February 17, 2005
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February 13, 2005
TROPHY WIFE, REDEFINED
From Diana to Camilla: A Fairy Tale for the AARP Set
By KATE ZERNIKE
FTER the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, some therapists reported that their couches were full of women who saw themselves in her short and struggle-filled life, not to mention the ugly unraveling of her marriage to the prince who turned out not to be Prince Charming.
But now, just in time for Valentine’s Day, the British royals serve up a new fairy tale, in the unlikely person of Camilla Parker Bowles, the “third person” Diana blamed for the breakup of her marriage to Charles. Now, 35 years after their first flirtation, Mrs. Parker Bowles is the prince’s bride-to-be.
If Diana, with her bulimia, her remote parents and her loveless marriage, spoke to women of a universal struggle to be unconditionally loved, the engagement last week of Mrs. Parker Bowles allowed women to believe in the power of kismet. Her story seemed to say: Stay patient, committed and supportive, and one day you will get your prince (even if you are post-menopausal).
Of course, old-fashioned romantics are unlikely to break out the hankies for Charles and Camilla.
“When you take it back to its core, he did a very unloving thing, and she was married to someone else, too,” said Nora Roberts, the romance novelist. “How many people are you going to hurt to have what you want? I find that very selfish, and love and romance shouldn’t be selfish.”
But however much one might think Charles had been a jerk to Diana, it was hard not to cheer for the woman he chose over the virgin bride, a woman who has only grown older and more wrinkled. The 56-year-old prince’s fiancée, at 57, is decidedly not a trophy.
“I do feel this is rather satisfactory,” said Fay Weldon, the British novelist who has made a career out of the revenge-of-the-ugly-woman tale (fiction, of course).
“She’s sort of older,” she said, “and everybody says she’s plain, and actually she’s not, she just doesn’t photograph well,” surely something women of any age can relate to. “She held her counsel and kept her cool, and in the end he married her and the marriage is a happy ending, which no one is ever sure of any more.” Even the British press, never sympathetic toward the woman Diana reportedly cursed as “the Rottweiler,” seemed newly transfixed by the engagement as fairy tale. After offering sympathy to Diana loyalists who might have misgivings about the marriage, which is set for April 8, The Sun wrote in an online editorial Friday: “Many of us have endured broken relationships or suffered the pain of bereavement and then found joy again with another partner. If it is right for us, then why should it not be right for Charles and Camilla, too?”
In fact, the tale of Charles and Camilla seems exactly right for the times, as fickle baby boomers face their gray years on both sides of the Atlantic.
“I think it’s a great postmodern romance,” said Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. With Viagra, the high rate of second marriages and the columnists in AARP magazine offering advice on love the second time around, Ms. Whitehead said, “the idea that one is on a romantic quest until we reach the grave is now part of the love and marriage story in America.”
Charles and Camilla are part of a twist on the classic fairy tale, said Genevieve Field, the editor of “Sex and Sensibility,” a new collection of women’s writings about singledom. Ms. Field noted the new flood of stories about divorced or widowed people discovering their soul mates among old flames at reunions.
Donna Hanover turned her own experience of marrying her college sweetheart, after her very public divorce from Rudolph Giuliani, into a book about similar stories: Carol Channing, who recently married her junior high school love; Liza Huber, star of the NBC soap “Passions,” who married the boy who sat behind her in second grade; and the designer Nicole Miller, who reunited with a former boyfriend in 1996.
Ms. Hanover was quick to draw parallels to Charles and Camilla. “The fact that they’re continually drawn to each other, in spite of the criticism, is very revealing about the power of early love,” she noted.
But every fairy tale, even true-life ones, needs a dose of cold reality – and here it is: Ladies, don’t expect Camilla’s story to happen to you.
“This is a triumph of hope over reality here,” said Raoul L. Felder, the divorce lawyer who represented Ms. Hanover’s former husband. “The reality is, this is a woman who probably wouldn’t do very well in the marital market, and she ended up with a prince.”
In real life, he noted, it isn’t true that “there’s a prince for every pumpkin.”
But Ms. Weldon, the British novelist, seemed willing to believe that after his twittish behavior, Charles has finally grown up and done the right thing. And Camilla, for now, gets to wear the tiara.
“She stays in there through all this and then she comes out a winner, and I think, ‘good for her,’ not because she’s a winner but because she loves him and he apparently loves her,” Ms. Weldon said. “You think it’s a rather rare emotion, but it seems to be real in this case. I like that. You go all sotty.”
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