by Susan Bordo
Few of the young women in the Boleyn Internet community are wistful Dianas, dreaming about snagging a prince or looking dazzling in royal jewels. They may have heard the same fairy tales as Diana did when she was a child, but few of them were old enough to have watched the royal wedding on television, and they all know how that fairy tale ended. Having watched The Tudors, many people—including me—were annoyed but addicted, and they knew how that one ended too. None of them see Anne as a tragic victim either. Yes, they felt that a huge injustice had been done to her; but “victim” is not a word in their vocabulary. Even the youngest interviewees (twelve to nineteen), when asked what made them an Anne fan, spoke of her intelligence, her independence, her refusal to be silenced, and her spunk. “I love her motto—‘This is how it’s going to be; let them grumble’; it’s basically an elegant way of sticking two fingers up to the people who hated her. She definitely had guts.”22 “For shy, soft-spoken girls, she is an inspiration to stand up and say something, and for not so soft-spoken girls, they can relate to her forwardness.”23 As someone who’d researched girls’ pain and depression over their bodies, I was touched by how often the younger girls mentioned Anne’s confidence in her own appearance, “even though she wasn’t overly pretty,”24 “not just a pretty face,”25 even “the antithesis of the ideal beauty.”26 “She wasn’t the conventional beauty and yet she showed that you didn’t have to fit the norm and that it was good to be different.”27
I hardly ever asked a question or posted a feature that “announced” itself as feminist or that suggested that label in connection with Anne. (The one time that I did—on another page—I was trounced for being “anachronistic” and “ahistorical.”) Yet without the word itself—poison to many young women nowadays—quite a few of my interviewees came pretty close to a classically feminist view. Especially among my post-twenty-year-old interviewees, phrases such as “male-dominated world” began to show up, and the analysis of inequality in Anne’s time went beyond “roles.” One twenty-six-year-old, while admitting that “Anne had power” and “made a difference in the world,” also saw her as representing “the struggle women can have with men. Some men cannot handle it when a woman is so intelligent.”28 On another website, a reader complained: “It makes me CRAZY when people place all the blame on the ‘loose woman’ who ruins a marriage. They did it in the sixteenth century and they still do it today. Where is the man’s/husband’s culpability? Why do we always fall back on the easily blamed ‘whore’? Why must the man be ‘led’ astray? He has no mind or libido of his own? Please.”29 “Look at Jane’s motto: ‘Bound to obey and serve,’” said a thirty-year-old interviewee. “If Anne lived nowadays, she would have said: ‘What the hell is that?! We’re not meant to be a man’s doormat!”30 Even my one twelve-year-old praised Anne for the fact that “she knew she wasn’t a second-class citizen.”31
But although these young women might complain about continuing sexual inequality, they, like their younger counterparts, put more emphasis on the degree to which Anne triumphed over her situation, making use of whatever resources were available to her. As Lynn Phillips brilliantly demonstrates in her study of young women’s attitudes toward sexuality, Flirting with Danger, these are generations that have grown up believing that being seen as a “victim” is the worst fate one can suffer. “Contrary to right-wing claims that women are eager to go public and ‘cry victimization,’” Phillips found that her subjects (they were undergraduates in college in the late 1990s when her study was conducted) went to great psychological lengths to “disqualify” themselves as victims.32 “Young women recounted many detailed stories of pain, humiliation, manipulation, violence, and force in their hetero- relations . . . Yet they were largely unwilling to use such labels as ‘rape,’ ‘acquaintance rape,’ ‘battering,’ or ‘abuse’ to describe those experiences.”33 Phillips suggests that “the generation of young women currently coming into adulthood may have quite different understandings of gendered power than those of second-wave feminist activists and scholars, perhaps twenty to fifty years their senior . . . Whereas feminist scholars may speak of male domination and women’s victimization as rather obvious phenomena, younger women, raised to believe in their own independence, invulnerability, and sexual entitlement, may not so readily embrace such concepts.”34
My twenty-somethings, like their younger counterparts, praised Anne’s intelligence, independence, courage, determination, and strength. But they also applauded (what they saw as) Anne’s forthright sexuality. “She came across as fiery, but also as sexy and desirable.”35 “She was a modern-day girl in the wrong time period and people weren’t ready for that. We relate because we act that way today. We are outspoken, a little feisty, and do what it takes to get what we want by using sex.”36 Surveying my interview responses as well as material from other websites, it became clear to me that Anne’s young fans have not followed any of the historical prototypes, but have created their own Anne, patched together out of those pieces of the media images that they find attractive (beauty, style—Anne’s favorite magazines would be Vogue, InStyle, Elle, Marie Claire, and Cosmopolitan37), actual historical information from the “elders” on the sites (which debunks many of the most vicious myths the media images promulgate), and, most of all, what they see as the many-sidedness of Anne’s personality, which resists definition as either flirt or “brain,” “feminine” or feisty, mother or career woman, sexpot or “one of the guys,” saint or sinner. They identify passionately with, or aspire to, this many-sidedness; it’s what has made Anne a distinctly contemporary heroine for them.
So, when asked on another website to respond to the query “Anne Boleyn—Angel or Devil?”38 most participants refused the terms of the question.
“She was human, she had her assets and her flaws, and she showed off both.” “She was neither an angel nor a devil. She was human.” “I don’t believe that Anne Boleyn was either a ‘witch,’ a ‘whore,’ or a ‘saint.’ I believe she was an ambitious, intellectual woman who like all the others before or since are rounded up into one of those tidy categories. Categories that allow society to pigeonhole ‘difficult’ women whom they don’t know what else to do with. Certainly, her life contained elements of all three, but this is a complex, multifaceted personality that was more than the sum total of all her parts.” “It’s far too simplistic to define her as either an ‘angel’ or a ‘devil.’ She was an intelligent, educated, highly sophisticated woman, who certainly possessed many flaws, significant among them being considerable arrogance, but who was also far too complex to be dismissed as simply a ‘bad’ or ‘good’ character . . . She really was a great deal more than a home-wrecking harlot who ran off with another woman’s husband, but she also wasn’t an innocent lamb who had no idea what she was getting herself into. She was hugely complicated, and not easy to dismiss.” “In Anne we have intelligence, strength, coquettishness, vulnerability, outspokenness and culture. And that may only be scratching the surface.” “Anne was an extraordinary woman, and can’t be lassoed into a single category.”39
One of my interviewees described Anne as “the original feminist.”40 If so, her feminism, for these girls, is clearly of the “third-wave” variety—a woman of contradictions who cannot be “lassoed” or “pigeonholed,” who skillfully walks the line between sexuality and sluttiness, girliness and brass, playfulness and power. So, if Anne was alive today, she’d be “provocative but not slutty.”41 She’d wear business suits during the day, but “designer outfits from Milan for evenings.”42 At Oktoberfest, “she would be flirtatious, magnetic.”43 But then she’d leave the guys dumbfounded by going home alone.
Unlike those consumers of pop culture who simply love to see a bitch get what’s coming to her, these young women have constructed an Anne who “empowers” them without asking that they relinquish their femininity or become a parody of it in the process. She’s neither a “victim” nor a “power feminist,” but she’s not “postfeminist” or “antifeminist” either. Her
very independence of mind and heart insists that it’s her right, and her pleasure, to dance, and flirt, and thrill to beautiful clothes—and then, if she chooses, leave the party alone. This Anne winks at young women across the centuries and understands the challenges they face and the questions they ask. Can I be myself—fully myself, sexual and smart, serious and playful, sometimes demanding, sometimes jealous, sometimes too loud, sometimes wanting to leave the party alone—and still be loved? Can I be loved—fully loved, body, soul, and mind—and still remain myself? If forced to choose, what will I sacrifice and what will I hold fast to?
Where did this “third-wave” Anne come from? In no small part, the answer is Showtime’s The Tudors. For many, born long after 1969, when the movie version of Anne of the Thousand Days—my generation’s introduction to Anne—was released, the series was their first taste of the sexy, seamy side of British history, made all the more enticing by the gorgeous, stylishly updated leads who looked nothing like the characters in their high school texts. (In fact, most of the people I interviewed had learned virtually nothing about Henry VIII’s wives—just “the Reformation”—in high school.) Without Natalie Dormer’s contribution to the role, however, only the most avid young researchers would have had the material out of which to forge a “third-wave” Anne. To professional historians, it may seem as though her hard-won revisions amounted to little more than tweaking. But for young viewers of the show, the changes Dormer made went a long way. “She portrayed so many sides of Anne,” said one of my seventeen-year-old interviewees, “strong, flirtatious, jealous, angry, intelligent, caring, loving . . . and she did so without ever losing the matchless allure that makes Anne so fascinating.”44 From an eighteen-year-old: “Natalie captured the signature ‘I am no fool’ aspect of Anne’s personality. Her Anne demanded attention; she brought feistiness to the English court, and embodied curiosity, intellect and charm in a manner I have never seen.”45 A nineteen-year-old said, “She gave the good, the bad, the vulnerable, the mother, and a sense that Anne was a very strong woman. Especially at the end.”46 From a twenty-five-year-old: “She captured the different sides of Anne very well—the innocent, the proud, the unsure, the angry, the strong. Anne is an extremely multidimensional character, and Natalie showed her as such.”47
Is this the “real” Anne? That’s a question that is unanswerable. But she clearly is a new Anne—and she doesn’t live only in the imaginations of young women and girls. British playwright Howard Brenton, without ever having watched The Tudors or visited an Anne Boleyn Internet site, arrived at a very similar conception in his critically acclaimed Anne Boleyn. Brenton didn’t even begin from a particular interest in Anne. Asked to write a play for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London celebrating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, at first Brenton was stumped. “Then I remembered that Anne Boleyn had a Testament, a Tyndale Testament, and, of course, the King James Bible is largely based on Tyndale. I thought that was interesting, and then the play spun itself from that,” he recalled.48 If you begin with Anne the reformist rather than Anne the home wrecker you get a very different sort of story: “It is as if there were a Joan of Arc, driven by a religious vision, within the more familiar figure of Anne the dazzling sexual predator.”49 Working from Eric Ives’s highly respected biography, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn—but not limiting himself to the historical facts—Brenton “spins” the story of a fiercely dedicated Protestant with a wicked sense of humor who opens the play in her bloodstained execution dress, taunting the audience about the contents of an embroidered bag that looks suspiciously large enough to be carrying a head. “Do you want to see it? Who wants to see it? Do you? You?”50 What she pulls out first—before the head—is Tyndale’s Bible.
Judging from the reviews, for many in the audience—even the critics—Brenton’s Anne was their first acquaintance with Anne the religious reformer, and with the now widely accepted explanation that her fall was engineered by Thomas Cromwell, with whom Anne fell out over the use of monastery monies. But although Brenton wanted to celebrate Anne’s “life and legacy as a great English woman who helped change the course of our history,” he didn’t leave the dazzler entirely behind.51 The artist in him, who eschews “message” and moralizing—and who admitted to me that he fell in love with Anne over the course of writing the play—couldn’t see her as saintly. Like the “third-wave” Anne, Brenton’s Anne is a flirt, and—as the play’s Cromwell puts it—could “look straight at you and wasn’t scared.”52 “What man,” he goes on, “can deal with that?”53
Brenton didn’t set out to create an Anne who challenged the duality of saint and sinner; in fact, writing the play was largely a matter of following his instincts.
“I don’t think you can know,” he told me, “whether something you’re working on is going to resonate for an audience. And often later, if it does, you realize, ‘Oh, that’s why I was so obsessed with that at that time!’ You can’t ever have a message-driven play that tries to disrupt and so on. You just follow an instinct, something that you’re obsessed with at the moment, and then only later do you realize why. It’s very dangerous for writers to suddenly begin to think about their ‘whys.’ You can go bonkers; you turn into the label that you’ve created. We can’t be moralists or ideologues. It’s a different kind of truth we should be after. Dostoevsky was a great novelist, but if you read his political and religious tracts, they are awful. They’re one dimensional, ranting, very little human feeling or insight to the human condition in them.”54
When I asked Brenton what he realized about the “why” of it after writing the play, he replied, “I don’t really know. Instability of regimes?”55 This surprised me because what was clearly the most provocative and enjoyable dimension of the play for audiences was its mixture of the sacred and the profane, particularly in the character of Anne. Brenton’s Anne can worship at the altar of “the word” one moment and wish, of Katherine, that “the bitch would piss off to a convent”56 the next, be someone who can lecture King James (the play weaves back and forth through time between his reign and Henry’s) about God’s will, but when he asks if she was “such an insufferable holy cow” when she was alive, she replies, “Oh no, I had a lot of fun!”57 Perhaps the key, both to Brenton’s musing about the “instability of regimes” and his conception of Anne, is “instability”—not in the psychological sense (crazy Anne in the Tower, as in Donizetti’s opera), but in the “postmodern” sense, in which everything that once seemed solid melts away, fixed truths are deconstructed, and rigid dualisms crumble. Brenton would never characterize himself as a postmodern, but then, very few of the women and girls who participate in the discussions on the Anne websites would characterize themselves as feminists. These things are not about the “positions” one takes but the cultural waves that flow through us. “We always write from our own time,” Hilary Mantel told me—even when we try to swim against the tide.58
Afterword: Anne, Susan, and Cassie
WE ALWAYS WRITE from our own time.” And our own lives. This book, for me, started as a kind of rescue fantasy. I have always been fascinated by girls and women who began with great hope and promise and met tragic ends—Anne Frank, Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana. And then, too, the less famous but brilliant, troubled young women—the anorexics, the cutters, the sexually abused—who have been drawn to me as a teacher, writer, and friend. I have been adopting these girls all my life, spellbound by the (almost always false) belief that if they just had someone who truly understood, everything could be made right. For them, of course, but also for me. As they sat in my office, sipping their water, soothed and grateful, I would feel the capable, reassuring, empathic Professor Bordo grow bigger and more real, until the sad, fearful child that I had been, Susan Klein, would almost disappear. Almost. Twenty-five years before, those feelings had led me to write my first book, about cultural attitudes toward the female body and their impact on girls and women; when I first began to research Anne Boleyn, I felt I
was being called to another maternal mission. I would find the “real” Anne Boleyn and rescue her from the pile of mythology that had built up around her. Presumptuous. Grandiose. But in the end, isn’t that why writers continue to add our puny words to the vast pile? We want to save someone, something, some truth or other, from oblivion, forgetfulness, stupidity, malice.
At an early stage in my research, I hung a postcard of a particular portrait of Anne on the whiteboard that sat next to my desk, decorated with other scraps of Tudoriana. Anonymous, undoubtedly a copy, and depicting a far younger Anne than the National Gallery portrait or any of the other later interpretations, the painting now hangs in Hever Castle, Anne’s childhood home. I had surmised from the childishness of her plump cheeks and soft, dreamy eyes, and the fact that she is still wearing an English hood—starched, hair-concealing, with a gabled point similar to that of a nun’s headdress—that she hadn’t yet been sent abroad.1 I figure her to be about twelve. It was a privilege, of course, to be “finished” abroad—and far less wrenching in the sixteenth century, when infant mortality was high and the affective bonds between parent and child were nothing like the norm today, when a middle-class child’s leaving for college is a great drama for all concerned. Still, at twelve, Anne had known nothing but the secluded Hever countryside and an everyday life centered on learning and play with her mother, brother, and sister. It had to have been wrenching, if exciting, to leave this bucolic life behind.
I loved this dreamy portrait, whatever its origins. For me, it was a reminder that there was an Anne before Henry, before the divorce from Katherine, before the miscarriages, before the charges of adultery, before the Tower. An Anne who sat at a seventeen-foot table; laughing with her family; dining on roasts, olive pie, spiced custard, and the numerous fricassees and “quelque choses” that were the pride of every well-heeled Tudor housewife. An Anne who practiced her French with the diligence of a scholar. An Anne who slept in a tiny bedroom—snug, plain, and sweet, and among the few rooms at Hever that have not been plushly redecorated in Edwardian style—dreaming of . . . what? We really don’t know. The Hever portrait reminds us that the archetypal temptress was once a real live child.