Diana Spencer: 20 Years After

“Life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.”– Oscar Wilde.

Such epigrammatic effusion on life is a demonstration of the centrality of life itself. It exists between birth and death. For birth and death are two words enveloped with a measure of mysterious awe. Man’s giant strides in science and technology have never diminished the mystique of the making of a human. From womb to tomb, man is a consummate miracle. Yet the totality of man’s life is a study in tragedy. And since the central position of high mimetic tragedy is a midway balance between godlike heroism and all-too-human irony, the story of a tragic hero or heroine is often expressed in the traditional conception of catharsis. If birth is a universal coda for miracles, why then does man die? But man needs miracles to rationalize his failings and foibles. Man only dies to be reborn. And so, the death 20 years ago, of Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, in a ghastly car crash in Paris, did draw to the front-burner of public discourse on an international scale, the pleasure-pain duality of the human personality. To mourn Diana, the rich and the poor, the mighty and the lowly, were perhaps more in tune than met the eye; and this might well explain why there was now a fleeting net of unity above and across the trenches revealing such an astonishing fraternity between brother enemies in mourning Diana’s death. Her death and its aftermath were concrete proof of the Wildean dictum that it is personalities, not principles, that move an age.

Even twenty years after her painful exit, the world is as united as ever in celebrating Diana’s essential humanism. Yet, it was a brutally inordinate news to learn of the death of the “Queen of Hearts”, a universal Princess that fateful Sunday August 31, 1997. She had now become a victim of a monarchy that thrives on the surreal or its fringes, a monarchy that has for long fallen morally from Olympian heights to ignominy. But, in death, Diana had emerged as the idiom encapsulated in the eternal conflict between darkness and light, a symbol of hope coming from the patrician arrogance of a backward social system in the face of an emergent global quest for freedom, liberty and justice. As a modern twentieth century phenomenon, Diana gave to and cared for the poor in a superlative manner as against a decadent culture that flaunts inexplicable opulence in a world steeped so much in misery and blatant deprivation. She worked herself up to become the toast of the poor masses across the world. As a liberal princess, she carried out her duties with a candour, a forth-rightness that was as outstanding as it was unusual for her immediate environment. In all she did in her private, public and official life, Diana’s unimpeachable patriotism and irrepressible humanism shone like a beaming beacon in a kingdom desecrated by self-serving greed and unrelieved callousness.

Suffice it to say that the journey of Diana’s tragedy actually began with Prince Charles’ infidelity. For those fellows who are oblivious of the facts of the story, Diana died the day Charles went back to Camila as the most notorious adulterer of the last century. Now, to appreciate the logic of Diana’s death calls for surfeit humour and gut. Diana possessed within her the capacity to shock in life and in death; and when she died, the symbolism and extraordinariness either of the circumstances of her life or the manner of her death opened a floodgate of experiences, which ultimately redrew the landscape which she hitherto commanded. Diana’s death, if anything, did provide the world an opportunity to expatiate on Hannah Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil. The pertinent question therefore remains: why is the kind and caring individual always at the epicentre of the apparent tragedy of the human condition? It is therefore not difficult to envision why so many people in the world found in Diana’s death something very much like an act both of loyalty and of sympathy. For them, her untimely death not only served to bring the problems and fears generated by power-drunk monarchs and their cronies into sharp focus, but became the counteraction that would conceivably contribute to their elimination. For, she was seen as a women who stood in the singular and really wonderful predicament of being undervalued on account of the profusion with which she had scattered about her good passions both in cash and in kind. Her problem was that she was very much head over heels in love, even with the sick and downtrodden.

Diana only too soon realised too well that the royal Palaces to which she belonged constituted a strange compound of mutually inconsistent orthodoxies – the bleak rationalism of the utilitarians and the narrow pietism of the Anglicans. She saw that the people were like flint and steel to one another and, from her observations, she sprang the spirit of moral idealism and passion for reform, which burned like wild fire beneath the soft surface of her precious breasts. The vast influence such as that which Diana may have been supposed to have upon English social life is extremely difficult to measure. It is certainly very easy to overestimate the importance of such elaborate and ostentatious conclusion as those which she overshadowed as social nonentities would have regretted their weakness, and the not infrequent outbursts of personal animosity which she permitted herself doubtless told against her. To her contemporaries, however, she seemed both original and highly important; and the role which she played may be assumed to have been considerable. Princess Diana was, perhaps, potentially, a citizen of the world, an inheritor of the entire culture of the past but with a delivery purely of the present. Just as she endeavoured to make her life almost purely aesthetic and, by declaring traditional influence no a necessary part of the concern, to remove one of the extraneous elements which affect social judgment, so too she tried to remove another such extraneous element by asking that princes and princesses be judged wholly on their individual merits. This must be done without reference to either the servility of the self-conscious provincial or the obstreperous complacency of the too ardent patriot.

Diana was the quintessential Queen of the common people all over the world. Uninhibited by a system that puts premium on unnecessary deference to potentates, she came across as perhaps the only royal personage of the 20th century, as far as the English monarchy was concerned, that was bestowed with an innate populist ethos. A tribute to Diana’s spirit of community which has continued to wow the conservative English kingdom is her uncanny love for the poor and the downtrodden. That she garishly flaunted her love and used it to taunt even members of her supposed upper class, was her greatest undoing. Even as an inquest, the fifth since her death, has revealed that she may have been officially murdered for using love for a foreigner to mock the English monarchy, a few incurable bookmakers still insist that she did not do more than wearing designer dresses and shifting a lot of headlines in the world press. The lesson of Diana’s death to mankind is that no matter how common or uncommon your class in society, if you love the common people uncommonly, you would be uncommonly celebrated in the imagination of the common people across the world. That she is still being celebrated globally twenty years after her painful death shows that Diana Spencer lived a worthy life. May her spritely soul continue to rest in peace.