself. Now they have Meghan as an example of how to speak truth to power, to show them that landing a prince is where the story starts, not where it ends.
In her interview, Meghan explicitly referenced fairy tales, and the story of The Little Mermaid. “Oh my God she falls in love with the prince and because of that she loses her voice,” Meghan said.
In the original fairy tale, it’s even worse. The little mermaid trades her tail in exchange for human legs (and, by implication, what’s between them). When she swallows the sea witch’s potion, she feels as though a sword is passing through her body—and every step she takes on those human legs feels like she’s walking on knives. The prince she’s fallen for likes her looks and her dancing, but, without a voice, she can’t explain that she once saved him and he marries someone else. The Sea Witch gives the mermaid one last chance—if she stabs the prince and lets his blood drip on her feet, she’ll become a mermaid again. Ariel refuses. She sacrifices her life for a man who doesn’t love her back, as women, in those tales as old as time, tend to do. By the end of the original story, she’s reduced to a wisp of sea foam, with the hope, in hundreds of years, that she may obtain a human soul.
Disney gave Ariel a different ending, one where she gets her voice and her man. Meghan did one better. She got her prince, her voice, and, now, the power of her own narrative. She’s shown girls and women that we can tell our own stories, even with the unpleasant, unglamorous, painful parts included, and that honesty about your struggles does not make you any less worthy of love. Meghan may be a mere duchess, but in my mind, that makes her the most powerful princess of all.
Jennifer Weiner is the bestselling author of 15 novels, including Good in Bed, Mrs. Everything, and the forthcoming That Summer. She lives with her family in Philadelphia.
This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Jennifer Weiner
