Many things about Diana’s career were movie-like. Her fairy-tale wedding, for example, has become a rear-view Rashomon. She felt like “a lamb to the slaughter,” she later confessed. Now when clips of the wedding are replayed, we too see a horror show of doubt and fear, with shadowy rivals skulking in the pews. Whenever I watch Diana’s story unfold on TV, I irrationally pray, as when watching Gone with the Wind, for a happy ending.
On occasion, I have felt something ghostly or preternatural about Diana and her memory. At a historical costume exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art two months after her death, I joined the throngs gazing with uneasy admiration at a strapless white crepe-silk sheath that had belonged to Diana and been auctioned at Christie’s that June. Hung on a stark frame, it was a mold of her long, lithe body. The installation was strangely isolated and elevated, like a gallows. Also on view, from the museum’s permanent collection, was the wedding dress worn by Princess Grace of Monaco, a Philadelphia native and another blonde victim of a mysterious car crash far from her homeland.
Two summers ago, on a laborious trek to Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark Fallingwater in the mountains near Pittsburgh, I took a side trip to nearby Kentuck Knob, another private house designed by Wright on a heavily wooded hill. To my astonishment, it was now owned and occupied by Lord Palumbo. As my tour group stared at the souvenir photos of Diana with Palumbo, our guide said, “We never see him. We only smell the trail of his cigar smoke.” I shivered. It was as if Palumbo had become the fugitive priest of the goddess Diana in her sacred grove at Nemi in the Alban Hills.
A final tale: In 1999, I made a first holiday visit to the British Virgin Islands. After a sensational sunset dinner of conch salad at a beachside restaurant on a far corner of Tortola, my party gradually became aware of the lyrics being pumped out by a steel-drum band on the patio. “Diana came to the BVI,” they sang (referring to her two visits with her sons to Necker Island). But the refrain, repeated over and over in an incongruously jolly manner, was: “Her mother gave her a bloody foot.”
There can be no better evidence of how Diana has been absorbed into world myth. The “bloody foot” is a severed chicken claw, used to cast a hex in voodoo. The islanders’ song shockingly conflated the Queen with the jealous stepmothers and wicked queens of fairy tales. It was as if Diana, like Snow White, were merely asleep, drugged by a poisoned apple. The crushed Mercedes was the glass coffin in which the wounded Diana was on tragic display. It symbolized her life of total visibility, which she both courted and loathed.
What is her legacy? New generations will never experience the wrenching highs and lows of Diana’s public life as her contemporaries did. Her saga will become archaeological, like the love stories of Victoria and Albert or Edward VII and Wallis Simpson. In the long term, Diana’s legacy will be embodied in her sons, who must redeem their mother while honoring their father. But for now, what Diana left is the stateless system of paparazzi, which she did not invent but ratcheted up to dizzily lucrative heights. These jet-borne entrepreneurs plying their ruthless trade have become our canonical image-makers. But since there are no celebrities left of Diana’s stature, we are mesmerized by a vacuum.
* [“Legends That Keep Diana Alive: The cultural critic Camille Paglia was the first to identify Diana’s iconic status back in 1992. Now, writing for the first time since the princess’s death seven years ago, she defines her eternal allure,” News Review, The Sunday Times (U.K.), August 29, 2004. Commissioned for the seventh anniversary of Diana’s death.]
26
DECONSTRUCTING THE DEMISE OF MARTHA STEWART*
INGRID SISCHY: Camille, can you bake?
CCAMILLE PAGLIA: [laughs] I don’t bake, no. My specialty is large hunks of highly spiced meat. I’m good at making great pots of things like pot roasts and stews—like medieval banquet dishes for Viking warriors—but that’s as far as I go. I belong to that ’60s generation that revolted against Betty Crocker. To me, Betty Crocker was a vicious oppressor, so baking isn’t part of my repertoire. I do admire Martha Stewart, however, for having updated the image of mistress of the household. She had a profound impact on American taste and design from the moment her books appeared in the 1980s. She kind of infiltrated the culture under the radar.
IS: When did you first become aware of Stewart?
CP: I was attending a cousin’s wedding in upstate New York in the mid-’80s. It was theatrically staged at a remote country inn, and at the reception there were tables heaped with all sorts of produce—cabbage, chard, rutabagas, and so on. I remember saying, “What are all these groceries doing here?” [Sischy laughs] I had no idea that this was a Martha Stewart concept—natural accents for bucolic country weddings. Her power of imagination and her ability to stimulate imagination in others—not the upper-middle-class elite but the middle and working class—was extraordinary. These were women who wanted to make their homes and family events occasions for beauty and pleasure. As an Italian-American, I had an immediate vibe with Martha Stewart. Despite her embrace of the tony WASP style and her early erasure of her family’s immigrant past, I felt she had a kind of cultivated Mediterranean sensibility that was sorely needed in the U.S.
IS: The whole other argument says women felt inadequate because the image Martha Stewart was projecting was of “the perfect woman”—who has a great job and family, who is successful at work and yet still gets the perfect light-blue frosting on the cupcake. That made many women who could not get the damned frosting right or who didn’t want to bake or cook feel inadequate. To them Stewart was the opposite of empowering: she was taking women backwards.
CP: But it was lower-middle-class women who created the Martha Stewart cult. Martha came to general attention after her 1994 appearance on Oprah, where the audience was jammed with her fans and their baffled husbands and where she inspired a rock-star hysteria. The resentment you’re speaking of came from ambitious upper-middle-class women of my generation who had rejected the things that Stewart was espousing and who had pursued careers. For decades after Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, feminism had disparaged and diminished the lives of women who wanted to be “merely” homemakers. Martha Stewart allowed these women to view the creation of an environment as an art form. Later the whole project became maniacal—she got lost in her fictive world like the Wizard of Oz.
IS: Compare Martha Stewart to Julia Child, the popular chef whose style was so loose and empathetic. I always loved how Child dropped a turkey on TV, wiped it off, took a sip of a drink, and just kept going.
CP: Well, Julia Child is Martha Stewart’s primary precursor and a monumental figure in American culture. But Child actually came from the classy, privileged background that Martha, the daughter of Polish immigrants, aspired to. It’s very ironic that Martha turned into “Miss Perfect,” a brittle hallucination of what she thought the genteel lifestyle was, when Julia Child has the cordial, relaxed manner of the true elite—those to whom wealth and position came naturally. Child has the hearty, horsey, up-and-at-’em style of the old Seven Sisters colleges. It descends from the British upper class and their country manors, where there would be holes in the leather furniture and the little old man trotting around with a trowel and dirty gaiters turned out to be the duke. There’s a lack of pretension. I think Martha made a pivotal error when she transplanted her primary residence to the Hamptons. That’s when she lost her bearings. She had re-created the nature-centered British country house at her Connecticut home on Turkey Hill. But the Hamptons are all about status and wealth. She wanted to be a celebrity player. The Martha of the ’90s began to be seen as a snobbish socialite who hobnobbed with Hillary Clinton. But that wasn’t the Martha who originally attracted her mass audience—a group that has never lost its loyalty to her.
IS: Many people saw a smugness in Stewart emerging with the legal troubles caused by the sale of her IM Clone shares. Before her trial, which wrapped in March,
she seemed to project the attitude that she was above the law. Some of those who are still loyal to her feel that she’s been given a rough rap, perhaps due to a spirit of anti-feminism. In fact, some feminists claim that the case against Stewart is a feminist issue, that if a powerful man had been accused of this relatively minor crime, it never would have received the attention it has.
CP: I reject that reasoning. If you’re going to define yourself as a public personality, then you should know—like Madonna or Jennifer Lopez—that you’re going to take your lumps when you make a misstep. Martha Stewart marketed herself as an icon in ways that none of those TYCO or Enron execs did. She intruded herself and her vision into people’s homes. Her image was part of her product. She entered into people’s psychology and dream lives and manipulated them—hence the weird reaction. People are disillusioned.
IS: It’s fascinating how the spectacle of Stewart’s rise and fall, and possible rise again, seems to have caught the whole country’s imagination.
CP: Yes. I loved that Saturday Night Live sketch the day after Martha’s conviction. There was a riot by white middle-class suburban women screaming and rushing back and forth with garden hoes and spades and breaking windows. [Sischy laughs] It was hysterical, because usually when a jury votes to convict, it’s the inner city that explodes.
IS: And now after the fall? What happens when a perfect figure like Stewart is exposed as flawed?
CP: The hospitable smile now seems false. My own view of Martha Stewart as a morally responsible human being has certainly altered. But her body of work remains unchanged. It’s the same thing with a lot of great movie stars or artists—when they’re revealed as demanding, infantile egomaniacs, some people are turned off. I detest that debunking style of biography—Elvis Presley lolled in bed and ate hamburgers; Picasso mistreated his girlfriends. It’s a very reductive, vulgar way of treating major cultural figures. Nice, giving people are rarely stars. Great stars are monsters! [Sischy laughs] I recently saw Martha Stewart’s first book, Entertaining [1980], at a friend’s house, and it’s still amazing—a gorgeous feast for the senses. Her books have staying power.
IS: It was hard to look away during the weeks of the trial. Initially, I found myself wondering why someone with all those image consultants would insist on carrying such an expensive Birkin bag from Hermès to the trial. Obviously, she wasn’t going to stop wearing the things she loved or had worked for. It was her own way of holding herself together and keeping her dignity.
CP: When the scandal first broke, I was amazed at Martha’s inability to handle it. I had always thought that she was a publicity genius, but no. The way she stonewalled the host during her cooking segment on the CBS morning show became an instant joke. Instead of just graciously saying, “This is a very distressing matter that I can’t talk about but hope will be resolved quickly,” Martha kept chopping her cabbage and dismissed the whole issue as “ridiculousness.” That’s when I lost confidence in her. She was an officer of the Stock Exchange and a former stockbroker! Her casualness about professional ethics was shocking. Then I was amazed by her inability to speak directly to the public, to take her fans into her confidence. She’s so over-controlled she couldn’t improvise. If she had just approached the problem in an honest, regretful manner and not tried to steamroll the feds, things might have turned out differently.
IS: It’s all rooted in the problem of the idea of perfection. We know perfection is unattainable, but her whole empire was based on it. This is a drama about being human and admitting mistakes.
CP: Yes, you’re right. She had a dream of perfection, as if she had a godlike power to remake human life into an Arcadian fantasy. Everything she touched turned to gold. By the time she became a billionaire, she had delusions of grandeur. It’s a classic case of hubris.
IS: The first time I heard the word “hubris” was in history class about the Greeks. It concerned Clytemnestra in Agamemnon, and the lesson was: fight evil, don’t become the source of it. What else does Martha’s tale teach us?
CP: It shows us where women are in society today. Throughout history it’s been mostly men—Achilles, Oedipus Rex—who’ve had the position or power to be guilty of hubris. It’s rare that women have risen high enough to make hubris possible. And rarer still have been women achievers in finance. Martha Stewart is a pioneer, a captain of industry like the swashbuckling entrepreneurs of the Gilded Age. She’s a worthy successor to Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. Hence my sorrow at her self-induced fall. There’s a grandeur to this story—finally women have advanced far enough to be as guilty of hubris as men.
IS: Is it your gut feeling that Martha Stewart, like others who have faced public shaming, will have a whole other chapter in her stardom after she completes her sentence?
CP: If Martha genuinely repents or even convincingly mimes repentance, she’ll have another act. But something has stunted her power of self-analysis. She’s as hunkered down in her private world as the brooding press lord in Citizen Kane.
IS: So, Camille, my last question: with Martha Stewart “going away,” how about you going on the tube in her place?
CP: [Paglia laughs] Listen, I’ve already appeared on the TV Food Network!
IS: Chopping or deconstructing?
CP: In 1995, Bill Boggs took me to Papaya King on upper Broadway to sample the hot dogs. They filmed me ordering the dogs and passing judgment. I also did a segment in the studio where I sautéed clams with garlic.
IS: I hear an empire calling. Just make sure your finances are in order, alright? [Both laugh]
CP: Okay, Ingrid!
* [Paglia in conversation with editor-in-chief Ingrid Sischy, “Did the Homemaker Heroine Cook Her Own Goose?,” Interview, June 2004.]
27
FEMINISM AND TRANSGENDERISM*
JONATHAN V. LAST: I keep waiting for the showdown between feminism and transgenderism, but it always keeps slipping beneath the horizon. I’ve been looking at how the La Leche League—which stood at the crossroads of feminism once upon a time—has in the last couple years bowed completely to the transgender project. Their central text is (for now) The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, but they’ve officially changed their stance to include men and fathers who breastfeed. The actual wording of their policy is wonderful: “It is now recognized that some men are able to breastfeed.” Left unsaid, one supposes, is the corollary that some women are biologically unable to breastfeed. Though this would go against the League’s founding principles, one supposes. What does one make of all of this?
CAMILLE PAGLIA: Feminists have clashed with transgender activists much more publicly in the U.K. than here. For example, there was an acrimonious organized campaign, including a petition with 3,000 claimed signatures, to cancel a lecture by Germaine Greer two years ago at Cardiff University because of her “offensive” views of transgenderism. Greer, a literary scholar who was one of the great pioneers of second-wave feminism, has always denied that men who have undergone sex-reassignment surgery are actually “women.” Her Cardiff lecture (on “Women and Power” in the twentieth century) did eventually go forward, under heavy security.
In 2014, Gender Hurts, a book by radical Australian feminist Sheila Jeffreys, created heated controversy in the U.K. Jeffreys identifies transsexualism with misogyny and describes it as a form of “mutilation.” She and her feminist allies encountered prolonged difficulties in securing a London speaking venue because of threats and agitation by transgender activists. Finally, Conway Hall was made available: Jeffrey’s forceful, detailed lecture there in July of last year is fully available on YouTube. She argues, among other things, that the pharmaceutical industry, having lost income when routine estrogen therapy for menopausal women was abandoned because of its health risks, has been promoting the relatively new idea of transgenderism in order to create a permanent class of customers who will need to take prescribed hormones for
life.
Although I describe myself as transgender (I was donning flamboyant male costumes from early childhood on), I am highly skeptical about the current transgender wave, which I think has been produced by far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows. Furthermore, I condemn the escalating prescription of puberty blockers (whose long-term effects are unknown) for children, which I regard as a criminal violation of human rights.
It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women’s studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects.
The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body (except for blood) remains coded with one’s birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.
Provocations Page 21
