Analyse af Hilary Mantels tale 'Royal Bodies'

For many years, the discussion of the Royal Family’s place in modern society has been lurking underneath the surface of the public dialogue. In our day and age, with democracy and modern warfare, the king or queen has no real power or responsibility to put their lives in danger in order to protect their country. Today the famous bloodline takes care of other tasks like cutting ribbons of new hospitals and bridges or attending fashion shows. However it is not everyone who thinks this is the ideal way to spend massive amounts of money or that it is ethical to put a single family on such a pedestal. After all, they are just like regular people, are they not? In Hilary Mantel’s speech from the London Review of Books at the British Museum on February 21, 2013, she questions the royal family’s place in modern British society; she compares Kate Middleton to Marie Antoinette and late princess Diana and she expresses distress by Kate’s public appearance, which from her point of view, is almost artificial.

In the beginning of the speech Mantel’s attitude towards the royal family appears to be critical of Kate Middleton’s person, describing her as: “(...)as she was, appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss vanished” (ll. 43- 48) making her sound like a manufactured doll, only existing to make the dynasty look good. But she also appears to understand the duality of being a public person, when she describes in lines 33-39, how Marie Antoinette was always judged on her looks, never taken seriously or thought of as a real human being with emotions. This way Mantel shows great sympathy for the royal family, because frankly, they are being treated as a laughing stock. This is shown in her comparison of the panda in a cage and the Royal Family (ll. 122-126). Like the pandas, the Royal Family is intriguing, whether you like them or not, the financial upkeep might not justify the amount of entertainment we get out of them, and we are just as disaffected and by the Royal Family as the pandas. They will never escape their cage; they will forever be objectified. Throughout the speech this sympathy seems to grow, especially when she talks about her encounter with the queen, where she is left feeling sad and embarrassed, not just because she accidentally stared at her but also because of the behavior of her peers. As a society we both adore and humiliate these people who live so differently from the mass. It does not seem like Mantel wishes to end the monarchy but she is definitely not in favor of how the royal family has become entertainment, this is implied when she compares the monarchy to a strip joint (l.268). Without their previous purposes, how exactly do the people in Buckingham Palace differentiate themselves from the celebrities in Hollywood or the contestants on the X-Factor?