Ask a woman what she thinks of the recent announcement that the Prince of Wales will marry Mrs Parker Bowles, and the chances are that the answer will be: “She won.” Depending on her age and the extent of her familiarity with you, she might also add, “the horrible b***h,” or she will simply leave that expression unspoken but implied. The only women who have a different reaction are those who are in a similar situation themselves, or who hope to be, the ones who believe that all is fair in love and war and that any means are justified when employed towards the end of getting your man, even if he is married to somebody else. There are others who simply do not give a damn, who have no opinion about the subject – but then they probably have no views on anything else either, except for what directly affects them.
Why has the news of the impending royal marriage touched such a strong chord with women? Why has it disturbed us somewhere deep inside, even though we may be loath to admit it? It is because we were all raised on fairytales – the same fairytales at that – which told us that good always wins over bad, and that no matter the trials and tribulations that the heroine must endure, she is inevitably restored to her rightful status, gets her prince, and lives happily ever after. Yet the 25-year saga of Lady Diana Spencer, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and Mrs Andrew Parker Bowles has turned the fairytale formula upside down and inside out.
According to the formula, tried and tested by Hans Christian Andersen (except with his tale of the little match-girl) and the Brothers Grimm, it was Lady Diana Spencer who should have been the heroine. Following the fairytale formula, the watching world – for there are similar fairytales in many cultures – cast her in this role. When Mrs Parker Bowles appeared stage-left in this tragic pantomime, we cast her in the role of the evil stepmother or the ugly sister. Some even saw her as the wicked witch (I am one of them; I think she is truly ghastly and unscrupulous). She was greeted by a chorus of loud boos. We did not need to call out to the princess, as we watched her on the stage, “she’s behind you!”, because the princess already knew, and she told the world about it in a BBC interview.
Women the world over, as we watched this saga pan out to its terrible conclusion, continued to cling to the fairytale formula. All right, we told ourselves, so the wicked witch destroyed the happiness of the princess, but the princess was growing more beautiful and more famous with every passing day, while the wicked witch grew uglier and more unpopular. The one was adored, the other abhorred.
Soon, we thought, unable to let anything shake our belief that here, finally, was proof that the fairytale formula worked in real life, the princess would triumph in some magnificent fashion, while the wicked witch would get her just desserts. Something terrible would happen to her – karma, we thought.
But then came the shocker. Something terrible happened to the princess, and seven-and-a-half years later, the wicked witched triumphs in a magnificent fashion, the most magnificent fashion possible: she marries her prince. What happened to the princess was not the worst thing possible – that would have been the death of her children – but it was the best thing that could have happened for her rival to achieve her purposes. Fate, we gasped, was on the side of the wicked witch. Without the death of the beautiful princess, the triumph of the wicked witch would not have been possible. Our last of belief in fairytales was dashed for good.
Women, even those who do not have the words to articulate their feelings, are perturbed by this story because it is a perversion of the fairytale formula. In this perverted real-life drama, we can see that Mrs Parker Bowles has been cast in the role of the heroine; she surmounts all the obstacles that life puts in her path, and finally marries her prince. The Princess of Wales was cast in the role of the wicked witch; she attempted to thwart true love between the prince and the heroine, and was finally punished by an extraordinary death that, in the correct fairytale tradition, struck like a deus ex machina.
We were further perplexed by the fact that, in fairytales, heroines are supposed to be young and beautiful and wicked witches are supposed to be old and ugly, but in this case, it is the other way round.
This does not compare at all well with Snow White and The Sleeping Beauty, and we are disturbed because we know that in real life, princesses are not caused to rise from the dead by the kiss of a prince. This princess will stay dead forever. It is because the fairytale will be cut short at the point of the marriage between the person we think is the wicked witch, and the prince, that we see it as a perversion which has cast the wicked witch as the princess and the princess as the wicked witch.
Were the resurrection of the princess a possibility in real-life, then this fairytale would so far have followed the perfectly correct formula of the princess being (temporarily) destroyed and the wicked witch marrying the prince. Then, according to this same formula, the princess is brought back to life by some magic agency, the witch is vanquished, permanently and dramatically, and the spell she has cast on the prince is finally broken.
He shakes himself, realises that the princess is the love of his life, and they live happily ever after in the palace. The fairytale should end at that point, but instead it will end with the triumphant marriage of the prince to the wicked witch, the evil stepmother and the ugly sister, all rolled into one.
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There is something else that is wrong with this fairytale, too. The prince is not the handsome, manly and morally superior hero described to us by Andersen and the Grimms. He is to us a weakling, lacking in moral courage, who reserved his contempt for the woman he should have respected, and his respect for the woman he should have held in contempt. This is what many women know to be true in real life, but we had hoped that the fairytale would have given us some exceptional respite. If even the hero-prince behaves like this, what hope is there for ordinary women with their ordinary men?
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Women – again, except for those who have cast themselves in the Camilla role or a similar one – do not like this story at all. At some point along the way, we grow out of our belief in fairytales, but despite this, we continue to believe that the formula is the correct one and that this is how things should be, even if they are not so in real-life. Looking on as the husband of an excellent woman rejects her in favour of some inferior person whom we have watched as she made a strategic play for him, we want to believe that this is the behaviour of a particularly foolish man, rather than that of almost any man similarly targeted by a determined and crafty woman. Men who say that they would never behave like that have probably never been subtly and cleverly pursued in a way that is not decipherable to them. They may have been overtly pursued, which is different and off-putting.
Somewhere between the age of 30 and 40 – and even earlier if she has been given due cause for cynicism, perhaps through direct experience – a woman sheds all trust in the fairytale formula and comes to realise that many men, if not most, are fools where a certain kind of woman is concerned, and they learn that this certain kind of woman, if she is determined and wily enough, will inevitably achieve her end.
With time, an intelligent woman is able to recognise this kind of person or potential situation within a very short space of time. It is not intuition; it is merely the intelligent and correct reading of clues and information.
On the whole, men are more romantic than women, but they are foolishly romantic, and they are more predisposed to believe in fairytales – perhaps because, unlike women, they have not been raised on them and so discover them later on in life, say at around the age of 40 or 50. They think of as chance an encounter with a woman who has planned everything down to the last detail, and because she is coldly calculating in achieving her aims, she does everything to please and trap him, unlike a woman who is genuinely in love, and he thinks “Wow – she adores me!”
Then he begins to think that he has fallen passionately in love and that he cannot live without this woman. His wife, who no longer thinks he can walk on water, and who probably never did, begins to seem very annoying. He thinks his choice is between a woman who adores him and a woman who annoys him. And that is precisely what happened in the great drama that started to unfold before us in 1980, and which will draw to the sorriest possible close next month.
As far as ‘the other woman’ is concerned, it is a matter of strategic planning and carefully-executed tactics. Most of us have seen this happen somewhere in our social circle or even closer to home. We may maintain a civil relationship or even a friendship with this ‘other woman’ after she has succeeded in her aims – after all, the days when we were expected to cut such woman dead are long, long gone – but still, in our hearts, we maintain a small kernel of contempt for her behaviour, because to us the strategy and tactics were transparent, even if they were not so to the men around us. The Charles and Camilla story is just a very, very public example of this same thing happening on a grand scale, with news-making consequences.
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Our fairytale princess never stood a chance against this more experienced, more determined and craftier woman. In a situation like this, innocence loses out to guile and cunning.
It proves to us women once more what we come to know by a certain age, which is that looks alone are no match for wily and amoral determination.
That is why clever women know the importance of having well-honed antennae, and a metaphorical sub-machine gun close at hand, with which to wipe out this kind of person as soon as she appears on the horizon.
The path of that kind of ‘true love’ can always be thwarted because it is not true love at all. You just have to know how to do it. Our tragic princess clearly did not. At 19, she was far, far too young, and still believed in fairytales. Poor thing.