6
While physical and mental prowess often spring to mind as characteristics of heroism, illness, disability and death also frequently feature in representations of heroines in history. At a general level, given women’s construction as the weaker, hysterical sex this is unsurprising.1 Womanly frailty and sacrifice could enable heroines’ appeal, as in the case of Diana Princess of Wales’s vulnerability and untimely death and Eva Perón’s ‘power exhibiting characteristics’ residing in the ‘spiritual or mystical, uninstitutionalized and irrational’ side of her ‘feminine nature.’2 Indeed, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has pointed out, ‘femaleness’ itself was often viewed as ‘a natural form of physical and mental deficiency or constitutional unruliness.’3 Sofia Rodriguez Lopez and Antonio Cazorla argue that the Nationalists constructed women on both sides of the Spanish Civil War as deficient. Republican militiawoman were cast as ‘degenerate killers, ridden with physical and moral illnesses.’ Meanwhile, women who assisted the fascist cause could be ‘a nuisance,’ prostitutes and second-rate fighters.4 While Rosario Sanchez Mora became a heroine for losing her right hand as she threw dynamite at the fascists, conservative heroines were harder to position and often overlooked.5 The phenomenal strength and success of World War II Allied resistance heroine Nancy Wake made her an awkward heroine for nations to position and commemorate.6 In contrast, diarist Anne Frank, who met an untimely death aged 16 at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, became a powerful martyr of Nazi oppression.
A common attack levelled against heroines in modern history is to discredit them by casting them as unwell and disabled. For example, Douglas Baynton has argued that accusing suffragist heroines of being frail, emotional, irrational and unstable was a way to diminish their cause. Highlighting an enduring tactic employed by heroines, as put by Antonia Fraser as the ‘only a weak woman’ syndrome, however, he argues that ‘Suffragists turned the rhetorical power of the disability argument to their own uses.’7 Constructing female weakness and fallibility could make a convenient feminist fallback position. For example, maternal feminism leaned heavily upon the need for women to have power in protecting girls and women from the vices of patriarchal society.
Susan Burch and Lindsey Patterson argue that disability should be ‘a central feature of our understanding of the past.’8 This is definitely the case for heroines in history, and this chapter considers the importance of illness, disability and death for heroines in history as an ongoing archetypal theme. It argues that sickness and characteristics of death are an important part of both the construction of and remembrance for heroines. Each heroine has her own embodied experience, many with chronic ongoing health problems. By way of example, Anita Roddick lived with the ongoing effects of hepatitis C, only in a twist of fate to die from a brain haemorrhage on 10 September 2007.
For some heroines, overcoming health issues was the reason for their heroic status, or it was added to become part of their heroism. For example, in 1850, English explorer heroine Isabella Bird had an operation to remove a tumour from her spine. The operation was only a partial success and as a result she suffered from insomnia and depression. Her illness was the making of her heroic career, as her doctor recommended that she travel. Her father gave her 100 pounds, and in 1854 she set off for North America. The letters that she wrote to her sister Hennie while away became the basis for her successful first book, The Englishwoman in America.9
How and at what part of the life cycle heroines died also plays an important posthumous part in how they are constructed. Enduring through the centuries, untimely death and martyrdom continued to frequent heroines in modern history. For China from late imperial to modern times, Xian Wang argues for shifting narratives from chaste martyrs to revolutionary female martyrs. For her, ‘chaste martyrdom functions as a bonding agent that holds male community together and consolidates the patriarchal system.’10 Particularly potent, Joan of Arc’s fate pervaded the modern, acting as a story of warning and containment for those whose achievements pushed boundaries beyond acceptable limits. Dying an untimely death, early on in the life cycle, ‘before one’s time’ or ‘cut short,’ whether because of accident, execution or illness, was usually underscored by interpretations of not being a mother and failing to leave children to perpetuate patriarchy.
If men became heroes on the battlefield through their life-taking, women’s ultimate heroic act was through life-giving, navigating the embodied dangers of pregnancy and childbirth that all too often ended in untimely death. As Elaine Showalter writes, ‘Childbirth, despite medical advances, is a confrontation with mortality for women as war is for men.’11 For example, ten days after the birth of her second daughter Mary Godwin, feminist heroine Mary Wollstonecraft died from septicaemia at the age of 37.12 Godwin would become Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818).
Sick childhoods
Childhood illness and disability through accidents frequently occur in the lives of heroines in history. For example, saintly heroine Suzanne Aubert was left disabled in her limbs after falling through a frozen lake,13 while Rosa Luxemburg suffered from polio. Overcoming disability was central for Helen Keller (1880–1968), who suffered an illness at 19 months of age that left her blind and deaf and caused her to become mute. Keller was an American author, political activist and lecturer, the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree, and a widely influential 20th-century heroine for disability rights. Examined by Alexander Graham Bell at age 6 she was sent to the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston. There in March 1887 she began a long relationship with her talented and dedicated teacher Anne Sullivan that lasted until Sullivan’s death in October 1936.14 Theirs is a story of courage and determination. Keller felt objects and associated them with words spelt out with finger signals on her palm. She learnt Braille at Perkins and how to speak at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston. Lip-reading involved placing her fingers on the lips and throat of a speaker while the words were simultaneously spelt out for her. At 14 Keller went to the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York City, at 16 to the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in Massachusetts and then to Radcliffe College in 1900. After graduating in 1904 she worked to improve disability rights and gave many lectures on behalf of the blind and deaf. An early advocate for disability rights, she advocated for commissions for the blind in 30 American states during the 1930s.15 She also established a $2 million endowment fund for the American Foundation for the Blind. In 1963 Keller received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.16 She wrote journal articles and books and lectured on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind.
Frida Kahlo, artist, communist and alternative thinker, was a heroine whose life was heavily punctuated by ill-health and pain. She was said to have a courageous spirit in the face of physical and emotional suffering. Art was her therapy, and important in her construction as a heroine. She held her first major exhibition in April 1953, less than a year before her death at age 47. By that time unable to walk, she was carried into her exhibition at Mexico City’s Gallery of Contemporary Art on a stretcher. As a 6-year-old Kahlo suffered from polio and spent nine months confined to bed. Then in 1925 she was badly injured in a road accident when the bus she was travelling on collided with a tram.17 Her rehabilitation led to painting. At first she painted friends, and then herself. In an age when women artists were not taken seriously and were confined to apolitical art of ‘still life’ flowers, Kahlo was exceptional in that of her 200 paintings most are self-portraits. Importantly, her ‘gloriously selfish’ art was an expression of her continuous and painful struggle with a wounded and deteriorating body.
FIGURE 6.1 Frida Kahlo in 1926.
Credit: Alamy stock photo Image ID W2JWAP: https://www.alamy.com/frida-kahlo-1907-1954-mexican-painter-kahlo-in-1926-image259799870.html
Kahlo joined the Communist Party in 1927. Her social networks involved artists, bohemians and Communists, including Russian exile Leon Trotsky. Kahlo met artist Diego Rivera and they married in August 1929.18 During their lifetime, Rivera was the more successful artist of the pair, receiving commissions to paint public murals across the border in Detroit and New York. Meanwhile, Kahlo’s ill-health caused her ongoing physical and emotional pain. In 1930 a pregnancy had to be terminated because of her health, and in 1932, pregnant again, she miscarried. She went on to miscarry three more times. Furthermore, her relationship with Rivera was tumultuous. He had an affair with her younger sister Christina, and he and Kahlo eventually divorced, but remarried in 1940.19 Kahlo’s health continued to decline, and in 1953 her right leg had to be amputated. Her last public appearance was at a 1954 peace demonstration where Rivera pushed her in a wheelchair. She had a peace banner in one hand and a clenched fist in the other. Suffering from pneumonia, she died on 13 July 1954 aged 47.20
Kahlo became posthumously internationally famous at the end of the 20th century. Amidst a feminist and postcolonial climate she became an icon for her alternative lifestyle and a role model for women artists. Perhaps most of all, it is her heroism in the face of physical suffering, and painting her way out of her pain, along with her vivacious and passionate pursuit of life that render her such an infectious heroine.
Sickness and untimely death
When popular Chinese aviatrix and diplomat Jessie Hanying Zheng died in 1943 from tuberculosis (consumption) aged 28 years in Vancouver, her coffin was carried through the city’s streets by a Royal Canadian Air Force guard of honour.21 Consumption was still a common killer, but for a pilot an untimely death not caused by a crash was a twist of fate. Bernard Faber has suggested that consumption in the 19th century had ‘a certain mysticism about it’ that could be ‘respectable and indicative of a sensitive nature, and, finally, acts as a sign of personal grace in the face of world tragedy.’22 Famous in her lifetime, Grace Darling’s untimely death from consumption made her legendary.
As discussed in Chapter 3, 19th-century British heroine Grace Darling catapulted to fame through an heroic sea rescue that captured the public’s imagination. Considered a lucky charm, artists sketched her, people wrote asking for locks of her hair, and she had offers to perform in the Adelphi Theatre in London in a lifeboat and in Batty’s Royal Circus. The press turned her into an early modern celebrity, and her image was of long-lasting use in selling products, including soap and chocolate.23 Choosing to remain at home, Darling was placed under the official protection of the Duke of Northumberland, who administered her awards. Portrayed as modest and working class, with over 700 pounds amassed, all she asked for was 5 pounds every six months. The Duke also oversaw matrimonial applications and when they first met he asked her if she was married. Darling replied ‘I have not got married yet for they say the man is a master and there is much talk about bad masters.’ She added that if she should marry, then she wanted to keep her name, commenting that ‘I have heard people say there is luck in leisure.’ Grace, however, was not immune to the common 19th-century killer disease of consumption. After a visit to her sister in Bamburgh in April 1842 aged 27, she caught a chill and died from consumption on 20 October in her father’s arms. Hers was an untimely death that evoked a universal ‘feeling of pity.’24 By coincidence, Alice Margaret Goomes of Bravo Island, Patterson Inlet, Stewart Island in New Zealand was compared to Grace Darling. On 18 July 1901 when her father suffered a stroke while out on his fishing boat she rowed out to get him. Like Grace Darling, shortly afterwards she became ill, in her case with a chill. She died on 14 November 1905 at the age of 20.25
In death, heroic Grace became forever young, pure and good. There was a large funeral, Wordsworth wrote a poem and Queen Victoria gave 20 pounds towards a memorial fund. In 1844, a 13th-century style tomb and canopy were built on the coast at Bamburgh. Darling’s posthumous fame continued to grow, peaking only at the end of the 19th century. Portrayed as hardworking, brave and modest, modern stories for girls suggested that Darling represented the ‘highest and noblest in girlhood of England’ and she became a moral role model for Victorian girls. The Girls’ Own paper, a modern weekly, found a place for Darling’s rescue to inspire adventure in girls, but confirmed their grown-up place as in the home. For example, a January 1880 story, advised that
As you girls grow older, no doubt in time most of you becoming happy wives and mothers, you will find that the surest way of being useful is, to do first the duty that lies nearest to you; until you have done that, be satisfied not to look further.26
How they coped with ill-health became an important characteristic for many heroines.27 It could be part of or central to their construction as a heroine. When spiritual and political maternal heroine Eva Perón became ill with cervical cancer her adversity was hidden from public view. J M Taylor evocatively writes that ‘Her disease progressed over the months until finally she lay dying, her body emanating mysterious odours of putrefaction. She was rotting while still alive.’28 Riding a wave of popularity, Perón’s untimely death in 1952 at the age of 33 shocked Argentina. There were huge public expressions of mourning. It seemed as if ‘The entire nation of Peronists threw itself into a delirium of mass mourning maintained with sacrifices to the dead spiritual leader of the nation. Altars sprang up everywhere bearing paintings and photographs of the smiling martyr.’29 Specifically, her martyrdom was constructed around refusal of nomination for the vice-presidency, as her sacrifice and renunciation.30 As J M Taylor puts it ‘Her people heaped exaggerated praises on her,’ comparing her to other heroines in history including Joan of Arc, Catherine de Medici, Elizabeth I of England, Isabel the Catholic of Spain and the Virgin Mary. He writes that ‘Eva Perón became the Spiritual Chief of the Nation, the Mother of the Poor, and Santa Evita.’ If she was important as a maternal, saintly figure in life, in death her cult status grew, fuelled by a mythology of untimely death and martyrdom. A bust of Eva Perón was said to advance miracle cures.31 Peronism did not want to lose her heroic status and set out to further build it for her in death. Ghoulishly, her body was embalmed, and stories of the preservation and fate of her corpse came to dominate her history.32 There were plans to build a large monument containing her body, but instead after a coup deposed Juan Perón, the preserved corpse was stolen by the militia, moved around Buenos Aires, taken to Italy with the assistance of the Vatican and anonymously buried, then later disinterred and kept in the Madrid dining room of Perón and his new wife Isabel. It was Isabel, back in Argentina, who in 1974 who repatriated the corpse. It was restored for public display and there were plans for a monument. But after another coup in 1976 the militia securely buried the corpse in the family’s mausoleum.33 Her undignified death and corpse’s afterlife came to dominate remembrance for Eva Perón, perhaps more than her work and beliefs.
Made ill from heroism
Ironically, for heroines who worked in health and well-being, their work could make them sick and sometimes lead to their death. Nursing heroines were particularly vulnerable. For example, explorer Mary Kingsley (1862–1900) died from enteric fever while nursing in the South Africa War. Florence Nightingale caught Crimean Fever and then depleted, took to her bed. Mary Seacole also returned to England from the Crimea in poor health. Bad health did not dominate the narrative of Seacole’s 1857 memoirs, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. 34 This is unsurprising as illness and death was an expected and unremarkable occupational hazard for nurses and doctors. The risk they took was part of their duty and service. If they did get sick or die, while close to martyrdom, it was somehow different as they had made a career choice. As it did not fit with ‘women as embodiments of patriotic motherhood,’ Nataliya Danilova and Emma Dolan consider Scottish Women’s Hospitals doctor heroine Elsie Inglis’s death from cancer was represented as ‘innocent and quiet suffering.’35
Heroines were made ill and exhausted from their metaphorical battles of all varieties. They were ground down by their work, exhausted in body and mind, and subject to wear and tear. For example, New Zealand suffragist Kate Sheppard’s work to make New Zealand the first country in the world to enfranchise women took its toll on her health. She also endured a number of deaths of her nearest friends and family, including the death of her only child Douglas in 1910. In the decades after the 1893 victory, she suffered exhaustion and retreated from public life. She made a comeback in 1919, only to retreat again.36 Indeed, episodes of breakdown in health were part and parcel for heroines who pushed boundaries and had the difficulty of negotiating a place in previously men-only domains. There was much opposition against forging a place for women where they were excluded. For example, Ernest Rutherford, prominent scientist and friend of Marie Curie, wrote home to his mother in New Zealand about Curie that ‘altogether she was a very pathetic figure’ because she was working too hard.37 Science was not considered the place for women to work hard.
Curie is often portrayed as run-down and unwell. Indeed, her job was hazardous. Her doctoral thesis research was on the mysterious radiation emitted by uranium. When it was finished in 1903 she was the first woman in France to gain a doctorate. Uranium had been discovered in 1896 by Henri Becquerel and, working hard, Marie built on his work. She discovered two new elements that were broken down from uranium – polonium, which she named after her home country, and radium. It was costly work and she was hindered by a lack of funding. Her lab was far from sophisticated, indicatively called ‘the shed.’ It was there that she worked extracting uranium from several tonnes of pitchblende residue. It was a dangerous job and involved working hands-on with hazardous materials. The new elements were 1,000 times more active than uranium.38 The danger of being exposed to such high levels of radioactivity was unproven at the time, and Curie was so driven that her motivation outweighed the dangers.
When working on the development of radiation for use as X-rays Curie didn’t wear gloves very often and had lesions and sores. Her death at 67 from leukaemia was a result of her experiments. Furthermore, the sickness was likely intergenerational as daughter Irène, conceived while Marie was working in the labs, went on to her own career in the same area and died of a similar illness.39 Yet, likely due to notions of choice and occupational hazard, as well as different safety standards, Curie is remembered for her contribution to science, rather than for being a martyr to it.
Paradoxically, Curie also tapped into an age-old archetype for women as healers. She may have been firmly part of a new modern age of science and technology, but she was most motivated by and interested in science’s ability to heal and cure. During World War I and its use of science as a tool for death and destruction, Curie worked closely with her daughter Irène, pioneering new advances in radiology that advanced well-being and healing. Curie became the head of the Red Cross Radiological Service that was responsible for training people in radiology. Under her direction, the Edith Cavell Hospital named after another heroine in history opened in Paris in October 1916. There women X-rays technicians named manipulatrices underwent intensive six-week training. By the end of the war 150 of these women had completed their training.40
Working in the shadow of World War I, Curie was strongly against the harnessing of her ideas on radioactivity towards warfare and was instead driven by the promise of peace and medical advances. Her approach was in contrast to scientists who developed atom physics for the use of weapons of mass destruction. In the United States, the Carnegies had already given her $50,000 in research fellowships and now some others wanted to follow suit.41 The need for funds brought forward a strong international current of support for Curie as a woman in science. Support came from the United States, with a concentration from some of America’s richest women. In 1921, accompanied by daughters Irène and Eve, Curie went on a seven-week tour of the United States to collect the radium for her research that included finding a cure for cancer. Marie Mattingley Meloney (often referred to as Mrs William Brown Meloney), a journalist who had become friends with Curie, persuaded ten American women to each donate $100,000 towards a Marie Curie Radium Fund.42 So expensive was radium that it cost $150,000 per gram.43 The Fund launched a nationwide campaign that raised a further $150,000. Women from all walks of life donated to the Fund.44
There was a swell of support for this iconic woman in science who sought to heal and promote well-being. A male scientist would not have had the same appeal – Curie’s gender mattered and as well as being a big part of advancing modern science, she was tapped into archetypes of maternal, spiritual and healing heroines. For the women who donated money, Curie was heroic for her work towards medical advances and a cure for cancer. She was an inspiration and a role model. And she symbolised women’s ability and success in the masculine world of science. She represented new hope and progress, with women playing a central part. By this time, the United States had experienced a strong wave of feminism. There was the presence of a generation of women who, like Curie, had become working professionals in teaching, journalism, law and medicine. The United States had strong pockets of women-centred educational institutions, and women keen to advance their status in society. Scholarships and endowments were practical measures being put in place for women’s education.
In America, Curie was met by large, celebratory crowds keen to welcome ‘The Radium Woman.’45 In a country proud of its melting pot for immigrants, Curie could be claimed as a fellow global migrant. She had moved to Paris at a time when others left Poland for the United States. Curie was the epitome of a self-made person, devoted to and living her dream, just as Americans sought their American dream. And she was a self-made woman, living proof of women’s advances in society. There were ceremonies in New York and then visits to the women’s colleges. Smith, Vassar and Mount Holyoake awarded Curie honorary degrees.46 There was definitely a feminist current to her recognition. Bastion of traditional education Harvard was one of the few universities not to award her an honorary degree.47 At the White House in Washington DC, President Warren Harding handed Marie a golden key to a case holding the radium.48
For a private person who did not seek public attention, Curie found the tour incredibly difficult and struggled to meet obligations, with a trip to the west coast jettisoned. The tension was worn on her body – she shook so many hands that her right arm had to be put in a sling.49 By this time, her health was starting to fail. In 1921 she suffered a kidney infection and hypertension. By the time of the tour there was discomfort in her eyes and ears. Between 1923 and 1930 she had a series of four cataract operations.50 Years of exposure to X-rays and radiation was catching up with her. She had conducted hazardous work long before the existence of safety codes that she helped to bring about. She didn’t wear gloves and by 1932 the sores and lesions on her hands from radium were debilitating. Her health continued to deteriorate and on 29 June 1934 she died in a sanatorium in the French Alps of leukaemia, as a result of prolonged exposure to radiation.51 Irène and son-in-law Frédéric Joliot-Curie carried on her work to great effect, sharing a Nobel Prize in the 1930s. Irène was the second woman to win the Nobel Prize. They shared Marie and Pierre Curie’s engagement with society and politics, concerning themselves with feminism, communism and a moratorium on atomic weapons. Irène died of leukaemia in March 1956, and Frédéric died only two years later from liver disease.52
In contrast to the United States, France would be slow to claim Curie as a national heroine. She was, after all, an immigrant and an outsider to mainstream France. She was also agnostic in a predominantly Christian country, unconventional and resistant to celebrity status. If her long list of achievements and accolades suggest a dour disposition, her poetry and family and social life signal a warm, humane and genuine spirit. And perhaps surprising, in 1911 she was dogged by scandal in the newspapers when news broke of a love affair between Curie and one of her married co-workers, Paul Langevin. Langevin was five years her junior and had four children. Although Langevin was effectively separated from his wife at the time, Curie was cast as a villainous home-breaker.53 While many men at the time had mistresses, a double standard held that Curie was the female temptress and the most at fault. The scandal hit shortly before the announcement of the second Nobel Prize. For Curie, professional accolades were concurrent with personal adversity – shortly before the Nobel Prize was announced in 1903 she had suffered a miscarriage. In 1911 the weight of public attention fell heavily upon Curie and she broke down at the end of that year. It took time for the memory of the affair to fade from the public’s imagination. Einstein wrote to her that he was ‘so incensed over the way in which the rabble dares to react to you that I absolutely had to vent these feelings.’54 Women in public life such as Curie risked harsh judgement being passed on their private lives.
It took France a long time to get over her affair. In 1995 the remains of Pierre and Marie Curie were removed from a cemetery in Sceaux and placed together in the crypt of Paris’ Panthéon, a modern temple that contains the tombs of the most revered of French heroes, including Voltaire and Jean-Jacque Rousseau. At the interment ceremony, France’s President Mitterrand hailed Curie as one of the few women celebrated there, casting her as one of France’s, and the world’s, greatest heroines. Signalling her integral Polish identity, and with the name Sklodawska included on her tomb, Poland’s president Lech Walesa was in attendance.55
The crypt sits below the main floor of the Panthéon where the life of Joan of Arc features on a series of panels. Taking no chances, Curie’s tomb included a lead lining to make sure that her radioactive remains did not contaminate others. Where Joan of Arc was remembered as a Christian martyr, burnt at the stake as a heretic, to be later rehabilitated, Curie’s scientific work to advance radiology and to seek a cure for cancer had ultimately martyred her.
Martyrdom
Occupying an evolving, transcultural presence in modern times, an enduring feature in the deaths of heroines is martyrdom – those who have died for their cause. As Chapter 2 revealed, various warrior heroines through the centuries shared the common theme of martyrdom, including Boadicea and Cut Dien. At the time of new additions, overt reference to previous and well-known heroic martyrs was often made. For example, Joan of Arc’s shocking medieval virgin martyr death at the stake continues to act as a western benchmark, haunting modern history and serving as a reminder of what befalls women who step out of line and push gender boundaries. Out of medieval times, Joan of Arc continued to be cast and re-cast as a modern feminist heroine. She was a heroine who had managed to challenge the patriarchal order, but who was martyred when no longer of use, a cross-dressing heroine who challenged gender identities and who led an, albeit brief, alternative and independent life.
The Bourgeois de Paris, an anonymous Parisian wrote a stark account of Joan’s death on 30 May 1431:
She was soon dead and her clothes all burned. Then the fire was raked back, and her naked body shown to all the people and all the secrets that could or should belong to a woman, to take away any doubts from people’s minds. When they had stared long enough at her dead body bound to the stake, the executioner got a big fire going again round her poor carcass, which was soon burned, both flesh and bone reduced to ashes.56
In life and death Joan of Arc’s intentions were constantly subject to doubt. When she set out as a young peasant woman and presented herself as a divinely inspired pure maid (La Pucelle) to the Dauphin (later Charles VI), she was unsurprisingly questioned by the Archbishop of Rheims, the Bishop of Poitiers, the Inquisitor of Toulouse and a professor of Theology from the University of Paris amongst numerous others. At that time, those men decided that she was divinely inspired, rather than being deluded by the devil. She also underwent a physical examination to confirm her purity, which was carried out by the Dauphin’s mother-in-law, Yolande, Queen of Sicily, and her ladies.57
When Joan was captured by the Burgundians, Charles VI did not attempt to pay the high ransom of 10,000 gold crowns.58 Joan had served her purpose, winning battles and assisting the French to secure territory and placing Charles VI on the throne. She was handed to the English and then to the Church, whose inquisitors were chosen by an English sympathiser, the Duke of Bedford, in whose interests it was to discredit her. The Chief Judge was Pierre Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais. Those chosen to judge her were all loyal to Burgundy or England. Both her divine revelations and political goals were outrageous to them.59
In an attempt to break her down, for almost a year the 19-year-old was held in shackles and questioned. Women’s clothes were offered to her, with the promise that if she wore them her life would be spared. Joan was accused of being a witch, a heretic, a schismatic, a blasphemer. However, she rejected women’s clothes and refused to renounce her beliefs and actions and twice attempted to escape. She expressed her faith in divine voices right to the end. Her head was shaved, and she met her fate at the stake as a heretic.60
In the 1450s Joan was rehabilitated. By that time the war was over and once more it suited the French to claim her. Witnesses came forward who had known her. In July 1456 the trial that had condemned her was found invalid on legal grounds, and she was remembered as a true Christian of exemplary piety, a heroine.61 Reinstated, Joan emerged as a virgin martyr. Her story continued into modern history and in 1920 she was canonised ‘for her piety, her purity, her selfless dedication to God’s will, her bravery in battle, and her still greater bravery during her terrible martyrdom.’62 The masculinity and cross-dressing and divine revelations remained marginal. As an archetype she became a symbol of bravery true to her convictions that transcended national boundaries. As Marina Warner puts it ‘Joan was a familiar face, but it had hardly ever been seen in the real world before. That was the miracle.’63
Modern virgin martyrs and chaste suicides
In modern times virgin martyrs continued to signal women’s pure, chaste and feminine place in society. For example, in a small Italian village 11-year-old Maria Goretti died on 6 July 1902. She had resisted a sexual assault by her 20-year-old neighbour, and died as a result of injuries inflicted upon her with a stiletto knife.64 Before she died, Maria forgave her attacker. He was jailed for 30 years, during which he became a practising Catholic, and claimed to see Maria appear before him surrounded by lilies, a flower representing purity. He was one of the main witnesses in the canonisation procedure that led to her being made a saint in 1950, where Maria’s mother and a congregation of 200,000 gathered at Rome for the service with Pope Pius XII.65 The message was that it was better to be dead and to have resisted than to be a rape victim, for as a rape victim she would have been unclean, harmed and have lost her pure status.
Of central importance for this heroine was that she had died a young virgin. Maria Goretti was a modern virgin martyr, an example of the perseverance of ideas of celebrating that it was better to die and be sacrificed than to be tainted. Summarising the situation in 2002 at World Youth Day in Toronto, Pope John Paul II articulated ‘death before dishonour,’ speaking that Goretti ‘reminds us that to be human one does not have to succumb to and follow the desires of pleasure, but to live your own life with love and responsibility.’66 A patriarchal framework whereby women were located as the property of fathers and brothers, with victims carrying the weight of dishonour, was perpetuated. And importantly, Goretti’s power came in death.
In a similar vein, chaste suicide is an enduring characteristic of heroine’s deaths. In changing representations of Mulan, Louise Edwards has argued that chaste suicides for women were a preoccupation and considered a marker of ‘exceptional virtue’ during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). The state built ‘elaborate arches commemorating women of exceptional virtue.’ It was in that era that Mulan was reinvented as a virgin martyr. For example, Chu Renhuo’s version at the end of the 1600s has her committing suicide to preserve her chastity instead of becoming a concubine of the Tujue Khan.67
In an important transcultural heroic theme, suicide could be the way for edgy, boundary-breaking women to become acceptable again. Referring to the 1991 film Thelma and Louise, Martine Delvaux generalised that ‘Suicide is a better option than girls’ rehabilitation in an economy that will, one way or another, put an end to their escape – that is to say, too, their future.’68 There are many heroines in history for whom suicide became the only way out from a world that they had become too much for. They had broken through all of society’s gender barriers and had nowhere else to go. For example, H G Wells referred to Ettie Rout, the sexual health reformer who provided soldiers during World War I with safe sex kits, embraced rational dress reform, vegetarianism, physical fitness and social reform as an ‘unforgettable heroine.’69 Too radical for many until the late 20th century, her activism and speaking out took its toll on her and in 1936 she ended her own life in Rarotonga aged 59.70
Warrior martyrs
Malalai of Maiwand (1861–80), the ‘Joan of Arc of Afghanistan,’ appeared in Chapter 3 as an anti-colonial and anti-British Afghan warrior heroine who rallied local fighters against British troops at the 1880 Battle of Maiwand.71 Being of a similar age to Joan of Arc at the time of her battle, aged only 18 or 19, added weight to the comparison. According to Pashtun oral tradition, on 27 July, the British were surprised by a much larger Pashtun force. The British initially made effective use of their artillery and drove back the Afghans. Malalai had spurred the men into action, offering ‘My lover, if you are martyred in the Battle of Maiwand, I will make a coffin for you from the tresses of my hair.’72 But it was Malalai who was killed in action, becoming a martyr heroine and her grave became a place of pilgrimage. Legend has it that it was her words of encouragement that led to the victory.73
In 1988 militant IRA member Mairead Farrell, allegedly in the process of plotting a car bomb attack on British military, was killed alongside two male associates in Gibraltar.74 Unarmed when shot, she became a martyr for her cause. After her death even her voice was censored from a documentary that was about to be screened.
It was common for warrior heroine martyrs to become pure in death. For example, according to Sikata Banerjee, Preetilata Wadedar (1911–32) ‘made no apology for her participation in armed rebellion and justified her right to stand side by side with her brothers.’ Yet in order to advance her purity she was importantly positioned as asexual. Surya Sen, Wadedar’s teacher and mentor advanced her martyrdom after taking a cyanide tablet as
In the name of the mother Goddess I like to announce from the core of my heart that never have I come across anyone so innocent, so sinless and so spotlessly pure as you. Really you were as beautiful as a flower and as pure and great. Your self-immolation is without a parallel and it has made you all the more beautiful and great.75
Mia Bloom writes of Palestinian women suicide bombers that ‘rather than confronting archaic patriarchal notions of women’ and challenging myths surrounding women’s place in society, they are ‘actually operating under them.’ Considering patriarchal motherhood as involving self-denial and self-effacement, she argues for martyrdom as ‘the ultimate and twisted fulfilment of these ideas.’ She concludes that ‘The message female suicide bombers send is that they are more valuable to their societies dead than they are alive.’76
In 1947, during the Partition of India, amidst sectarian violence, surrounded by a Muslim force demanding their conversion, and under the threat of invasion and rape, rather than risk dishonour, 90 women in the predominantly Sikh village of Thoa Khalsa in the Rawalpindi district of India killed themselves by jumping into a well. Out of options in a patriarchal world, it was interpreted that their action ‘revived the Rajput tradition of self-immolation when their menfolk were no longer able to defend them.’ The implication of a 1947 newspaper article in The Statesman was that ‘Heroism for women therefore can find articulation only in self-annihilation.’77 The mass suicide was immediately commemorated as ‘a matter of immense pride for the Sikh community where the self-sacrifice of the women was portrayed as a mark of Sikh courage and valour.’78 One July 1947 pamphlet referred to ‘The death-defying sisters of Rawalpindi – the Pride of Pothohar – Those Brave Daughters of Guru Arjan – Who preferred voluntary death – self-inflicted or at the hands of their dear ones to an ignoble life. They are physically gone. Their spirit is an undying force.’ As Arunima Dey puts it ‘Women who during their lives are methodically demarcated to the category of sub-human creatures are now suddenly memorialized as “an undying force.”’ Rather than voluntary suicides, she reinterprets the deaths as ‘community-orchestrated murder’ and an act they engaged in believing it was their place in society.79
Warrior heroines who killed themselves after battle frequently appear through history and continue on in modern times. For example, in Sri Lanka, 2nd Lieutenant Malathy (Cakayacili Peturuppillai) died on 10 October 1987 aged 20. In a battle between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) she was wounded in both legs. Unable to escape, she took cyanide. According to Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam, Malathy ‘was only the first in a long line of women martyrs of the LTTE.’ Tamil Eelam Women’s Awakening Day was held to commemorate her death, as well as decorating her tombstone and statue in Killinochi.80 Another commemorated Tamil martyr, Annai Pupati (Mother Pupati or Kanapatipillai Pupati), died in a temple in Batticaloa on 19 April 1988 at the age of 56. She had refused both food and fluids for 30 days. After two of her sons were killed by the army and a third was arrested and tortured, she joined the Mothers’ Front in Navatkeni. That group peacefully protested against army occupation and their ‘disappeared’ sons. She began her ‘fast unto death’ on 19 March 1988 against the IPKF, demanding a ceasefire and negotiations.
Writing of the Indian cultures, Hellmann-Rajanayagam argues that while ‘men become pure by dying a martyr’s death, women retain their purity.’ Sati, where wives immolate themselves after their husband’s death on his funeral pyre, even sometimes had memorial stones placed for them as for a fallen warrior. LTTE ideology expected chastity (karpu) from both sexes as an expression of self-control and restraint. A secular movement, it rejected the concept and practice of Sati and attempted to remember female and male martyrs the same.81
Executed martyrs
Expecting martyrdom after being part of a failed attempt to assassinate the governor of Anhui, rather than escape, Chinese heroine Qiu Jin waited at her school for troops to arrive. Like other heroines, her execution ‘fuelled dissent.’ Authorities could be well aware of the heroic martyrdom of women working against them. For example, Constance Markievicz was sentenced to death for her part in the Easter Uprising, but had her sentence commuted to life imprisonment because she was a woman.82 As Louise Edwards writes, Qiu Jin’s trial was considered ‘mismanaged and its verdict excessively harsh.’ It caused ‘serious problems’ for the Qing officials and the magistrate who sentenced her to death later killed himself.83 In death, she became an important cult figure and was buried and reburied nine times.84 Sun Yat-sen called her a ‘female hero’ and situated her ‘within the ideology of noble swordswomen of China’s past rather than as a revolutionary citizen in which feminists could be part of China’s future.’85 Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and Vera Mackie note the importance of changing revolutionary national memories in heroic versions of both women.86
Advanced as an heroic British woman and martyr to the World War I Allied cause, Edith Cavell (1865–1915) became posthumously famous, with death dominating remembrance for her. Cavell was a vicar’s daughter from Norwich, England, who had lived and worked in Belgium for a considerable part of her adult life. Sometimes considered the ‘second most famous’ British nurse after Florence Nightingale, she was responsible for advancing Protestant nursing techniques in Brussels. She was a mature 49-year-old matron when on 12 October 1915 she was executed by a firing squad in German-occupied Brussels after being found guilty on a charge of escorting troops to the enemy. It is estimated that Cavell assisted around 1,000 men, rather than the 200 she confessed to at her German military court trial. She was part of an escape organisation and closely aligned to those involved in spying.87 At her trial much was made of her work as a nurse dedicated to life-saving, and work at her hospital that continued under the Red Cross during the war.
Cavell’s death backfired for the Germans occupying Brussels, who likely considered her a meddling old maid resisting their control. Cavell became a propaganda tool for Allied enlistment, with men encouraged to avenge her death on the battlefield. George Bernard Shaw compared her trial to that of Joan of Arc. Dead, Cavell became very valuable as a martyr and the most famous British heroine of World War I. Versions of her death fuelled the propaganda machine. She was portrayed as young, innocent, martyr wearing pure white, and with a red cross. One popular postcard with the words ‘Remember’ featured a German officer shooting her with a revolver and the shooting squad off to the left, serving to further vilify the Germans through their breaking of military protocol. The many versions of her death show Germans as cowardly and barbaric towards women. One account had her falling in a swoon, too much of a lady to witness her own death, and selfless to the end. Immediately after her death propaganda accounts gave an execution time of an unchivalrous 2am, not the traditional dawn. Stories of how she died included images of aggressive parading German troops and resistance by some of the rank and file German officers shooting above her head to avoid the execution of a woman on their conscience.88
During that war it was usually only women who were convicted of being spies who faced the firing squad. The Allied propaganda emphasised women as different from men, and in need of their protection. On the other hand, the Germans advanced that men and women were equal before the law and that the only reason not to execute a woman was if she was pregnant. Dr Alfred Zimmerman the German Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs added that ‘in war time one must be ready to seal one’s love of the Fatherland with one’s blood.’89 Asserting her standing as a fine British heroine, encouraging men to enlist and avenge her death, British Prime Minister Asquith asserted that ‘she has taught the bravest man amongst us the supreme lesson of courage.’90
Chinese communist warrior martyr Zhao Yiman was 32 years old when executed on 2 August 1936 by the Japanese. She was posthumously remembered as mother to her son, a teacher of communism and a guerrilla fighter.91 Also, in China, according to Louise Edwards, Liu Hulan has been ‘hailed as a heroic communist martyr for well over half a century.’ The 17-year-old was beheaded with a hay cutter in the winter of 1947 during the Chinese Civil War of 1946–9. A member of the CCP, her village of Shanxi came into Nationalist Party hands. Politically active from a young age, she was supporting the communist troops with supplies and looking after the injured. She was constructed as a ‘girl warrior,’ a loyal peasant girl who did not betray her comrades or renounce her convictions.92 Executed along with 24 others, there were reports of her bravery on the execution block. The heroine defiantly said ‘Come on! If you want to kill me, do as you like! If I came back for another 17 years, I’d do the same again!’93 Similarly, defiance and patriotism featured in the execution of Gabriel Petit. During World War I in Belgium in 1916 the 23-year-old resistance worker dubbed ‘the modern Joan of Arc’ was executed by the occupying Germans.94 According to a popular account of her death, she refused support from a soldier saying ‘Thank you, Sir, but I do not need your help, you will see how a Belgian girl knows how to die.’ She rejected a blindfold and cried out final patriotic words.95
In March 1948, Aisin Gioro Xianyu, a Manchu Princess, was found guilty by China of spying for Japan. She appeared at her trial (Chapter 5) dressed as a man and in her defence she said that she was fighting for a Manchu State.96 Records state that she was executed by a rifle shot to the back of the head. But had her contacts set up a body double and she had escaped, living out her life as ‘Granny Fang’? Little did those who labelled the Manchu warrior princess ‘the Joan of Arc of the Orient’ in the 1930s know that like Joan of Arc she would be tried and executed in a potentially unfair trial that handed out summary justice.97
Political murders
Rosa Luxemburg suffered bouts of illness throughout her life. She had a limp from polio as a child. No stranger to being imprisoned for her beliefs, at the turn of the 20th century in 1906 she was released from prison in Russian Poland on health grounds. It was when she was imprisoned soon after for a further two months in Berlin that she managed to write The Accumulation of Capital in her prison cell. Nobody was immune from the outspoken Marxist critic, even Lenin, whose leadership she found too centralised. In prison for opposing it, at the end of World War I, Luxemburg was released from prison in Germany, hopeful for revolutionary success in that country. Sadly, on 15 January 1919, German soldiers smashed her skull with a rifle butt, shot her and dumped her body in a canal in Berlin. Her motto was ‘Doubt all,’ her life’s struggle was for women to be accepted in the front line of socialist theory and leadership. Too much for the world she was ‘finished off,’ silenced. Even exalted mother figure heroines leading their nations were vulnerable to assassination. Early women prime ministers Indira Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto were assassinated in 1984 and 2007, respectively.
FIGURE 6.2 Rosa Luxemburg in Zurich.
Credit: Alamy stock photo Image ID D1GRN0: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-rosa-luxemburg-historic-portrait-photo-of-rosa-luxemburg-as-a-young-52615612.html
Mysterious deaths: interwar aviators
Heroines’ mysterious deaths have frequently come to dominate how their lives are represented. This is particularly the case with heroic daredevils and boundary-pushers, such as the aviators of the first half of the 20th century. Located ‘at the intersection of subjectivity and technology,’ as Justine Lloyd points out, heroines such as Amy Johnson were part of ‘modernist myths of travel as personal freedom’ and producing ‘a new, more democratic kind of space for women.’98 For example, British heroine Amy Johnson flew during World War II as part of the Air Transport Auxiliary and died during a ferry flight. There is mystery surrounding her fate, but, given that she was unfortunately shot down by friendly fire, it did not come to dominate how she was remembered. In contrast was the untimely death of Amelia Earhart. When Earhart’s Lockheed Electra plane went missing over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 while attempting to circumnavigate the globe there followed the most expensive search and rescue mission for a plane ever mounted. Four thousand men, ten ships and 65 aeroplanes combed 250,000 square miles of the Pacific for 16 days.99 She was already famous, but by disappearing she became legendary. Over the years many conspiracy theories surfaced as to her fate, and that of her co-pilot Fred Noonan. One was that she had eloped with Fred Noonan and they were living happily on a Pacific atoll. Another was that they had crashed and been taken prisoner by the Japanese. Yet another was that she was spying against the Japanese and had not disappeared but gone undercover.100 What led to Earhart’s disappearance? Kathleen C Winters suggests that ‘Maybe she spread herself too thin. Overcommitted and always in a rush, she skimped on pre-flight planning, bypassing the meticulous work necessary for consistent, successful long-distance flights.’101
Earhart was well aware of the dangers of flying. She wrote that ‘When I go, I would like to go in my plane, quickly.’102 Before the second transpacific flight she gave George Putnam a handwritten note ‘Please know I am quite aware of the hazards of the trip. Women must try to do things men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.’103 In letters to each of her parents to be opened in the event of her death she wrote to her father ‘Hooray for the grand adventure! I wish I had won, but it was worthwhile anyway. You know that I have no faith we’ll meet anywhere else, but I wish we might. Anyway, goodbye and good luck to you.’ To her mother she wrote ‘Even though I have lost, the adventure was worthwhile. Our family tends to be too secure. My life has really been very happy, and I didn’t mind contemplating its end in the midst of it.’104
Earhart’s fame and glamour lived on and importantly her disappearance rendered her forever young. Her heroic value continued to soar, depicting qualities of valour, gallantry, courage and of hopes and dreams. Earhart worked in a competitive record-breaking climate and one where she was incredibly famous. She provided escapism and entertainment. Did she, or her promoter and publisher husband push her on too far? Cynically, she did become more valuable dead than alive.
Dying alone led to New Zealand aviator Jean Batten (1909–82) being posthumously character assassinated, re-casting and even dominating versions of heroic status. Importantly, in a life of adventure, setting records and receiving awards, dying alone was interpreted as a sign of failure. Dying away from the patriarchal family unit positioned Batten as independent and threatening and being outside of social norms subjected her to derision. Batten understood being alone and knew how to cope with loneliness. It is likely her personality thrived on danger and the thrill of time alone in the skies. Her own words, crafted to hook an audience, display a well-honed understanding of the emotion, rather than of being a victim to it:
There have been times when vital decisions had to be made in the fraction of a second-decisions that meant life or death, and depended on a clear brain working in perfect co-ordination with a steady hand. There have been other times when loneliness has been so intense that I have longed for the sound of a human voice or the sight of a ship, or even a tiny native village, to dispel the feeling of complete isolation that one feels when flying alone over the sparsely inhabited tracts that comprise such a great area of the earth’s surface.105
In 1990 Ian Mackersey’s Garbo of the Skies revealed that aged 73 Batten had died in an apartment in Palma, Majorca, from a pulmonary abscess caused by an untreated septic dog bite wound. Due to administrative errors, relatives in New Zealand went uninformed. In stark contrast to the many buildings, streets and prizes named after her, on 22 January 1983 the heroine was buried in a pauper’s mass grave.106
In the post-war years Batten and her mother had lived a life of leisure, travelling around the Caribbean and Mediterranean. After her mother’s death in Tenerife in 1969, Batten had increasingly enjoyed her own company, although she did have a wide social network. The compulsive explorer and traveller, also used to the glamorous high life, was not a settled family homebody. She cultivated an image as an attractive, single, interwar celebrity rather than a housewife. Liz Millward has argued that Batten ‘suggested emancipatory possibilities to women that challenged heteronormativity because she represented economic independence coupled with an appealing brand of emotional intelligence.’107
The story of Batten’s death diminished her life achievements. Ian Mackersey stripped Batten of her glory and cast her as sad and elusive. She was a loner who built a wall around her. Manipulated by her mother, Batten was deceitful, ‘an androgynous woman with a male sex drive’108, ‘a fascinating woman who combined bravery and seductive beauty she used so effectively to achieve her destiny.’109 Influenced by Ian Mackersey’s work John King wrote of ‘themes are a manipulative mother, failed relationships with men, ruthless and selfish.’ Batten is left stripped of all of her talent; her achievements put down to luck.
In India, political revolutionary heroine, Bina Das (1911–36), famous in 1932 for the attempted assassination of Bengal British Governor Stanley Jackson, mentioned in Chapter 3, died alone. After the death of her husband she had preferred her own company. Her partially decomposed dead body was found on the roadside in Rishikesh, India, in December 1986. It took the police a month to confirm her identity.110 Like Batten, dying alone and unclaimed became part of her ‘life story.’
Forever young
In August 1962, 20th-century heroine Marilyn Monroe, discussed as a glamour heroine in Chapter 8, died an untimely and tragic death at the age of 36. Like Amelia Earhart, her death remained shrouded in mystery and intrigue, playing a big part in how she was remembered. The cause of Monroe’s death was ‘probable suicide,’ leaving room for decades of rumours and conspiracy theories. Writer Norman Mailer wrote ‘what a jolt to the dream of a nation that an angel died of an overdose.’111 Dying alone contributed to an interpretation of loneliness and despair. The autopsy revealed ‘a lethal level of barbiturates in Marilyn’s bloodstream and in her liver, but no residue in her stomach.’ Her sister Bernice Baker Miracle wrote that:
In the past Marilyn had accidentally overdosed and suffered respiratory failure, and the prior two years of crises and depression offer possible motives for suicide. But the absence of a note, the lack of proper dress and makeup, and a full schedule of appointments for Monday, all seem to indicate an accident.112
Monroe displayed a strong awareness of both her personality and her position in society. Her own words hauntingly foreshadowed her death: ‘Yes there was something special about me, and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand’113 and ‘But things weren’t entirely black – not yet. They really never are. When you’re young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and then by Wednesday you’re laughing again.’114 At 36, following the recent termination of her contract at 20th Century Fox Studios, Marilyn’s career in film appeared to have ended.115 Paige Baty has argued that in suicide Monroe was able to take back her own power.116
Congenital heart disease and a broken heart fused in stories for Bollywood glamour star Madhubala. She was born with a hole in her heart, which at the time was an incurable condition. Madhubala went to London in 1960 to seek medical advice, which recommended that she not have children, avoid stress, and estimated that she could live from one to ten more years.117 Despite her enormous success as an actress (see Chapter 8), Madhubala was portrayed as a tragic figure. As she put it in her own words, ‘I am very emotional. I have always lived my life with my heart. For that I have suffered more than necessary. I have been hurt.’118 Connecting her emotional and physical struggles she said that
The sum total of my life is a bitter experience which is coiled tight like a spring within my heart and when released, hurts excruciatingly. It is true that one learns something from every experience, but when the experience is evil, the shock is so great that one feels as though one can never recover from it.119
One story held that Madhubala never recovered from her break-up with fellow actor Dilip Kumar. Although they were not talking, they starred together in the 1960 blockbuster Mughal-e-Azam.120 The filming had involved Madhubala moving about in heavy iron chains resulting in abrasions ‘so severe that she was confined to bed for many days.’121 As her illness worsened through the 1960s, Madhubala was bedridden and ‘reduced to just bones and skin.’122 Manju Gupta comments that ‘Perhaps it was Madhubala’s early death itself that has immortalised her as a forever beautiful, forever carefree young woman who will remain always elusive.’123 Through her illness and untimely death ‘The bubbly actress was cheated of her dreams and lived only for thirty-six years to become a star forever …’124
Also at the age of 36, Diana, Princess of Wales (1961–97), had an untimely death. Hers was the result of an accidental car crash in a Paris road tunnel. Sandra Coney wrote at the time that rather than die heroically, Diana’s fate was a ‘commonplace’ car crash and furthermore, that ‘The media hounded her to death, then gathered round the corpse to feast off the rich pickings.’125 Singer Elton John re-recorded and adapted for Diana his song written for Marilyn Monroe, Candle in the Wind. In a controversial 1995 television interview Diana had crowned herself ‘the Queen of Hearts.’ In Britain she was then posthumously crowned as ‘The people’s princess,’ a term coined by journalist Julie Burchill and taken up by Prime Minister Tony Blair.126
A discourse of virgin martyrdom surrounded Diana. She was ‘England’s rose,’ a reference to whiteness and purity of breeding. In the lead up to marriage, between February and July 1981 she went from a 29- to 23.5-inch waist as a result of bulimia nervosa.127 Despite feeling that she was the ‘luckiest girl in the world’ walking down the aisle with a heart that ‘brimmed over with love and adoration for Charles,’ in opposition to her ever-rising popularity, marriage would make her privately unwell.128
Diana’s public image in the early years of marriage was that she went from strength to strength in her role. Most importantly she produced an ‘heir and a spare,’ with William born on 21 June 1982 and Harry on 15 September 1984. It was not until much later that private adversity, including post-natal depression and suicide attempts, became public knowledge. In 1995 the revealing and incredibly widely watched Panorama interview included Diana’s suicide attempts, affairs and her statement that ‘there were three of us in this marriage’ alluded to Charles’ ongoing adulterous relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles.129 It amounted to treason and made Diana a royal liability. The Queen consulted the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury and suggested that Charles and Diana divorce. In February 1996 Diana agreed to an uncontested divorce. By 28 August 1996 it was final.
After her divorce Diana was free to be herself. In response to losing her ‘Her Royal Highness’ title she said ‘I am going to be me.’ She auctioned off her clothes for charity and set out as an humanitarian ambassador. However, she didn’t disappear from public view. An age-old theme for heroines in history, especially regal ones, is their perceived availability once divorced. Chapter 5 has covered heroines cross-dressing in order to evade suitors. History reveals that the solution for women alone was usually to quickly remarry and gain the protection of a new husband. Now vixen rather than virgin, Diana was linked to a series of men including Hasnat Khan, heart surgeon, Christopher Whalley, property developer and, finally, Dodi Fayed. Then after a year of freedom and living in the fast lane, and only a year after her divorce, on 31 August 1997 Diana was dead. Her brother Charles referred to her being hounded and hunted by the paparazzi, and they were widely viewed as being directly culpable in her death. As Sandra Coney put it, she was ‘subject to the forces of the market and the market won.’130
That Diana was no longer officially regal at the time of her death was of little consequence, as she was flying high as the most popular British Royal. In response to public demand the flag at Buckingham Palace eventually flew at half-mast and the Queen walked amongst the piles of tributes as a sign of respect. Vitally, Diana was constructed as a saint, a goddess-like mother figure and martyr who transcended the British nation. And she was most potently and simply ‘mummy,’ evoking a super-womanly heroine. As Beatrix Campbell put it, there was a ‘secular beatification.’131 Her saintly qualities of care, nurture, and charity with the needy were to the fore. And in contrast to the out-moded monarchy, she was a modern regal heroine. At her funeral representatives of her charities marched behind her coffin, forming a sea of rainbow colours. When spiritual heroine Mother Teresa died at the same time, there were endless comparisons drawn.
Diana’s funeral was also a posthumous crowning of a maternal, martyred ‘Queen of Hearts.’ Importantly and poignantly, a united patriarchal column of royal men walked solemnly behind her coffin. Her ex-father-in-law and ex-husband were side by side with her brother and her two young sons. They may have walked behind her, but it was a corpse in a coffin they followed and not an alive, free, feisty, independent woman. She was no longer out of their grasp. Diana’s body was taken by her family to the family home at Althorpe to rest in peace on an island in the middle of a lake. There is a shrine where people go to visit a heroine whose untimely death came after episodes of illness that made her story real and relatable.
Conclusion: funerals
Funerals provide useful insights into how heroines’ lives were viewed at the time of their death and women’s status more generally. Queen Salote of Tonga was 18 when she ascended the throne in 1918. When she died in 1965 15,000 yards of black fabric was imported for mourning purposes. Yet even that amount was not enough for the black curtains, banners and clothes required for the six months of mourning that followed her death.132 In contrast, Queen Victoria left behind her funeral directions that separated her from the era that she personified. Contrary to the Victorian age’s association with great pomp and ceremony, Victoria wanted a minimum of pomp and not even the traditional Death March from Handel’s Saul. Rather than the ‘Victorian mourning’ colour of black that she personified, she wanted white and gold drapery. As head of the armed forces, Victoria could have had a military funeral, but did not want that association.
For heroines in history, as humans, illness and death were an essential part of their stories. As women, their gendered vulnerability could be both enabling and disabling. Representations changed with the times and often combined elements of fact and fiction. Untimely death and martyrdom featured strongly in how heroines were remembered.
Notes
1 See Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (New York: Doubleday, 1972).
2 J M Taylor, Eva Perón: The Myths of a Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 148.
3 Rosemarie Garland‐Thomson, ‘Feminist Disability Studies,’ Signs, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2005), 1557–87, 1557.
4 Sofia Rodriguez Lopez and Antonio Cazorla, ‘Blue Angels: Female Fascist Resisters, Spies and Intelligence Officials in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–9,’ Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 53, No. 4 (2018), 692–713, 694.
5 Lopez and Cazorla, ‘Blue Angels,’ 693.
6 Peter FitzSimons, Nancy Wake: A Biography of Our Greatest War Heroine (Sydney: Harper Collins, 2002).
7 Douglas Baynton, ‘Slaves, Immigrants, and Suffragists: The Uses of Disability in Citizenship Debates,’ PMLA, Vol. 120, No. 2 (2005), 562–7, 654.
8 Susan Burch and Lindsey Patterson, ‘Not Just Any Body: Disability, Gender, and History,’ Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 25 No. 4 (2013), 122–37.
9 https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/british-and-irish-history-biographies/isabella-lucy-bird-bishop (Date last accessed 4 October 2021).
10 Xian Wang, ‘Flesh and Stone: Competing Narratives of Female Martyrdom from Late Imperial to Contemporary China,’ Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Oregon, 2018, iv.
11 Elaine Showalter, Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador, 2002), 38.
12 Showalter, Inventing Herself, 37.
13 Katie Pickles, ‘Colonial Sainthood in Australasia,’ National Identities, Vol. 7. No. 4 (2005), 389–408, 392.
14 Rachel Hunt, ‘Helen Keller’ in Sara Hunt, Heroines: Remarkable and Inspiring Women: An Illustrated Anthology of Essays by Women Writers (Glasgow: Saraband, 1995), 98–9.
15 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Helen-Keller (Date last accessed 11 October 2021).
16 Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications Inc, 1903/1996), iii.
17 Maria Costantino, ‘Frida Kahlo’ in Hunt, Heroines, 115–7.
18 Costantino, ‘Frida Kahlo,’ 115.
19 Costantino, ‘Frida Kahlo,’ 116.
20 Costantino, ‘Frida Kahlo,’ 117.
21 Patti Gully, Sisters of Heaven: China’s Barnstorming Aviatrixes (San Francisco: Long River Press, 2007), 229.
22 Bernard Farber, ‘Women, Marriage, and Illness: Consumptives in Salem, Massachusetts,’ 1785–1819, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, Family, Health and Illness (Spring, 1973), 36–48.
23 Jessica Mitford, Grace Had an English Heart: The story of Grace Darling, heroine and Victorian superstar (London: Viking, 1988), 137–43.
24 Hugh Cuningham, Grace Darling: Victorian Heroine (London and New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), 77.
25 Katie Pickles and Angela Wanhalla, ‘Embodying the Colonial Encounter: Explaining New Zealand’s “Grace Darling” Huria Matenga,’ Gender and History, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2010), 361–81, 372.
26 Mitford, Grace Had an English Heart, 146.
27 On coping, mental illness and breakdown see Judy Kaye and Senthil Kumar Raghavan, ‘Spirituality in Disability and Illness,’ Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 41, No. 3 (2002), 231–42.
28 Taylor, Eva Perón, 82.
29 Taylor, Eva Perón, 82.
30 Taylor, Eva Perón, 95–6.
31 Taylor, Eva Perón, 83.
32 Taylor, Eva Perón, 83.
33 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18616380 (Date last accessed 19 October 2021).
34 http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/seacole_mary.shtml (Date last accessed 6 August 2019).
35 Nataliya Danilova and Emma Dolan, ‘Scottish soldier- heroes and patriotic war heroines: The gendered politics of World War I commemoration,’ Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, Vol. 27, No. 2 (2020), 239–60, 239, 253.
36 Judith Devaliant, Kate Sheppard: A Biography: The Fight for Women’s Votes in New Zealand: The life and the woman who led the struggle (Auckland: Penguin, 1992), 208–9.
37 Rosalynd Pflaum, Grand Obsession: Madam Curie and her World (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 153.
38 Eleni Stylianou, ‘Marie Curie’ in Hunt, Heroines, 86–7.
39 Robert Reid, Marie Curie (London: The Quality Book Club and The Scientific Book Club, 1974), 317.
40 Susan Quinn, Marie Curie: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 367.
41 Pflaum, Grand Obsession, 225.
42 Pflaum, Grand Obsession, 219.
43 Pflaum, Grand Obsession, 224.
44 Pflaum, Grand Obsession, 224.
45 Pflaum, Grand Obsession, 224.
46 Pflaum, Grand Obsession, 225.
47 Pflaum, Grand Obsession, 228.
48 Pflaum, Grand Obsession, 227.
49 Pflaum, Grand Obsession, 226.
50 Pflaum, Grand Obsession, 240.
51 Eleni Stylianou, ‘Marie Curie,’ 87.
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65 ‘Pope to young virgins: death before dishonour,’ The Press, 9 July 2002, B1.
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67 Louise Edwards, Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 24–5.
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76 Mia Bloom, ‘Female Suicide Bombers: A Global Trend,’ Daedalus (Winter, 2007), 94–102, 102.
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83 Edwards, Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China, 48.
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85 Edwards, Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China, 51.
86 Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and Vera Mackie, Remembering Women’s Activism (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 114–5.
87 See Emmanuel Debruyne, Le Reseau Edith Cavell: Des femmes et des hommes en resistance (Brussels: Racine, 2015).
88 Katie Pickles, Transnational Outrage: The Death and Commemoration of Edith Cavell (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007/2015).
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91 Edwards, Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China, 130–1.
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