Between the relentless twin influences of Hans Christian Anderson and Walt Disney, every American girl grows up clutching wistfully at a singular dream: to be a princess. To be rich and beautiful and adored. To be gowned and coiffed, served and feted, daintily clutching cups of steaming tea, petit fours sitting prettily atop porcelain saucers as grandness blooms around us. Even when our feminist mothers schooled us to dream different dreams, the fairy princess imprint held sway.
It’s a seductive fantasy, and Diana Princess of Wales was its chief emissary. The beautiful beloved princess with the shy, shy smile. She was our princess, even here in America.
I was pregnant with a daughter the summer Diana died. Sitting on a deserted beach on that late summer day, cells dividing within me, my child’s tiny butterfly heart beating steadily beneath my own I heard the news of Diana’s death and cried. She stood for a life we knew was impossible—endlessly scrutinized and scripted down to each turn of the head—yet she was our little girl dream come to life. She was the living, breathing embodiment of the archetype we’d only known in books, and we loved her for daring to walk off those pages and charm us utterly.
My daughter is now nine. Healthy and perfect, a bit rough at the edges and full of sprite. She knows Cinderella and Snow White, Rose Red, Ariel, and Belle. But she doesn’t know Diana and I, for one, am sorry for that. Goodbye, good Princess. We remember you still.
