How Meghan's interview, like Diana's before her, was really a confession
Trying to understand one's own story is confessional, writes George Pitcher. But these royally wronged women sit in judgement more than penance
Rowan Williams begins a contribution in a published collection of his essays with a metaphor of singing a familiar song, maybe a psalm. He describes it as a simple activity, but something rather odd and complex when you start to examine it:
...my imagination is somehow “calling up” the words and phrases to come… the future, the next piece of the song, is passing through the present moment into the past. But that can’t be quite right: the song is in my memory, in my past, already. What is slipping through the present moment is my continuing performance of a song I once learned. But that can’t be quite right either… there’s nothing that exists ahead of me to move from the area in front on me to the area behind me. And what is going on when I can’t remember the next line: is it “there” or not? Yes, because I learned it once; no, because it is not sitting somewhere waiting to be inspected.
Why I quote this passage is that it’s from Williams’s 2015 book On Augustine. And St Augustine of Hippo is best known for his fin de siecle 5th-century work Confessions, which Williams is addressing in this piece. He is explaining that Augustine’s use of the idea of confession is “[u]nderstanding myself, understanding what I am saying” and it “involves not only what I clearly see but listening for those ‘drifts’, gently interrogating them.”
I want to write about confession too, because this is what I want to suggest Meghan Markle was doing in her televised interview this week – though, to be sure, it was meant to be Oprah Winfrey doing the “interrogating” of her – and what Princess Diana did with Martin Bashir in 1995, whether or not these two troubled women realised that what they were doing was confessional.
At one level, it’s about that dodgy business of memory to which Williams refers, as is clear from anomalies in Meghan’s and her husband’s accounts and as affirmed by the Queen’s statement that “recollections may vary”. Bearing witness is infinitely variable.
But it’s also essentially about these women, related to dysfunctional monarchy by marriage and separated by a quarter of a century, trying to make sense of their lives. At the heart of their broadcast endeavours is what Aristotle coined as their telos, their purpose and goals as established in the narrative of their lives as they wished to present them – and making sense of those lives, in the Augustine-to-Williams continuum, qualifies as a confessional act.
Less charitable interpretations
There are, admittedly, less charitable interpretations of intent than confessional teleology. Not least the desire of the two interviewees to get even – though here the analogy with confession may still stand up, as (in the devotional sense) it’s about being “justified” by divinity, which is a holy way of “putting the record straight”, albeit with the Almighty rather than with Oprah Winfrey (I make no comparison between the relative seniority of these two deities).
The gap between interpretations of confession is the one that yawns between understanding and judgement (and which John Major used politically to define an attitude to crime a decade ago). Where the confessional, narrative-of-understanding interpretation of Meghan’s and Diana’s performances will get most push-back is from those who hold that confession is meant to be the acknowledgement of one’s own sins and wickedness in the face of judgement – and these women were very obviously wishing to portray themselves as innocent victims of circumstance, indeed more sinned against than sinning.
But as the late Alan Richardson, a former dean of York, pointed out some decades ago, the Latin word confessio in the ancient Church meant a profession of faith made by a martyr. So the word came to mean a firm declaration of conviction with reference to persecution. That’ll fit Diana and Meghan nicely then, thankyou. Whether it was their intention or not, the target perception is of Vestal Virgins sacrificed on the altar of British monarchy.
That soubriquet may not stand up technically, given that virginity is not at issue here (though being a virgin was very much a part of Diana’s royal telos) but there is something of its alleged purity to which they both aspire. (And, incidentally, while female servants of the goddess Vesta weren’t actually sacrificed on altars in ancient Rome or anywhere else, but buried alive if they carelessly lost their sacred virginity, both Meghan and Diana could testify to the vicarious experience of getting buried alive in royal palaces.)
Yet another objection to the TV interview as post-modern confession could be the medium’s innate lack of humility. Isn’t confession meant to be an act of humble penance made in private? Well, no, not always. In the Epistle of James (brother of Jesus), he writes: “Confess your faults one to another.” In other words, bring it out in the open.
And the late Methodist academic Gordon Wakefield points out that Methodist class-meetings encouraged “therapeutic honesty, though it became too severe for some, and degenerated into wearisome repetition and testimonies for others” - a feeling with which readers of newspapers must this week surely be familiar. Furthermore, the interviews acting as a form of self-therapy, whether honest or dishonest, for both Meghan and Diana seems undeniable.
What is less clear is whom these two less than merry wives of Windsor themselves perceive to be the penitents. Revisiting their interviews, it’s clear that they are “sorry” only in so far as they want to convey that their public confessional acts are performed more in sorrow than in anger. Ideally, they would have wanted the royal family into which they married to be doing a whole lot more of the penitential heavy-lifting, on bended knee preferably before their own (self-)righteousness.
And, indeed, there is a hint of monarchical humility and penance in the Queen’s claim that her “whole family” (the modern equivalent of the royal “we” perhaps) is “saddened to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan.” Meanwhile, whether such sadness and a hint of penitence extends to the Palace’s mystery royal racist remains to be seen.
Grant absolution
Which brings us to the matter of absolution. If it’s the institution - “The Firm” - that are cast as the penitents, then it is Meghan (and before her Diana) who grants herself the throne of grace from which to deliver absolution. But in every sense it looked on our screens last Monday night that the consistently lachrymose Meghan herself was seeking some form of absolution.
This is complex – is there a sense in which she’s playing the Penitent Magdalene, concurrently saintly and saved? Possibly, but if it’s absolution she seeks, it looks as if she may be seeking to be absolved of responsibility rather than of sin, which makes the confessional quality of her act somewhat more worldly than sacramental in its self-examination.
So take your choice: Meghan currently and Diana historically were either confessional in the sense of interrogating the quality of their own lives before their respective “confessors”, Winfrey and Bashir. Or they sit in judgment, calling their persecutors to repentance. The former is classically Augustinian, the latter contemporary and pretty much universally held, I would guess.
But there is another actor in this confessional drama – the media. Journalists are not given naturally to contrition, let alone confession and repentance. They (we) are self-absolving. Meghan loathes the British press; Diana exploited it ruthlessly. Arguably and in very different ways, it has taken both their lives.
Again, does Meghan seek to recognise anything of herself in the mirror that UK newspapers hold up to her? Or does she only wish to sit in judgment of their sins? It is, once again, complex.
For if she is truly sinless and if, as she claims, she has been blamelessly crucified by British newspapers, then she is presented with no choice if, on self-examination, she finds her conscious is clear. If she is beyond reproach, there is one precedent and example set clearly for her: When it comes to her journalistic torturers, she must pray that they are forgiven, for they know not what they do.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.