6
The heteromonarchy: Kate Middleton, ‘middle-classness’ and family values
Since the birth of Prince George in 2013, Princess Charlotte in 2015 and Prince Louis in 2018, the Cambridge children's childhoods have been documented through official portraits on notable occasions, such as birthdays, first days at school or family holidays (Figure 6.1). These are released on Kate and William's Instagram account @kensingtonroyal (named for Kensington Palace, the family's official home and the name of their Communications Offices, which runs the account), which as of 2020 has 12 million followers. The photographs appear natural, impromptu and informal, and the Instagram is framed as ‘the Cambridge family photo album’, allowing ‘intimate’ glimpses into Cambridge family life. The captions often reveal that Kate Middleton takes some photographs herself, enhancing their connotations of familiarity and sharing a private family album.
6.1 The Cambridge family on holiday, 2016
Instagram is bound with notions of intimacy and authenticity, as people share representations of their everyday lives.1 For celebrities, and indeed royals, this means giving glimpses into their ‘private’ lives. As I discussed in Chapter 2, the challenge for the Firm on social media is that it is a form of ‘context collapse’, whereby institutions and celebrities co-exist on the same platform as their fans and the public, reproducing notions of intimacy and blurring hierarchical boundaries, which the Firm also needs to maintain its monarchical mystique.2
Although ‘the Cambridge family photo album’ connotes intimacy, these photographs, as with every official monarchical press release, are precisely choreographed to foreground particular meaning. In comparison to portraiture of historical monarchies depicting royal children as inheritors of political dynasty,3 these photographs present the Cambridges as a nuclear, heteronormative and (upper-)middle-class family. The historian Patricia Holland suggests that these portraits are often idealised, ensuring that the middle-class family is coded as aspirational and desirable.4 But considering that traditional family photograph albums have been displaced by digital cultures, their evocation on Instagram by the Cambridges is bound up with nostalgia for traditional family values. It appeals to the nuclear, middle-class family when families and class identifications in Britain are becoming more complex, and, indeed, when the Cambridges are far from middle class.
We have seen that the Firm performs middle-class family values as initially modelled by Queen Victoria to disguise its capitalist and corporate relations, producing the Family Firm. I proposed that, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, aristocracy and royalty embraced ‘middle-classness’ to distance themselves from associations with greed, profligacy and moral ‘lack’. We now consider what kind of middle-class family the Firm simulates by examining the figure of Kate Middleton. Kate is primarily represented as middle-class due to her non-aristocratic background, and the news and entertainment media have crafted a ‘rags to riches’ story of aspirational classed mobility, using the recognisable tropes of classic fairy tales.5 This is most clearly illustrated in how she is still commonly referred to as ‘Kate Middleton’; a middle-class stage name as opposed to the aristocratic ‘Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge’. In fact, Kate occupies a complex class position in that her family could be classified as middle-class when she was born (on the basis of occupation: her mother and father were a flight attendant and a flight dispatcher, respectively), but rose to the upper- or upper-middle-class after starting their own ‘family firm’, the party supplies business Party Pieces in 1987. As of 2019, Party Pieces has an estimated worth of £40 million.6 I suggest that foregrounding Kate's supposed ‘middle classness’ is a strategic move for the Firm to mask its hereditary privilege, and appear to open aristocratic cultures to the middle classes. However, this openness is merely a gesture. In fact, representations of Kate and the Cambridges illustrate how the Firm is becoming even more remote through Kate's indeterminate persona and staged photoshoots.
Sexual politics and gender roles are also narrated through Kate's middle-class background. Like Princess Diana before her, and Meghan Markle after her, Kate has received sustained media coverage from popular celebrity publications, frequently topping ‘best celebrity role model’ opinion polls, and voted a ‘fashion icon’.7 She has also featured in academic analysis to exemplify ‘postfeminism’ and contemporary motherhood.8 In contrast, I suggest that postfeminism is being developed under new forms of authoritarian neoliberalism, dynastic wealth and patrimonial forms of capitalism, which facilitate more conservative gender roles. Women are increasingly encouraged to embrace traditional femininities and undertake ‘dynasty-making’ practices to reproduce elite family's wealth and privilege. The feminist scholar Beatrix Campbell uses the term ‘neoliberal neopatriarchy’ to demonstrate how gendered divisions are not just a by-product of neoliberalism, rather it is ‘cause and effect’.9 That is, under neoliberalism, women (alongside racially minoritised groups, the lower classes, people with disabilities, queer people) are structurally disadvantaged and bear the brunt of inequalities and systemic misogyny.10
The feminist scholar Anne McClintock describes how white, heterosexual, upper-/middle-class women have longer histories as standard bearers of the nation, as nations are constructed through domestic spaces.11 This takes on particular purchase in the monarchy. Whilst Running the Family Firm has argued that the Firm is reproduced through media cultures, this chapter extends this to consider how the Firm is also dependent upon the biological reproduction of an heir. To maintain power, the monarchy must both reproduce its lineage and reproduce itself in the public imagination (and, as photographs of the Cambridges demonstrate, these processes are interlinked). Kate's body is fetishised as reproductive of the citizenry, reproducing the nation's ‘First Family’. Kate is a contemporary configuration of the centrality of nostalgic heteronormativity and traditional gender roles to the reproduction of monarchical power, and indeed heterosexual reproduction is key to its ‘frontstage’. This is the heteromonarchy.
The happy housewife to the #tradwife
The idealisation of domesticity has a long history interwoven with (conservative) political imagination. In the Victorian era, the ‘separate spheres’ of work and home were represented through fantasies of the wife or mother as the ‘Angel in the House’.12 After the Second World War, the figure of ‘the happy housewife’ arose in second-wave feminist critiques of domesticity and motherhood, the best known of which is Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.13 Friedan describes ‘the happy housewife myth’ in the 1960s USA: poster and advertisement representations of young, conventionally attractive, middle-class women content with their domestic roles due to suburban consumer cultures, used to persuade women (back) into the private sphere after undertaking war work.14 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the American feminist Susan Faludi identified similar representations of ‘the New Traditionalist’ as middle-class stay-at-home mothers who had chosen to return to domestic roles.15 As the feminist theorist Sara Ahmed writes, ‘the happy housewife is a fantasy figure that erases the signs of labour under the sign of happiness … How better to justify an unequal distribution of labour than to say such labour makes people happy?’ 16
The ‘happy housewife’ re-emerged again in contemporary British austerity cultures as a moral imperative to encourage domestic restraint as a solution to hardship.17 This makes specific references to the context of postfeminism: a neoliberal ‘sensibility’ 18 variously incorporating a ‘repudiation’ of feminist politics;19 an emphasis on individualism, choice and agency;20 and an idealised ‘married heterosexual monogamy’.21 A ‘retreatist’ narrative in contemporary media culture encourages women to ‘choose’ to reclaim the domestic space and retreat from work, which feminist scholars have critiqued given the limitations to ‘choice’ within the context of capitalist patriarchy.22 Simultaneously, the reproductive female body is increasingly represented as aspirational. Jo Littler's work on the ‘yummy mummy’, for example, identified ‘a type of mother who is sexually attractive and well-groomed’,23 and the pregnant female body is increasingly visible in media culture.24
The ‘yummy mummy’ is distinctly (middle-)classed, revolving around conspicuous consumption and leisure practices. The cultural theorist Angela McRobbie identifies this as ‘mediated maternalism’, which she argues is used by the political right to reproduce middle-class norms and denigrate working-class single mothers reliant on state benefits.25 This updates ideas of family values for the neoliberal regime.26 Marxist feminist work draws attention to women's invisible labour in capital accumulation, with domestic work and child rearing functioning as social reproduction to support the labour market.27 In this new realm of ‘mediated maternalism’, the family ‘is managed along the lines of a small business or enterprise’ whereby motherhood is ‘a mode of investment in the human capital of infants and children’.28 It is, fittingly, a family firm.
Representations of the mother as the household's CEO are explicitly present in contemporary #tradwife discourses. This is a hashtag emerging on YouTube and social media in the mid- to late 2010s from women exalting the virtues of staying at home, illustrating the reorientation of ‘happy housewife’ discourses around social media.29 The tradwife – traditional wife – describes women who ‘choose’ to stay at home and care for their husbands and children.30 In the contemporary equivalent of postwar ‘happy housewife’ posters, tradwives use photographs, blogs and videos on social media to document their idealised domestic lives. The #tradwife movement is situated in the contemporary (inter)national socio-political context and the rise of nostalgia, of which – as I have described throughout this book – some of the Brexit vote is emblematic, drawing on traditional, middle- or upper-class, right-wing ‘British values’ to reject freedom of movement, immigration, globalisation and multiculturalism.
One particularly visible tradwife in Britain is Alena Pettitt, who runs the blog and Instagram ‘The Darling Academy’ with over twenty thousand followers. Pettitt – and those like her – draw on upper-class nationalist iconography. She describes her lifestyle as returning to ‘traditional British values’, her Instagram has a red, blue and white colour palette which reflects the Union Jack flag, her book Ladies Like Us teaches lessons in upper-class British etiquette, and in one Instagram post she hailed Queen Elizabeth II as ‘the ultimate Trad Wife’ because she supports ‘duty, nation and family’.31 In a blog post, Pettitt celebrates Kate as ‘the English Rose personified, charming, intelligent, elegant … [and] conservative’.32
The #tradwife illustrates how the contemporary right-wing movement is gendered. Conservative, heteronormative family values and the re-traditionalisation of gender politics have been re-popularised under political ideologies variously termed authoritarian neoliberalism,33 libertarian authoritarianism34 and/or neoconservatism.35 These values are perhaps best visualised within the ‘new elites’, where oligarchic and patriarchal families such as the Trumps openly use nepotism to reproduce dynastic power.36 In their study of ‘family offices’, the sociologists Luna Glucksberg and Roger Burrows found that ‘the link between kinship, property rights and wealth was key. It was about the social reproduction of a particular group’ through human capital.37 The sociologist Melinda Cooper found that ideologies of ‘family values’ united neoliberals and social neo-conservatives in the USA, with both groups moralising traditional ideas of the family as portals to wealth and status.38 The anthropologist Sylvia Yanagisako similarly argued that ideologies of ‘family values’ reflect how kinship, economy and politics increasingly intersect amongst the elites through, for example, inheritance practices.39 The feminist scholar Laura Briggs argues similarly that gendered issues such as family values, surrogacy, abortions and welfare reform are politicised to emphasise the normalisation of heteronormativity, nuclear familialism and middle-classness (see also Lisa Duggan's work on queer families framed through discourses of ‘homonormativity’).40 It is female bodies, and their reproductive capacities, that are the subjects of authoritarian neoliberal regimes. Women become standard-bearers for the reproduction of nation(alism).
It is in this context that the figure of Kate Middleton emerges. Alena Pettitt's celebration of Kate, alongside Pettitt's repeated royalist statements, demonstrate Kate’s usefulness for representations of ‘happy housewife’ or tradwife cultures.
‘The Kate effect’
In the 1910s, the Soviet film-maker Lev Kuleshov demonstrated what he called ‘the Kuleshov effect’: a film-editing phenomenon where viewers receive meaning from the sequential editing of shots rather than each shot on its own. Kuleshov created a short film featuring the expressionless face of the actor Ivan Mosjoukine, which were interspersed with various other, entirely disparate, shots (for example, a girl in a coffin, a bowl of soup). He found that the cumulative effect meant that audiences believed that Mosjoukine's expression changed each time he appeared, depending on which object he appeared to be ‘looking at’ (grief or hunger, respectively). The experiment demonstrates that cinema's meaning ‘exists in the mind of the spectator rather than the celluloid itself’, because Mosjoukine's face was the expressionless receptacle on to which audiences projected meaning.41
I argue here for the relevance of what I call ‘the Kate effect’, whereby the meaning of Kate is constructed by virtue of the clothing – the costume – she wears in particular representations, and the cumulative effect of these. Her unchanging smiling face (the happy housewife) in all representations can be read in conjunction with Mosjoukine's expressionless one: it relies on the context of Kate's surroundings to give it meaning. Unlike Meghan Markle, who was an established celebrity upon joining the Firm, Kate has been made by the monarchy. Very little is known about Kate and she gives few public speeches. The few times her voice has been heard it is directly connected to the Firm, tied to either heterosexual family life (an interview for her and William's engagement), feminised charitable interests (children's and mother's mental health issues, art gallery patronages) or rare feminised television appearances (A Berry Royal Christmas, featuring Kate baking with the British chef Mary Berry).42 Like Mosjoukine's face, in film theory terms Kate is a non-specific sign, with meaning projected on to her depending on her costumes. Art historians have used clothing to unearth the details and significance of portraiture, and Hilary Mantel drew on this work to describe Kate as ‘a jointed doll in which certain rags are hung … she was a shop-window mannequin … entirely defined by what she wore’.43 Kate's image is multiple as she moves between costumes to present different personas – the housewife, the celebrity, the middle-Englander and the aristocrat.
In July 2015, the newborn Princess Charlotte's christening was held at the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk. Here, the Cambridge family displayed traditional 1950s styling, drawing on royal moments past (Figure 6.2). George was dressed in an embroidered smock top with formal red shorts and traditional buckle shoes, an almost exact copy of an outfit his father had worn as a toddler in 1984.44 Charlotte was wrapped in the traditional royal christening gown, and put in an antique pram used at Prince Charles's christening in 1948 – not a pushchair designed to fit in a car for the ‘mum on the go’, but a retro carriage for the camera.45 Kate wore a demure white coatdress with fascinator and low-heeled court shoes. The image of Kate pushing the pram is an astonishingly retrogressive representation of contemporary conservative femininity. She is perfectly coiffed yet demonstrably unsexy, fashionable yet twee, and firmly upper- or upper-middle class. The comments on this photograph on the Kensington Palace Instagram demonstrate its power. One user, @robertoalexavillegas, comments to a fellow user ‘Babe omfg goals!!!!!!’, suggesting that the Cambridges are their life ‘goal’ (albeit, perhaps, with ironic overstatement).46 The christening photographs resonate with Sara Ahmed's description of heterosexuality: ‘heterosexual love becomes about the possibility of a happy ending; about what life is aimed toward, as being what gives life direction or purpose’.47 The Cambridges’ broad smiles presents their nuclear family unit as fulfilling. The scholar Lauren Berlant argues that people develop ‘optimistic attachment[s]’ to fantasies of happiness, or ‘the good life’.48 She suggests these fantasies become cruel – what she calls ‘cruel optimism’ – when these fantasies are unachievable or unsustainable. For user @robertoalexavillegas, the Cambridge family fantasy is unattainable: the monarchy is a hereditary institution, and it is extremely unlikely audiences can marry into it despite the myths of meritocracy that Kate consolidates (see below). Rather, representations of the Cambridges normalise heterosexuality and conservative versions of femininity and family life.
6.2 Princess Charlotte's christening, 2015
Kate is often described in media culture as a ‘fashion icon’. The fansite ‘What Would Kate Do?’ includes a section called ‘repliKate’, which advises readers on buying ‘lookalike’ clothes.49 The Daily Mail's Femail section published an article two days after Kate announced her pregnancy with George entitled ‘Queen of the Yummy Mummies and her tiny trendsetter’.50 The list of products includes a £148 soft toy, and a £1,450 pram. While the happy housewife of the 1950s was targeted by advertisements for domestic technologies,51 the contemporary mother is targeted by images showing elite mothers and their luxury lifestyles. Diane Negra has described a ‘culture of aspirational elitism’, where luxury commodities are represented as essential to the middle classes under neoliberal capitalism.52 Of course, at those prices, these fantasies of ‘the good life’ and of ‘repliKating’ are once again ‘cruel’ for many.53
If Kate is a ‘fashion icon’, this is a particularly conservative version of contemporary fashion trends. Jo Littler describes the ‘yummy mummy’, as the name implies, as a mother who is sexually appealing.54 Whilst Kate is conventionally attractive, she is never publicly sexually objectified. Her potential, well-narrated faux pas at university, when she wore a sheer dress for a charity catwalk, has been co-opted by the news and entertainment media as part of a transformation narrative after William fell in love with her, thus lending the occasion a level of respectability because her (temporary) sexualisation led to heterosexual, monogamous marriage.55 Before her marriage, some tabloid newspapers and entertainment magazines dubbed her ‘Waity Katie’ because they dated for nine years before engagement, suggesting that she was desperate to be married.56 At her wedding, any sexual attention was redirected towards her sister, Pippa Middleton, whose bum became the focus of media commentary in a figure-hugging gown.57 Paparazzi images that do capture Kate's unclothed body – when her skirt blew up, or in a bikini, for example – have been quickly concealed by the British press, despite the usual willingness of tabloid newspapers to reproduce such photographs of female celebrities. When the French edition of the celebrity magazine Closer published long-lens photographs of Kate sunbathing topless on private property, Kensington Palace sought an injunction and eventually won €100,000 in damages.58 In comparison to the invasive coverage of Meghan Markle (see Chapter 7), Kate remains remarkably protected. As I argue below, this is perhaps attributable to connections between the white, middle-class mother and the reproduction of nationhood – particularly one responsible for birthing the heir to the throne.
Kate's fashion style reflects this conservatism, usually incorporating mid-length skirts and high necklines. This suggests a classed and gendered respectability, which the sociologist Beverley Skeggs associates with ‘restraint, repression, reasonableness, modesty and denial’.59 Kate's outfits (or costumes) exemplify the fusing of celebrity, middle-Englander, heritage and aristocratic cultures. At informal occasions, her style evokes countryside rurality and heritage cultures – Barbour jackets, quasi-riding boots and tweed jackets. But as opposed to the Sloane-esque traditionalism of Diana, Kate combines this aesthetic with ‘celebrity style’ long blow-dried hair, neat make-up and manicured nails. This is alongside a middle-Englander embracement of high-street stores, which the news and entertainment media use to narrate her ‘ordinariness’. Cosmopolitan magazine, for example, announced ‘Kate Middleton just wore a £40 Zara summer dress to the polo’, assimilating classed cultures.60 The fusion of costumes and cultures is best exemplified in Kate's 2016 front cover for Vogue. Posing in a Norfolk field, Kate combines a Burberry suede coat (a brand also subject to shifting classed connotations) with a high-street Beyond Retro fedora and trademark long, wavy hair.61 Inside the magazine, she poses in a Breton-style top leaning against a gatepost; stroking her dog Lupo in a long denim jumpsuit; and pushing an antique bicycle. The blurring classed cultures are further signified in the photograph's display in the National Portrait Gallery to celebrate Vogue's centenary issue, connoting it with artistic and historic value.
If Kate's indeterminate persona make her a non-specific sign, she is useful for the Firm. She simultaneously connotes conservative, upper-class femininity, celebrity style and middle-classness, appealing to multiple audiences, which are mobilised by the Firm.
The ‘Middletonization’ of the Firm
The first official photograph following George's birth in 2013 was taken by Kate's father, Michael Middleton, in the Middleton family garden. Although it predates the Kensington Palace Instagram, it draws on similar notions of familial intimacy. Kate, William (‘Kate and Wills’), George and their spaniel Lupo relax on the grass in casual (yet conservative) clothing, described by Jo Littler as ‘Bodenesque’ after the upper-middle-class clothing brand.62 Here, the ‘Cambridge family photo album’ appeals to a heteronormative, nostalgic ‘middle-classness’.
The photograph reflects both the variations and the consistencies in representations of the Family Firm over time. The Cambridges draw on similar values to the intimate, domestic portraits of Queen Victoria and her young family (see Chapter 1), yet Victoria poses in an opulent palace interior, whilst the Cambridges sit in the Middleton family garden, distanced from signifiers of aristocratic privilege. The historian Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite argues that in the twentieth-century middle and upper classes blurred due to a cross-class claim to ‘ordinariness’, which was a ‘contested and shifting’ term.63 Likewise, Jo Littler suggests that the royal family are represented as ‘normcore aristocrats’: ultra-wealthy aristocrats who appear ‘ordinary’ and ‘just like us’.64
Indeed, drawing on the signifiers of Kate's family – the Middletons – as ‘middle-class’, the Firm (re)brands itself through what the journalist Tom Sykes has termed the ‘Middletonization’ of the royal family.65 Kate's supposed middle-class background often features in media representations. The ITV documentary When Kate Met William: A Tale of Two Lives, released for the Cambridges’ wedding, narrates her ‘humble beginnings’ in contrast to William, and visualises this through symbols of classed hierarchy.66 Footage of Kensington Palace splices into an image of a suburban house, and the voiceover narrates, ‘while Prince William grew up in the grandeur of Kensington Palace, Kate's childhood home was this Victorian semi67 … bought for £35,000’. The Daily Mail used genealogies of Kate's family tree to give ‘scientific’ evidence of her ‘dirt-poor family past’ and descent from coal miners.68 Narratives of upward social mobility featured on the Daily Telegraph's front page on her wedding day, in the headline ‘Kate waves farewell to her life as a commoner’.69 Such discourses use notions of meritocracy to smooth out, and erase, more complex issues of classification and widening inequalities.
A ‘middle-class’ woman marrying into the monarchy is, indeed, notable. The Royal Marriages Act 1772, which dictated that the first six people in the line of succession need permission from the monarch to marry, was written after George III's anger that his brother Prince Henry had wed the ‘commoner’ Anne Horton in 1771, and aimed to prevent future marriages deemed inappropriate to the dynasty.70 William would require such permission to marry Kate, suggesting that opening up aristocratic culture to the lower classes was approved. In so doing, the Firm can draw on the ‘myth of meritocracy’ to position itself as socially mobile, and overlook the inaccessibility of the inherited classes.71 In Kate's supposed social mobility, the Firm appears attainable and aspirational. On the other hand, such language reasserts a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’: Kate is ‘waving farewell’ to her ‘ordinary’ life because she moves into something decidedly extraordinary. Michael Billig argues that this contradiction between ordinary and extraordinary is a negotiation strategy, whereby audiences position the royals as simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary to make sense of, and produce consent for, their privilege.72
The version of ‘middle-classness’ that the Cambridges evoke is nostalgic, proposing continuity between the twenty-first-century middle classes and those of the Victorian age. For example, the narration in When Kate Met William: A Tale of Two Lives that situates the Middletons in their ‘Victorian semi’ and the royals in Kensington Palace suggests there is nothing between the two extremities.73 In fact, the distinct categories of working, middle and upper class that emerged during the Industrial Revolution have shifted under widening inequalities that polarise the top and bottom of society.74 The Victorian middle classes as a stable, respectable, bourgeois family defined by the ‘separate spheres’ of work and home is a retrogressive notion of social organisation. As the English scholars Rosalía Baena and Christa Byker argue of the television period drama Downton Abbey, ‘collective nostalgia can promote a feeling of community that works to downplay or deflect potentially divisive social differences (class, race, gender and so on)’.75 Likewise, the Cambridges’ nostalgic middle-classness deflects widening inequalities.
The attempted ‘Middletonization’ of the Firm could be interpreted as a strategic antidote to the damaging royal representations of the 1990s. In the Introduction, we saw that the Queen's so-called ‘annus horribilis’ in 1992 was partly characterised by anger at public funds being used to restore Windsor Castle after a fire.76 It was also partly characterised by publicised ‘sexual transgressions’ by the (then) younger royals, after intimate disputes, ‘sexual scandals’ and divorce were documented by the news and entertainment media and shook ‘the patriarchal foundations of the monarchy’.77 The year 1992 saw Prince Andrew separate from Sarah Ferguson, Princess Anne divorce Captain Mark Phillips, Charles separate from Diana, Diana publish the tell-all book Diana: Her True Story, Sarah Ferguson photographed having her toes sucked by the American financer John Bryan, and recordings of Diana's intimate conversations with James Gilbey leaked.78
Such publicised ‘scandals’ were historically commonplace among aristocrats and royalty.79 The historian Anna Clark argues that they often arose because reproducing monarchical power depends upon a legitimate heir, and challenging this legitimacy could contest power. For example, in the early modern period, James II's controversial Catholic heir was rumoured to be an imposter smuggled into the birthing room, and Henry VIII is best known for his multiple marriages in search of a legitimate heir.80 The upper classes typically married strategically to foster alliances with powerful inter/national families, rather than for love.81
In contrast, ‘Wills and Kate’ are depicted as living their ‘happy ever after’. The sociologists Jemima Repo and Riina Yrjölä analysed UK tabloid coverage of Kate between 2010 and 2012, and found that Kate's ordinary family life was often contrasted with Diana's and the royals’ aristocratic upbringing, drawing on the cultural tropes of the respectable, nuclear middle-class family versus the dysfunctional aristocrats.82 William's relationship with the Middleton family was interpreted by some as a ‘positive and healing influence’ on his well-being, resolving histories of broken royal marriages through his absorption into middle-class respectability.83 Distinguishing ‘Wills and Kate’ from historical narratives of ‘scandal’ appears to be something the Firm is keen to uphold. In 2019, the US magazine In Touch reported that William had had an affair.84 This was publicly discussed on Twitter, including by The Times journalist Giles Coren, who quickly deleted his tweet. 85 However, at the time of writing no mainstream British news publications have published the rumours. The online publication the Daily Beast reported that the Firm's lawyers allegedly served legal warnings to British publications banning them from publishing the reports.86 These alleged reports raise important questions about the Firm's apparent influence over journalistic reporting. I argue that Instagram gives the Firm the opportunity to curate such images without interventions from critical news media.
Representations of the Cambridges do not entirely erase historical ‘sexual transgressions’. Rather, past royal representations are incorporated, developed and resolved. The pantomime of ‘scandal’, criticism and resolution is a recurring trope of royal representations, as I demonstrate for the redemption of Prince Harry in Chapter 5. As for Harry, for William and Kate this pantomime often evokes the spectre of Diana. Kate wears Diana's engagement ring, an object that the media scholar Margaret Schwartz identifies as a ‘fetish object … for an imagined body that has been lost’.87 William and Kate also restaged Diana's (in)famous Taj Mahal photograph. The photograph of Diana alone on a bench outside the Taj Mahal, taken in 1992 during an official visit to India, was used repeatedly by the news and entertainment media to capture her isolation amidst her and Charles's impending separation considering the Taj Mahal's symbolic meaning as the monument of love. During their own official trip to India in 2016, William and Kate posed in the same spot with identical framing, but presented a united image of happy domesticity, both smiling widely with Kate's body pointing towards William.88 I argue that this symbolically resolves Charles and Diana's divorce through the respectable Cambridges and their heteronormative, nuclear, middle-class family values. In 2019, the Daily Mail used similar language to suggest that representations of ‘Brand Cambridge’ as ‘solid, relatable, [and] reliable’ were a counterpoint to a year of negative royal stories, from reports of Prince Andrew's involvement with the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to rising criticism of Harry and Meghan.89
However, the ‘Middletonization’ of the Firm is fractured by both William's and Kate's class privilege. Kate is called ‘Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge’ in all official royal communications, despite the media continuing to use ‘Kate’, demonstrating the Firm absorbing her into respectable upper-middle-class circles. William and Kate are represented as ‘liberal’, ‘hands-on’ parents, from William driving Kate and newborn George home from the hospital, to the couple taking George and Charlotte to school, which are all documented on the Kensington Palace Instagram. This, of course, erases the labour of domestic staff in Kensington Palace, including nannies, chefs and cleaners, who absorb some responsibilities of social reproduction and caregiving.90
Similarly, descriptions of pre-royal Kate as a ‘commoner’ take extreme liberties with her privileged, bourgeois background. The Middleton family business Party Pieces is a multi-million-pound enterprise, Kate attended two private boarding schools and the Middleton family home is now the 18-acre Bucklebury Manor.91 As their own family firm, the Middletons went from middle class to successful ‘new money’, giving them access to upper-middle-class and/or aristocratic circles and institutions of class privilege (the elite University of St Andrews, where Kate met William). However, it remains important that the Middletons’ wealth is perceived as largely self-made to align them with respectable narratives of meritocracy and neoliberal ‘hard work’. Kate's brother James, for example, retaliated to claims he had used his royal connections for publicity by saying ‘nothing is handed to anyone on a plate. There are possibilities for everyone.’ 92 The Middletons offer a respectable permutation of ‘new money’.
There is constant threat of the Middletons’ classed respectability rupturing. The sociologist Steph Lawler's analysis of media representations of Kate and William's brief split in 2008 found that the unsuitability of Kate's family was repeatedly referenced, as they were ‘simply too déclassé’.93 Likewise, accusations of class snobbery and antipathy have endured: from her sister Pippa Middleton marrying the brother of the reality television star Spencer Matthews; royal staff muttering ‘doors to manual’ behind Kate's back in reference to Carole Middleton's former job as a flight attendant; and Carole Middleton being photographed chewing gum at William's graduating parade from Sandhurst.94 Kate's class mobility is always already at risk.
‘The Great Kate Wait’
On 22 July 2013, hundreds of journalists gathered outside the private maternity Lindo Wing of St Mary's Hospital, London, to await Prince George's birth. The frantic media attention – which included BBC News regularly cutting to Royal Correspondent Peter Hunt, who reported ‘no news’, and Sky News's Kay Burley asking how many centimetres Kate was dilated, to be told by palace officials it's ‘not the kind of information they give out’ – has been dubbed in the media and public commentary as ‘the Great Kate Wait’.95
At 8.30pm, a Kensington Palace press release announced George's birth. At 8.40pm, the Queen's then Press Secretary Ailsa Anderson and palace footman Badar Azim erected a centuries-old ornate gold easel behind Buckingham Palace gates, displaying an announcement signed by Kate's doctors:
Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cambridge was safely delivered of a son at 4.24pm today.
The passive tense of ‘was safely delivered’ erases Kate's agency. The next morning, William, Kate and George left the hospital to pose for hundreds of photographers and royal fans and gave a brief interview (Figure 6.3). This performance was repeated for Princess Charlotte's birth in May 2015, and Prince Louis's in April 2018.
6.3 The Cambridges leave the hospital with their newborn son, Prince George, to a crowd of journalists, photographers and fans, 2013
The reproduction of the (Family) Firm has multiple meanings: its representational reproduction through the media industries, and its biological reproduction through the female body, as royal birth becomes public spectacle. Like other royal wives before (and after) her, Kate is prized on her ability to give birth and reproduce the dynasty. As Mantel suggested in relation to Henry VIII's reign, ‘women, their bodies, their reproductive capacities … are central to the story.96 This reflects Kay Burley's fascination with how many centimetres Kate was dilated, reorienting royal gynaecology for the global media age. Indeed, the dramaturgy of royal births that led Henry VIII to host a jousting tournament to celebrate Katherine of Aragon birthing a son in 1511 (the baby later died), which was immortalised in a scroll, seems not to have abated, but is now rather mediated through live news bulletins and social media.97
Following successful birthing of an heir (and spares), Kate's royal purpose is to successfully raise respectable royal children. Indeed, her royal identity is constructed almost entirely around her identity as a mother. On the official royal website, the ‘featured quote’ from Kate on her biography page, designed to document the ‘individual interests’ of royal figures, reads: ‘it is our duty, as parents and as teachers, to give all children the space to build their emotional strength and provide a strong foundation for their future’.98 Likewise, her key patronages are themed around early years support, including mother's and children's mental health and children's hospitals. On an official tour of New Zealand in 2014, Kate and George (notably, without William) visited a local playgroup, where they were photographed playing with other children and Kate chatting casually to other parents.99 The event was coded through middle-class leisure practices typical of McRobbie's ‘mediated maternalism’.100 Visits to, or interviews about, Kate's patronages are often mediated through her own reflections of motherhood. In 2020, she featured on the podcast series Happy Mum, Happy Baby, where the writer and celebrity mother Giovanna Fletcher interviews celebrity mothers on their experiences. Kate shared stories on hypnobirthing and morning sickness to demonstrate that, as she claims, ‘no matter what walk of life you've come from, there's so many things that really unify parents and families in their struggles’, again positioning the Cambridges as ‘ordinary’.101 If royal patronage is understood in this book as royal ‘work’, Kate's use of her mothering experiences can be read as a ‘professionalisation of motherhood’ similar to that of so-called ‘mummy bloggers’, who use their motherhood and children as a form of capital online.102 Kate's job is (royal) motherhood, used to produce capital (economic, social, symbolic) for the Firm.
Royal brides are most symbolically effective when they produce royal offspring. Whilst Henry VIII hosted the jousting tournament to celebrate his son's birth – wearing a letter ‘K’ on his coat to celebrate Katherine of Aragon and laying the trophies at her feet as gratitude for her fertility – after the baby's death six weeks later and a further six unviable pregnancies, Henry VIII annulled the marriage and wed another woman.103 Indeed, he would famously marry six women in search of an heir. In more recent history, royal women who fail to be contained as wives and mothers have lost favour in the monarchy, and sometimes hence in public opinion. Diana was vocal about her unhappy marriage, leading to her distancing from the Firm. Likewise, in Chapter 7 I argue that Meghan's departure from the Firm was in part because she was too ‘symbolically loaded’ to be contained as Harry's wife and Archie's mother.
The dramaturgy of royal birth also reflects its symbolism as reproducing the nation state. The feminist scholar Anne McClintock describes how ‘nations are frequently figured through the iconography of the familial and domestic space’, for example, the USA's First Family, the UK Home Office or the royal family.104 Media descriptions of the 2011 Royal Wedding as ‘the people's wedding’, or George's gestation as ‘the people's pregnancy’, fetishise Kate's body as reproducing the citizenry: her reproductive capacities are representative of (and belong to) the wider public imagination.105 This assumes that a white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, upper-class wedding and subsequent nuclear family are representative of citizens, which erases alternative identities from ideas of nationhood. Writing about Diana, the media scholar Raka Shome argues that white, heterosexual, upper-/middle-class women become ‘biological and social reproducer[s] of the nation's future’.106 Of course, for Kate in the monarchy, this plays out in specific ways. Upon birth, George became third in line to the throne. At the age of two, he featured on a set of postage stamps alongside the Queen, Charles and William: four generations of (future) monarchs acting as signifiers of British national identity.107 Kate is tasked with reproducing this genealogy.
On a broader socio-political scale, nationalism and the family are interconnected under authoritarian neoliberalism, which attempts to maintain national cultures through the re-establishment of patriarchal power and traditional gender norms.108 As described earlier, the #tradwife movement as an alt-right project illustrates the re-emergence of conservative, heteronormative family values vested in women's domestic subservience. As the sociologist Miranda Christou posits, the #tradwife embodies the intersections between toxic masculinity and white supremacy, where women are encouraged to ‘save the nation by helping the (white race) become great again’.109 The women are tasked with reproducing future white supremacists and misogynists, securing the future of the alt-right movement. #Tradwife Alena Pettitt's claim that she wants to ‘submit to her husband like it's 1959’ and serve him is suggestive of restoring ‘traditional English manners, lifestyle and values’, visualised in her Union Jack paraphernalia.110 The scholars Agnieszka Graff and others argue that right-wing nationalist slogans like Trump's ‘America First’ appeal to ‘traditional family values’.111 These values are imposed through the retrenchment of women's sexual/reproductive agency, and the stigmatisation of women who transgress social norms (for example, single women depicted as responsible for facilitating national ‘family breakdown’).112
In Britain, family values are coded through Second World War nostalgia of familial sacrifice and responsibility. Indeed, the sociologists Kim Allen and others have argued that representations of Kate embody precisely these values.113 Second World War fantasies of Britain as a wartime hero have since been co-opted into the Brexit movement, informing far-right ideologies of social exclusion, anti-welfarism and white British superiority.114 During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Queen compared experiences of COVID-19 to wartime in her televised speech, with both articulated through discourses of national restraint and sacrifice.115 During the pandemic, the Cambridges were represented as part of the country's collective caring efforts. Kate, William and their children partook in the national ‘Clap for our Carers’ movement, where citizens stood outside their homes each week to applaud NHS and other care workers for their sacrifices. In the video, produced for a BBC fundraiser programme and uploaded to the Kensington Palace Instagram, the Cambridges emerge from a traditional wooden front door framed by retro lamps and neatly trimmed foliage, meant to signify their home, wearing co-ordinating blue outfits and clapping.
Applauding doctors, nurses and other NHS staff as heroes of the crisis erases the government's accountability for failing to provide the NHS with appropriate safety equipment to deal with the outbreak.116 Kate and William's family, shored up against the virus in their ‘family home’ and applauding key workers, depicts them as the idealised, responsible middle-class citizens for the wider public to emulate in response to the pandemic. Such response overlooks institutionalised inequalities, such as the Cambridges’ access to elite medical care, their lack of concerns about job security and their ability to self-isolate in any one of their palaces. It also reproduces conservative ideologies of individualism, and legitimises the destruction of health and social care provision under successive Conservative governments.117
In an interview between Rosalind Brunt and Michael Billig about Diana's submission to royal patriarchy, Billig says, ‘it wasn't just the position of a woman vis-à-vis a man or men. It was also a class position. Patriarchy within a class position. And a national position.’ 118 Royal brides occupy a unique position, where their submission to patriarchy is inseparable from their reproduction of a class system and their connection to the nation. This is, perhaps, why Kate is a useful signifier for the #tradwife movement, which also connects reproductive bodies to class, race and nation. ‘The Great Kate Wait’ illustrates the ongoing interest in the wombs of royal brides, and indeed, of women around the world who find their reproductive rights being eroded by alt-right governments.
Conclusion
On 2 May 2020, Princess Charlotte's fifth birthday, Kensington Palace Instagram published four new photographs of Charlotte, taken by Kate.119 Published during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in the UK, the photographs depicted Charlotte clutching a gift bag filled with homemade pasta, knocking on a turquoise front door with a heart-patterned doormat. The caption says the images were taken ‘as the family helped to pack up and deliver food packages for isolated pensioners in the local area’, implying that Charlotte is knocking on neighbouring front doors. The front door is noticeably less austere than the one pictured for the Cambridges’ aforementioned ‘Clap for your Carers’ appearance a week earlier.
The photographs capture the relations described in this chapter. The Cambridges are depicted as liberal: a respectable, middle-class family assisting the community effort to support the vulnerable. Yet, these ‘philanthropic’ actions erase the government's accountability for supporting those vulnerable in the first place. The emphasis on Kate taking the photographs depicts her as teaching her children values of care and personal responsibility. The photographs also connote intimacy and access, documenting a private moment in Charlotte's, and the Cambridges’, life. There remains a contradiction in representations of the Cambridges, in that they connote openness through apparently ‘intimate’ photographs, yet these representations are precisely choreographed. Although ‘the Cambridge family photo album’ stages royal domesticity, for example, this is not in the same way as the 1969 Royal Family fly-on-the-wall documentary (see Chapter 2). If the Firm was still modelled on this documentary, each royal figure might have a personal Instagram or Twitter account like celebrities. Rather, the Firm appears to be tightly restricting and managing access through its official channels, which is unusual in contemporary celebrity culture.
Kate is a PR coup for a Firm recovering from ‘scandals’ throughout the 1990s: a nice, middle-class woman from a respectable, nuclear, heteronormative family. If she is respectable, paparazzi cannot take photographs of her naked; if she is middle-class, she takes photographs of her own children. And so, royal representations are carefully contained. Likewise, if Diana caused a crisis in ‘the patriarchal foundations of the monarchy’, Kate has successfully re-established them.120 Indeed, representations of the Cambridges illustrate how the British monarchy acts as the ultimate bastion of heteronormativity: the heteromonarchy, which performs heterosexuality and nuclear familialism as its ‘frontstage’. The continued centrality of heteronormativity demonstrates that the sexual politics of monarchy have never changed. Despite the publicised ‘sexual scandals’ throughout the 1990s, the real ‘scandal’ would be a senior royal figure defying heteronormativity and having a royal baby out of wedlock or being homosexual. In 2018, the Queen's cousin Lord Ivar Mountbatten married his partner James Coyle and it made headlines for being the first same-sex royal wedding; yet Mountbatten remains a distant relative to the monarchy and it took until 2018 for this marriage to happen.121 Royal homosexuality would also be a ‘scandal’ because of the multiple meanings of reproduction described in this chapter. The Firm is dependent upon both biological reproduction and its reproduction in the public imagination to maintain its power, privilege and wealth. However unusual Kate's non-aristocratic marriage into the monarchy might be, her traditional sexuality and femininity merely reproduces royal gender politics, and the publicised royal ‘transgressions’ are limited in scope as part of the royal pantomime of ‘scandal’, criticism and resolution.
‘The Kate effect’, a phrase adapted from Kuleshov's film theory, works cumulatively. That is, because we know little about Kate as an individual person, it is only through representations produced by the Firm that Kate's meaning is constructed. She has been carefully contained in the image of the heteromonarchy: the idealised standard-bearer of the nation, the idealised mother of authoritarian neoliberalism, the idealised wife of a future king. In the next chapter, I use the figure of Meghan Markle to explore the consequences when royal wifedom and motherhood are not, and cannot be, ‘contained’. In opposition to ‘the Kate effect’, Meghan's identity and background (a celebrity, a woman with an established career, a racialised body and a feminist) mean she is too animated for containment. Whilst Kate's indeterminate persona reproduces the Family Firm, Meghan's intersectional symbolism threatens to rupture the norms it relies upon.