Are you accusing Mantel of not dumbing down her speech enough Olga?
I have to wonder though if it were a male novelist who voiced these thoughts would the media have pounced on him? The way this whole thing has been portrayed as some kind of girly cat fight I suspect not. I feel sorry for Mantel (yes, I am defending her, don’t hate me for it!) in that the media are obviously too stupid to know when they’re being criticized. This will all blow over soon and the media will go back to commenting on the Duchesses lady bits.
Womb watch 2013 must continue!

Louise said

I have read the Mantel diatribe in it’s entirety and I can’t see how she has been quoted out of context. She made those comments, which were nasty and uncalled for. Once again, however, she gives her opinions just as she does in her books, and then hides behind the suggestion that she is referring to media exploitation. It’s an excuse.

THe media has explotied the royal family since the earliest days of Fleet Street. I have no sympathy for the pres..

She gives her opinion of the Boleyns and hides behind her fictional Cromwell in order to give voice those opinions.

That’s a novelist’s job..to give voice to other people …rightly or wrongly..You don’t have to agree with them and sometimes…just sometimes..looking at another’s viewpoint of the past can help with looking at the fuller picture.

She gives her opinion of the Duchess of Cambridge and hides behind how she says the press view Kate in order to voice her opinions. She doesn’t even have the integrity to be honest about it.

so..she gives her opinion and then hides it??? I’m missing your point here…

Louise said

I don’t agree that Mantel’s obesity or appearance should be referred to when considering her comments regarding the Duchess of Cambridge.

I totally agree …but why are people fixating on ms Mantel’s weight….

oh..yes..fat women should hide..and not have any other purpose apart from comedic relief..cos otherwise they are jealous b!tches from he77…read too many comments about Ms Mantel recently..

That’s despite her own personal comments on Kate, her thinness and her plastic face. I think her comments should not have been given airspace or credence in the first place.

Why not? It was a lecture given in a public forum and picked up by the Daily Wail amongst organs of Fleet Street.The British press have always laughed about censorship in the past..

All those who defend Mantel point out the ‘fact’ that her attack on Kate was actually merely an indictment of the nasty press. I agree she has a valid point when it comes to our obsession with looks, and the press’s attitude to Kate, as with Diana before her.

And any other female celebs out there….nearly all the men get a “get outta jail” card for not being perfect 24/7/52.

Double standard much!

Those who defend Mantel say she was supporting Kate and that she was merely projecting the press’s view of Kate, not her own.

Many of us who’ve seen through the whole press objectification of famous women are nodding in agreement…

I suppose that’s similar to the adverse depiction of the Boleyns in BUTB. Of course she wasn’t giving her own views, merely Cromwell’s.

Since neither you nor ms Mantel actaully knows how Cromwell thought..I’m allowing Ms Mantel to tell the fictional story how she wants it to go.

But despite what will no doubt be her protestations of innocence, look at what she actually says,
‘I saw Kate becoming a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung. In those days she was a shop window mannequin, with no personality of her own, and entirely defined by what she wore.’

Fleet Street did that to Diana, Princess of Wales… Actually…I’ve seen reports about Alexandra of Denmark when she was Princess of Wales commenting on her appaearence and not her personality or character..it’s not a recent innovation..

OK the press may have seen her as a shop window mannequin defined by what she wore, but Mantel goes further then merely projecting her opinions of the press with the, ‘no personality of her own’. She goes on to say in the same paragraph,
‘These days she is mother-to-be, and draped in another set of threadbare attributions. Once she gets over being sick, the press will find that she is radiant. They will find this young woman’s life until now was nothing, her only point of purpose being to give birth.’

been there, done that…had everything I achieved become irrevaleant to the fact I was now packing the goods in my womb.. esp from my family..less so from D’Hoffryn’s since they already had a grand-son

Threadbare attributions? Is that not nasty? Once she’s got over being sick? Even worse. Is she merely saying that the press view Kate as a breeding machine, or has she hidden her own opinions behind the press, just as she hides her own opinions behind Cromwell in her books?

Yupper…the British Press have always been interasted in the fertily of the female membvers of ther Royal Family..I’ve seen that from 1973 onwards…

That comment is personal, and I believe that’s Mantel’s opinion. The reason I say that is because of what follows.
‘Kate Middleton, as she was, appeared to have been designed by committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished.’ This sentence is typical of Mantel’s exquisite pretentiousness, but is it the press’s view of the single Kate? It’s Mantel’s comment; no one else’s.

Hyperbole by Ms Mantel..

‘Presumably Kate was designed to breed in some manners. She looks like a nicely brought up young lady, with ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ as part of her vocabulary.’

Slight as the Princess Royal’s infamous ” Naff” comment , me thinks…

‘What does Kate read? It’s a question’.

and ??? IT’s as irrevalent as does the Duchess listen to Justin Bieber or Alice Cooper?? She’d be condenmed for either or both….

‘Kate seems to have been selected for the role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.’
All of these comments are mind-numbingly patronising, and the last untrue.,/<blockquotde.

Sadly..we haven’t had time to see what the Duchess of Cambrige is capable of..so i really don’t see how that is untrue..

William selected Kate because he loved her. The royal family didn’t select her for him.,

ITA..I think a lot of the “willthey/won’tthey” was because the former Ms Middleton knew what would be expected of her from seeing what had happened to Lady Diana Spencer, Lady Sarah Fergusson and Sophie Rhys-Jones due to press pressure.

Painfully thin? That’s Mantel’s opinion of her. If not then why not simply say ‘suitably slim’. This is an insult which gets at Kate, not the press. So how can Mantel argue she’s doing Kate a favour, particularly taking into account the last barb, ‘without the risk of the emergence of a personality’?
I agree that our interest in royalty is largely shallow. If Mantel limited her comments to the shallowness of our own and the press’s view of royalty, particularly female royalty, then I would have sympathy with her views. But she goes far further than that. If her intentions were, as those who defend her comments suggest, then she failed miserably. I find it difficult to believe that a woman who is allegedly such a wonderful writer could get it so wrong. There are too many sly little digs at a variety of different people hidden amongst her carefully crafted prose for it to be unintended.

How thin, then, is suitably, thin??

I remember how Diana, Princess of Wales was hounded by the press for alleged bulimia and gym addiction. And How Sarah, Duchess of York was hounded for her packing on a few pounds…

Bella44 said

Are you accusing Mantel of not dumbing down her speech enough Olga?
I have to wonder though if it were a male novelist who voiced these thoughts would the media have pounced on him? The way this whole thing has been portrayed as some kind of girly cat fight I suspect not. I feel sorry for Mantel (yes, I am defending her, don’t hate me for it!) in that the media are obviously too stupid to know when they’re being criticized. This will all blow over soon and the media will go back to commenting on the Duchesses lady bits.
Womb watch 2013 must continue!

To be honest…many of the British papers I see on line have been commenting on when the sprog will be dropped since November 2011. Since a lot of them thought that the former Ms Middleton was enciente before the wedding..

‘What does Kate read? It’s a question’.

Every time I see this quote I can’t help but think that someone told Hilary that Kate hasn’t read any of her books.

Having read this thread and read the actual ‘speech’ and lots of various news reports, my opinion is that there are some very personal attacks towards Kate hidden within the attack of the way the media treats Kate. The whole Kate section comes across as a pile of sour grapes. To the point that I think Mantel is pissed that the Royal Family killed her beloved boyfriend all those centuries ago.

If I was a cynical man I would say this whole speech was designed for free publicity and it worked apparenty.

Claire said

The flunkey bit, and actually the whole bit about Buckingham Palace, had me cringing. Many people would just be grateful to be there, gristly meat or not. I looked up “flunkey” in the Oxford Dictionary as I wasn’t sure if it’s derogatory but it is:

“Definition of flunkey
noun (plural flunkeys or flunkies)
chiefly derogatory
a liveried manservant or footman.
a person who performs relatively menial tasks for someone else, especially obsequiously.”

So, yes, not very politically correct!

Obviously people have focused on the ‘Kate’ parts of the speech but you’re right in pointing out that there’s more to it than that.

Thanks for pointing that out! I was scratching my head trying to figure out what the heck that word meant. I’m from the US and I’m not familiar with certain words or slang used in the UK.
I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand what was up with all the little jabs she kept taking at the monarchy. I mean did she really have to resort to that to get her point across?

Claire said

Can you imagine the furore if David Starkey had said what Mantel said?!

A h3ll of a lot less of the “ugly, infertile, fat , lesbian” and far more of the “noted writer and historian” and nay a hint of him being gay..

I believe in freedom of speech but I also believe that people in the public eye, who are given a platform to speak, should be aware of the power of their words. As an award-winning novelist, Mantel is the ‘darling’ of the literary world at the moment, so anything she says is going to be conveyed to a wide audience and so I feel that her words were unwise.

I must disagree …the UK popular press is and has always been noted for it’s shall we say, “spin-doctoring” of widely reported stories…And the US press, esp Fox and it’s ilk is even worse..

Ms Mantel is guilty of viewing a subject through her “lens” (if you like) and reporting what she sees and feels. Her opinion is as valid as your’s or mine.

And the inference taken from it by (general) you or me is defined by how we view the world and more importantly, esp the women here, how our experiences of the feminist and post-feminist world changes the outlook of our view-point.

I don’t believe she meant to be malicious, but having read her speech over and over again it is insulting to Kate and I can’t see it any other way. A brief one line statement of apology saying something like “I didn’t mean it as it’s been taken….” would have rescued the situation, I believe.

But how is Ms Mantel supposed to know how the press is/was/going to spin her words to make her look bad or the Duchess of Cambridge look good to their readers. The interpretation is pushed by the reporter and unless the reader is going to read the original and make up her/his own mind then any possible shamed apology is meaningless.

black_mamba said

Claire said

The flunkey bit, and actually the whole bit about Buckingham Palace, had me cringing. Many people would just be grateful to be there, gristly meat or not. I looked up “flunkey” in the Oxford Dictionary as I wasn’t sure if it’s derogatory but it is:

“Definition of flunkey
noun (plural flunkeys or flunkies)
chiefly derogatory
a liveried manservant or footman.
a person who performs relatively menial tasks for someone else, especially obsequiously.”

So, yes, not very politically correct!

Obviously people have focused on the ‘Kate’ parts of the speech but you’re right in pointing out that there’s more to it than that.

Thanks for pointing that out! I was scratching my head trying to figure out what the heck that word meant. I’m from the US and I’m not familiar with certain words or slang used in the UK.
I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand what was up with all the little jabs she kept taking at the monarchy. I mean did she really have to resort to that to get her point across?

My Husband has a lot of trouble keeping up with my slang at times. Nearly every British town/villiage/city has their own little sayings. The British accent has a real mixture of dialects, which comes in handy when Dinosaur gets up my bugle because I can off into a tirade of North of Watford slang and he hasn’t got a clue what I’m on about. Then of course there is the c*ckney rhyming slang, it’s not used so much these days, but I’m guessing your poor head would pop like a balloon if ever you were thrown into a conversation amongst the older community in the East End of London. Thankfully my father was a true born c*ckney (Born within the sound of the bow bells) so I learnt a lot of it from him.

As for a good G.B biography. YES we need one and I feel that Louise is the perfect person for that job. She just needs a good boot up the bum to get her going and I think will would have a good, factual and trustworthy book to tell us about the real George Boleyn. There has been so many fictional portrayals of him and the only one I feel that is perhaps anywhere near the real George was in Anne of a thousand days. A steadfast loyal and very loving man.