Confinement and the Agency of Refusal: Maddening Spencer through an Intersectional Lens
By Meghann O’Leary
During the holiday season this past year, director Pablo Larraín (Jackie, Ema) released his new film Spencer, a biopic about Princess Diana starring Kristen Stewart. As he did with Jackie, a biopic about Jackie Kennedy Onasis, Larraín explores the mental breakdown and anguish of a highly publicized female figure. Even after her tragic and untimely death, Princess Diana’s life remains under the spotlight, generating seemingly endless public fascination and speculation. It would be easy to dismiss Spencer as feeding such a fetishistic obsession, as my immediate family did when we watched the film this past Christmas. However, I’d argue that this film’s representation of a woman’s breakdown and eventual breakthrough is more complicated, and a film we should all pay close attention to.
Spencer takes place during the British Royals’ yearly holiday festivities at Sandringham Palace in the English countryside, ostensibly the weekend before Diana tells Prince Charles she wants a divorce. Public perception and specific conscribed roles and traditions remain paramount, and Diana, who drives herself in a flashy red sports car and arrives at the large mansion much later than the Queen, is already challenging such proscriptions. Struggling with bulimia and a cheating husband, Diana, whose mannerisms, wispy accent, and posture Stewart captures excellently, is already dreading the holiday gathering and the role of the fairy-tale life she is meant to enact.
Instead of rushing hurriedly to lunch upon her arrival, she meets her sons, Prince’s William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), both young boys wondering why their bedrooms are so cold and why they have to open their presents on Christmas Eve, instead of Christmas Day like the rest of the world. Diana is thrilled to see her lady’s maid, advocate, and confidante Maggie (Sally Hawkins), although she is dismayed at the large rolling wardrobe Maggie wields with all of Diana’s outfits meticulously lined up for specific days of the holiday weekend. A fictional character, former military officer Major Alistar Gregory (Timothy Spall), appears to be a metaphor for Diana’s oppression, assiduously trying to keep her in line, constantly looking over her shoulder and reminding her of her duty to the crown.
Reviewers of the film, mostly men, said the portrayal of Diana is plagued with “drama queen of hearts entitlement” and that her character comes off as “a bratty child.” After all, what does a beautiful white British Princess have to complain about? As it turns out, quite a bit. To conduct an intersectional reading of the film it is necessary that we understand Diana’s character in the context of her race, gender, class status, and sexuality. Diana’s ultimate success at the end of the film challenges the common portrayal of the white, cis-gender, middle or upper class, heterosexual, madwoman. Common real-life embodiments of this image include the Pulitzer Prize winning poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, who was institutionalized and later committed suicide; famous actress Frances Farmer, who was also institutionalized and later given a lobotomy; and Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of the famous The Great Gatsby novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. A novelist in her own right, Zelda was institutionalized as well and died in the hospital during a fire.
I could continue, but you get the idea. For white, cis-gender, heterosexual, upper and middle class women, madness is seen as a treatable medical diagnosis requiring various therapies, including institutionalization, electric shock therapy, lobotomies, medication and/or psychoanalysis. However, for women of color, madness, commonly associated with extreme moods, volatility, and hypersexuality, is considered an innate characteristic of their race, and so the goal is containment, decimation, and violent annihilation from “civilized” society, rather than the normalizing psychiatric treatments often forced upon white women so they can assume their “proper” and compliant role in society. To understand these differences demands that we understand all madwomen’s oppression differently, based on gender, race, class, and sexuality.
Diana is no stranger to these normalizing demands, and Spencer does a nice job of portraying just how suffocating and maddening it can be to perform the role of a British Royal with a fairytale marriage and two beautiful children, particularly when you don’t quite fit the part. Diana proclaims to her lady’s maid Maggie late in the film that she likes fast food and rock music, and she feels more affinity for the pheasants that are bred strictly to perish in the common British hunting and shooting pastime than she does with her adopted family. The suffocating breakdown becomes particularly extreme when Diana feels forced to wear the pearls Prince Charles gave to her for Christmas, knowing all too well that he gave the same necklace to his long-time mistress, Camilla. As she sits across from her husband at the dinner table, trying to eat her soup, all Diana can feel is the constraint of the large pearls on her neck. In a scene that turns out to be imaginary, she rips the pearls from her throat, and they cascade into her soup. She then quickly devours the soup and pearls with them, nearly breaking her teeth and choking on the hard stones.
Diana does eventually really break the pearls from her neck, ostensibly also breaking from royal tradition and constraint, in a climactic scene at the house she grew up in, which is close to the royal mansion and now in dangerous disrepair. Diana’s trek to the house takes place during dessert and is preceded by her ripping her sewn curtains open with wire-cutters and then cutting her arm with the tool until it bleeds. She skips out on family dinner early and treks across the green landscape to her old childhood haunts. After a good cry in her old bedroom, she stands at the precipice of a set of steep broken stairs, ready to launch herself down them and end her misery. The ethereal ghost of Henry VIII’s second wife Anne Boleyn, whom he had beheaded so he could marry his mistress, appears and challenges Diana to resist rather than give in and end her life. The figure of Anne Boleyn has in fact been haunting Diana throughout the film, after Major Alistar Gregory left a biography of the former queen in Diana’s bed, as a warning for her bad behavior, we will later learn.
The end of the film is unique in common portrayals of white, cis-gender, heterosexual madwomen, as Diana does not discover her own agency of refusal in the care and concern of a stable male figure. This common narrative is in fact queered, because it is Diana’s lady’s maid Maggie who professes that she is in love with Diana, even though she knows Diana is straight. It is Maggie who encourages Diana that it is not a doctor she needs, although the royal family and many in her staff would love to prescribe one. What Maggie recommends is love and joy. Diana follows Maggie’s advice, forcibly interrupting the pheasant hunting that her sons were required to take part in, and stealing them away in her red sports car, music blaring, and making a stop at Kentucky Fried Chicken, where Diana gives her maiden name Spencer to reserve the order.
The film Spencer, far from a canonical tale of a white woman going mad under pressure, is a compelling portrait of madness and seeking safety as it intersects with race, gender, class, and sexuality. It does not end in her death or “cure.” We should not dismiss this story, simply because of Diana’s positioning. Nor can we ignore it and read this film as a warning of what might happen when others actively refuse the role society demands of them. After all, Diana does not, and never will, end up in prison or murdered by an authority figure for her transgressions. While we need more stories told at every intersection of madness, this story of a woman’s breakdown and breakthrough is compelling in its own right, illustrating the powerful agency of refusal denied so many women similarly positioned to Diana. Now, with the frequent call to “bring back the asylum,” perhaps this film can serve as a warning indeed, a reckoning with a forgotten and barbaric past that demanded conformity and compliance to prescribed roles for women with relative privilege and often sadistically held them to this compliance.
Meghann O’Leary (she/her) is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at Miami University in Ohio. She holds a PhD in Disability Studies from the University of Illinois in Chicago. Her research interests include the intersections of Mad Studies and Disability Studies as well as providing an intersectional lens to representations of and by women diagnosed with psychiatric disabilities, including media representations and various life-writings. She loves dark, apocalyptic films with social commentary, especially while snuggling on the couch with her feline companion Dylan.
