Let Her Be: Catherine, in a Post-Hope Britain, Evokes a Time When We Had a Country

The film of the wedding 13 years ago of Prince William to Catherine Middleton evokes both personal and political memories of better times. William still had his hair — and his brother, his “best man,” who stands by his side both proud and mischievous, whispering in his ear “She is here…she looks beautiful.”We still had our late Queen, too, Elizabeth the Good and her irascible husband, whose worth we didn’t realize until he was dead. We also had a country — a world — before the existential battle between Islam and democracy, and before the pandemic. It wasn’t an innocent world. No one who lived through the industrial horror of two 20th-century world wars could believe that, but it was to some extent a hopeful world. Now we are post-hope.Almost 30 on the day of her wedding, Catherine looked like a girl, with the narrow waist and tumbling hair of a teenager. Like the teenage Diana before her, in some strange way Kate married a whole nation, her privilege melting away like snow in the sunshine of her open-heartedness. But far more so than the thoroughly aristocratic Diana, Kate — the coal-miner’s great-great-granddaughter, whose mother started out as a stewardess — appeared “one of us.”The wedding also took place in a world before we knew of Meghan Markle, truly a prelapsarian Eden. It’s a little unsettling to imagine her watching it as a young woman, eyes glittering with avarice as she picked out the spare prince.Kate, princess of Wales, during her visit to Sebby’s Corner at north London, November 24, 2023. AP/Frank Augstein, pool, fileWhen Catherine mysteriously went missing at the end of last year, after being diagnosed with cancer (as it transpired when she made a short video in March) the scurrilous stories on social media which circulated about the reasons for her absence were widely believed to have been started and embroidered to ever more dizzy heights of grotesquerie by the ‘Sussex Squad’ of semi-literate groupies who dedicate their so-called lives to furthering the lost cause of Meghan and Harry at the expense of the Waleses.Whereas the video of Catherine sitting on a bench and addressing the camera alone was affecting in its simplicity and sincerity, the latest outing is different; twee and staged, with a touch of Hollywood that is a cross between “Gladiator” (the wheat-field) and “The Stepford Wives” (the flat delivery of a script which might easily have been crafted by an actual bot.) There’s not a word of thanks for the doctors and nurses who have helped her complete her chemotherapy course, which from a woman known for her lack of high-handedness and her serious humility seems odd. At best it’s a Tory Burch advertorial — at worst it’s like something Meghan would cook up for some ghastly American Riviera Orchard room spray. This image from a video released by BBC Studios on March 22, 2024, shows Britain’s Catherine, the Princess of Wales, recording her message announcing that following her abdominal surgery in January ‘tests after the operation found cancer had been present.’ BBC Studios via APChemotherapy is a harrowing business, and the general romping which Catherine performs with her photogenic young family while reciting platitudes about her ‘journey’ seem off. There was an amusing social media meme a while back called “WOMAN LAUGHING WITH SALAD”; sometimes this video seems like “WOMAN LAUGHING WITH WORD SALAD.”The camera still dwells on her narrow waist and tumbling hair, as it did all those years ago. Catherine, though, is an intelligent and worldly woman in early middle age now; to seek to preserve her as an icon of youthful perfection is an unfair burden. Let her age as we age, not freeze her forever as a gamboling girl in a summer frock. She is still here. She is still beautiful, as her estranged brother-in-law noted all those years ago.Let those of us who admire her make her aware that the first of these is all we really care about, and let’s make the powers that be aware that it’s not helpful to anyone to wheel out every few months this dignified and serious woman, as a tireless, ageless cheerleader for our poor post-hope world. If we love her, let her be.

Let Her Be: Catherine, in a Post-Hope Britain, Evokes a Time When We Had a Country

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