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4 hours ago
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Whatever unhinged parasocial relationship the adoring public had with Diana, Princess of Wales, their relationship with the Duchess of Sussex is its shadowy reflection.
For decades, Diana was the subject of public adoration that was locked in a permanent hysterical register. Clive James, for example, captured the hyperbole when he described himself as a “besotted walk-on mesmerized by the trajectory of a burning angel” and Diana as like “the sun coming up; coming up giggling”.
Yet in terms of public opinion, Meghan is stuck in its opposite register – a perceived darkness to Diana’s light.
In a single year in 2019 – still in the honeymoon stage – Meghan appeared in negative news stories 21,100 times across 29,000 tabloid and broadsheet publications, according to data analysis firm Brandwatch.
The data revealed that in 2019, Meghan received roughly five times more negative newspaper stories than Catherine, Princess of Wales, with the analysis showing 4.3k negative stories for Kate.
I can understand the hatred and disgust at a figure such as the former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor – given his associations with Jeffrey Epstein.
But I cannot imagine why anyone at a remove would have anything other than a mild or neutral view of Harry and Meghan.
What choices they make have so little to do with any of us. If we don’t approve of the products they are peddling, we can simply not buy them.
Yet eight years after their wedding, on a private visit to Australia, the negative press continues.
In order to finance their independence from the royal family, the couple are engaged in a series of projects and commercial deals that seem to enrage the public in a way that is entirely disproportionate to their banality (a memoir, a Netflix series and in Australia, a wellness seminar).
The lather that the pair inspire makes me wonder if the hate directed at them has some deeper meaning that sits below the level of consciousness – just as the inconsolable public reaction to Diana’s death also revealed hidden aspects of British character.
Said Christopher Hitchens of Diana’s death: “the orgy of sentimentality from the British people was shocking to behold. She became a Christ-like figure.”
It marked the transition of Britain’s psyche from the imperial to the emotional.
Meghan has also been cast in a sacrificial role – once again an inverse to Diana, a sort of photo negative of adoration, consigned to the role of scapegoat.
We need scapegoats in our society, according to René Girard, a French-American philosopher and literary critic who died in 2015. He wrote that human societies are held together not primarily by shared love but by shared violence; specifically, by the periodic sacrifice of a victim who absorbs the tensions that would otherwise tear the community apart.
The victim, or the scapegoat, is someone who everyone agrees, implicitly or explicitly, to blame for the community’s disorder. The victim is expelled, and this causes massive relief to the community, who feel a return of peace and unity.
Meghan is a classic scapegoat figure, fitting the characteristics outlined by Girard. Firstly, a victim must be inside and outside the community simultaneously (which she is, as an outsider who married into the British establishment).
The scapegoat must then transgress a boundary or break a rule – and we see this through narratives that Meghan somehow corrupted Harry and turned him against his original family.
And the sacrifice must feel unanimous, the whole community against this one person. In Meghan’s case this is reflected in the large amount of negative press and low public opinion that seems hugely disproportionate to the offence that she gives.
The hostility toward Meghan and Harry coincides with a period of extraordinary anxiety in British (and to some extent Australian) public life including Brexit, the pandemic, cost of living crisis, the decline of institutional trust, immigration fears, national identity confusion, a monarchy navigating the aftermath of Diana, and the shadow of Andrew.
Particular to Meghan are accusations of “wokeness” – framing her scapegoating within a culture war.
In the media, Meghan became the explanation for the monarchy’s problems, for Harry’s split from his family, for the sense that something has been lost or corrupted and the royal family having to change in uncomfortable ways (witness the discomfort of the British public with aspects of her wedding, such as the American preacher and the gospel choir).
The way to identify a scapegoat, Girard argues, is through the disproportionality of the response, when the punishment wildly exceeds any plausible crime (often the scapegoat is not actually guilty of what they have been accused of), and the hostility is maintained long after any rational grievance would have dissipated.
It’s a terrible thing to start off being a princess and quickly ending up as a scapegoat. But the process has an energy of its own, and it feels impossible to stop once it gets started.
Much of the modern scapegoating industrial complex is driven by the media, which profit and maintain audiences from rage-baiting. Meghan has been good fodder for them. The scapegoating has no hope of stopping while the fodder is good.
This is what being a princess really entails. It is not an enviable job.
To be cast as both Christlike and demonic is to deny the humanity of both Diana and Meghan. It pushes them into shapes that don’t resemble the complex human beings they are and were. Meghan is not a devil. Diana wasn’t a saint.
There is nothing inherently social about parasocial relationships. They say more about us than them.
