The audacity of Meghan Markle
Unlike bland ‘breeder’ Kate, the Duchess of Sussex has broken the mould of acceptable womanhood and is being punished for it.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman of audacity must be put in her place. If she has the courage to be different – to break the mould of acceptable womanhood – then she’ll likely be punished for it. And so to Meghan Markle. Who has mightily shaken and stirred the royal family; who is not what we perceive a Windsor princess to be. And her inability to fit neatly into the cookie-cutter mould is fascinating to witness. It’s the audacity of difference, and a lot of people can’t bear it. Because Meghan’s not what a royal consort is meant to be –someone meek, subservient and largely voiceless; a mere breeder.
Meghan’s sister-in-law Kate has played such a calm, patient game, so impeccably restrained. Not a perfectly shod nude heel is ever put wrong. After the loose cannons that were Di and Fergie, Kate is everything the royal family was crying out for. Profoundly obedient. Bland. Someone who won’t rock the boat. As Hilary Mantel said of her, “[she is] without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character”. When she was first pregnant, Mantel stated, “[the press] will find that this young woman’s life until now was nothing, her only point and purpose being to give birth”.
Meghan’s life, in contrast, has been anything but “nothing” before now. She’s rich with vivid experience – a divorcee, blogger, successful actress with a hardworking past (her Suits call time was 4am). It’s been an adulthood of grit and graft that informs everything Meghan does as a royal, whether the Firm likes it or not. She also has a messy family situation but then again, so do a lot of us. As do the Windsors.
When I think of Kate I think of someone ruthlessly determined to follow the script. Meghan, I think of early morning business emails because she’s used to that work ethic, warmth and joyous devotion; that lovely laugh that shoots out, often when it’s over something involving her husband. She feels like a blessing upon Harry’s world, and to the family she’s married into. She’s dragging it into the 21st century not just because of her mixed race heritage but because of how she conducts herself as a smart, articulate, working woman. The Firm is not used to this.
Neither, it seems, is the press. Meghan is enduring a period of sustained vilification. She goes off script. She’s dangerous. She spontaneously scrawls messages to sex workers on bananas and wears shoes without tights and gets anonymous friends to explain her situation because she can’t herself. And while she’s crucified for being different by certain elements of the media, what of the monster who’s become her endless tormenter? Thomas Markle, her father, is needy and unrestrained and insecure, fragile masculinity in all its glory. He will give his daughter no peace and neither will the press.
We’re sacrificing Meghan on the altar of royal celebrity and it’s men who seem to have the most problem with her. Her father and the commentator Piers Morgan (who she famously unfriended) can’t seem to cope with the fact she no longer wants them in her life. Meghan demonstrates she doesn’t need them. Ignores them, and that’s what fragile men fear the most. A reduction to irrelevancy. They’re not being given the gift of attention but frankly, why should they? Neither can be trusted. They both feel like hand grenades wrapped in very flimsy ribbons.
I suspect that the wider public sees through the media attempts to denigrate this vivid, disrupting, bi-racial woman and, like her late mother-in-law, she’ll remain beloved to the great unwashed. It’s the courage of her difference. I’m enjoying this story arc; where it will lead and what Meghan will demonstrate as a woman not afraid of feminine audacity. I just hope she can keep her head high through it all.
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