My connection to Queen Elizabeth stems from my
identification as a member of the Episcopal Church (the American branch of the
Church of England), where the minister once characterized us as the “frozen
chosen”. She has always appeared to me
to exemplify what it means to have a stiff upper lip. And a stiff lower lip. She has seemed almost inhuman. I was first introduced to her on screen when
she was portrayed as a child in the movie The King’s Speech. I think I next ran into her onscreen – or the
royal family as a whole – in Love Actually, where the loser sandwich delivery
guy imagines himself in America as Prince Harry without the weird family. Oh, sure, I have seen her on TV and in People
magazine. Elizabeth is the mother of
Charles who married Lady Di – and she has never turned over the throne to him –
but I am not an anglophile, so am just now learning about the history of the
monarchy from the new Netflix series, The Crown, which really seems to flow
almost seamlessly out of The King’s Speech (by way of Dunkirk).
Claire Foy plays the queen – and she does this with all the
humanity that my brief views of Elizabeth in People and News Clips lack. What Foy is particularly good at – and what
the show seems to centrally focus on – is portraying the experience of what it
takes – the internal mettle – to cross a boundary. It is as if you can see Elizabeth, over and
over, making a decision – and each one involves leaving behind a little piece
of her humanity to more fully assume the role of Queen – to become The Crown –
and this transition, far from being a cold or mechanical one – paradoxically makes
her become more and more delightfully and painfully human. Foy as Elizabeth invites
us to empathically connect with what it takes to be the adult when all those around
her are being children – to determine how to confront her prime minister or her
husband – not because she wants to, but because it must be done – and, across
the course of time and much against her will, we see her becoming the Queen and
more fully and weirdly, herself.
Elizabeth is portrayed as believing herself to be poorly
suited to being Queen. The abdication of
Edward the VIII is a truly awful moment for her – it is the moment when her
father, George VI, becomes King and she becomes the heir. She had wanted to lead a quiet life of
leisure – to be a royal housewife at some kind of English Manor House in which
she could raise children and horses and go hunting out of the limelight and off
the party circuit, entertaining, and being entertained by a few close
friends. This is the life that she and
Phillip fantasized about leading until she, rather late in life, would be
called on to become Queen. Unfortunately
her father’s health precluded that – his death from lung cancer thrust her into
a role that she had been trained for but felt quite ill-suited to. Her
sister Margaret (played stunningly by Vanessa Kirby) seems more suited to the
role of Royal – outgoing, vivacious and beautiful, she would have wowed not
just the Brits, but the world. Instead
it is the dowdy and inwardly drawn Elizabeth who, based on birth order, assumes
the throne.
Now, wouldn’t we all, in some measure, want this thrust upon
us? Wouldn’t we all want to be
Queen? Well, it turns out that it’s not
just a title but a role. The Crown is an
integral part of the functioning of a constitutional monarchy. And governmental oversight (or more precisely
in the role of the Crown – oversight of the government) it turns out – despite
our current president’s position that abdicating oversight is a reasonable way
to govern – is an essential function for a country by its titular
governor. We first get a flavor of this
when Elizabeth’s father, who knows he is terminally ill but has not yet told
Elizabeth or the family, introduces Elizabeth to The Red Box. This is the leather bound box in which the
notifications about the functioning of the government arrive. What does he state that he does with it? He turns it over before opening it. The things they want him to see are on
top. The details – the boring, but also
the essential stuff, is hidden in the bottom.
He says to her, in effect, turn it (and metaphorically everything else
that is handed to you on a platter or in a box) over and work your way up from
the details to the formalities.
Across the course of the first two seasons (the third has
not been released at this writing), this is what she does – she turns things
over, looks at them from underneath, and works her way towards functioning as The
Crown. She is doing this during a period
in time when the British Empire, which quite recently had counted one fifth of
the world’s population as its subjects, has fallen on hard times and is
struggling to keep its head above water as a world power and even, at times, to
feed its own people. She works to define
herself (choosing, for instance, to marry Phillip, someone whom no one from the
royal family was in favor of) but also to define her role and her country
during this time of huge transition. And
she does this living in palaces and castles that, for all their monstrous size,
when they don’t look like the lobby of some kind of convention hotel, look more
like tawdry middle class homes filled with old knick-knacks and souvenirs from
a bygone era, as well as huge television sets with tiny screens that look
chintzy, regularly fritz out, and are, appallingly, rented.
The series is quite conscious of the tension between the
Royal Family as perceived/ presented and the grimmer grittier reality of
running a family business. Margaret
notes in one of the annual family portraits that the job of the royals is to
support the fairy tale experience for the public. All that glitters is not gold, though (Trump
and family beware) and this series demonstrates that in engaging detail. I think that its appeal to me is both on the
level of curiosity about what has happened behind closed gates – we have since
Shakespeare’s days been fascinated by the lives of the Royals – but also the
story of the development of a person who has power thrust upon her – and I
think that is both an historically interesting development – she is, for
instance, a woman in power during a time that women are gaining power – but
also a personally relevant one – she grows into herself on screen in ways that
mirror how I have grown in my own life (at my best moments), and as I have
watched my children, my students and my patients grow. Becoming who it is that we are in the process
of becoming is, I believe, a fascinating process.
In my Freud class for honors’ students that I am teaching
this spring, we have just finished reading two of Freud’s papers that describe
something about the governing of one’s own mind – Beyond the Pleasure Principle
and The Uncanny. Both of these papers
wrestle with something that Freud calls the repetition compulsion – the ways in
which we seem to repeat what has happened before in our lives in novel
situations and with new actors. This is
not, he notes, just a replaying of pleasurable interactions – that would be
understandable – but we replay things that are truly awful – he was treating
what we now call PTSD and was wondering about why soldiers would keep
revisiting terribly traumatic events they had survived, but he also noted that
we seem to set up – and dream about – and re-enact - the most embarrassing and
shameful moments in our lives – moments that are simply awful to live
through. Freud is perplexed by this and
ends up proposing a drive to explain this – a drive deeper than the drive for
pleasure – the death drive. Now, I think
this is a crazy idea and it has never held up.
To his credit, Freud did not seem entirely convinced of it either, but
the question remains – why do we keep doing things the same way despite the
fact that we know what the outcome of that will be – and how can we help people
figure out how to do things differently?
I think that one of the compelling things about this series
is that Elizabeth, in those moments when she steels herself, is engaging – over
and over – in novel ways of being with others.
She takes as a given the role that has been thrust upon her – her role
is to govern and she does that – but she does not do it by rote – but seemingly
invents herself and the ways that she will express The Crown in new and
completely different ways in episode after episode. She is coming up against the repetition
compulsion – and figuring out how to master it – how to ignore the signals that
channel us into familiar ways of functioning – sometimes aided and abetted by
pride or anger or a sense of entitlement or injustice. Elizabeth – not always, but more often than
not - is able to elude the grasp of the obvious. She is able to achieve novel solutions to
situations that seem intractable. Because
she, almost at times in spite of herself, cares deeply about the life that has
been thrust upon her, she engages deeply and creatively in living that life –
circumscribed though it is by tradition and rules which she must and chooses to
follow – but she figures out how to do that in novel and exciting ways. And this, I think, is what people who are
awake and engaged do – they live lives that are complicated and fascinating.
As an example, in season 2, episode 8, after having been
shown up terribly by the Kennedys – particularly by Jackie when she was a guest
– Elizabeth decides to act as an ambassador in a time of great turmoil in
Africa. The communists are successfully wooing
former colonies away from Western Influence.
She flies to The Congo and meets with the President there and
successfully woos him back, something her advisors and her husband have warned
her is a high risk venture with little chance of success. This account feels prosaic in my telling –
you really should watch the episode – and more importantly the series to
observe the development of this intriguing – if frozen on the outside – person.
By the way, I don’t mean to be suggesting that Elizabeth walks
on water nor that becoming The Crown is always a good thing. There are numerous deals with the devil that
have terrible consequences in the immediate and long run. Would that it were possible as a leader or a
ruler to be prescient; she is not portrayed in this manner nor can anyone in
the real world function in this manner.
But she does struggle with becoming the Crown and the impingement that
makes on her being Elizabeth – something that we all struggle with in our own
way.
This post has gone on too long, so I will post a separate
description of her alter ego, Edward the VIII, and particularly of the Season
2, episode 6 description of his being not what he appears, but instead a worthy
subject for Shakespeare…. And someone who does not appreciate what it means to
be or become The Crown.
To read a post on The Crown focused on Edward the VIII as Elizabeth's alter ego, click here.
To read a post on The Crown focused on Edward the VIII as Elizabeth's alter ego, click here.
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