Having as I do firsthand experience of the impact of Thatcher’s thirteen years, her government’s break with prevailing consensus and bloody-minded devotion to neoliberal orthodoxies, an objective and rational evaluation of the woman is probably beyond me. That said, her presumably impending death – although I do have a longstanding appointment at a pub in King’s Cross to dutifully raise a glass – is something to which I’ll be largely indifferent. It won’t matter. Thatcher as a person has far less bearing on the current world than what she represents. The damage has been done, the battle lost, and much as I might appreciate a Truth and Reconciliation Commission into the 1980s, Thatcher and her co-conspirators are by now too old and whiskey-soaked to be held to any meaningful account.

Efforts to humanise Thatcher, even when they enlist Meryl Streep, seem discomfiting and deeply bizarre. What she means has transcended what she was, is and will be. The purpose of this post, therefore, apart from being an exercise in detachment for me, is to look briefly at some aspects of Thatcher’s image in political and pop culture, and to consider the effect of her gender on her role as a woman in power. Quick, before the next bus goes past.

The Icon Lady

Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.

– Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens

Thatcher’s visual staying power in political and pop culture is as great as her impact on oppositional music. The face of Thatcher most often called to mind is that of what Angela Carter termed her ‘balefully iconic’ post-1983 premiership: encased in true-blue power suits, wielding a handbag, her hair lacquered into immobile submission, her earlier style solidified into a heavily stylized femininity bordering on drag. Paul Flynn, in a fairly tortured discussion of Thatcher’s status as a gay icon, put it down to her ‘ability to carry a strong, identifiable, signature look… an intrinsic and steely power to self-transform’, and a ‘camp, easily cartooned presence’. The startling evocative power of this look, its ability to summon up its host of contemporary social, cultural and political associations, is why I jump when Streep’s replication of it intrudes into my vision. It’s like being repeatedly sideswiped by the 1980s, which is something the last UK election had already made me thoroughly sick of.

The iconic capacity of Thatcher’s image has been compared in articles and actual mash-ups with that of Marilyn Monroe and Che Guevara. The artist Alison Jackson observes that all three ‘had what it takes to become a modern icon: big hair, high foreheads and a face that would allow you to project your own fears and desires on to it.’ Conversely, subsequent political leaders – including both Blair and Cameron – have had their own faces conflated with Thatcher’s, usually as part of left-wing critiques meant to signify the closeness of their policies to hers. Thatcher’s image is here used as an instantly recognisable political signifier, communicating a set of ideological ideas in a single package, as well as a self-contained political warning sign.

Although the kind of passive objectification associated with Monroe might seem at odds with the idea of Thatcher as a great historical actor with narrative agency in her own right, the images of both women are used in a cultural tradition in which the female figure in particular becomes a canvas for the expression of abstract ideas (think justice, liberty, victory). The abstract embodiment of multiple meanings, and the strategic performance of traditional ideas of femininity, constitute sources of power which Thatcher and her political and media allies exploited to the hilt in their harnessing of support for the policies she promoted.

Iron Maidens

Thatcher’s image, rather than appealing solely to a particular aspect of femininity, was a tense mixture of conflicting and mutually reinforcing signifiers. Angela Carter identified it as a composite of feminine archetypes, including Dynasty’s Alexis Carrington, Elizabeth I as Gloriana, Countess Dracula, and one of PG Wodehouse’s aunts – tropes sharing a certain type of burlesqued and grotesque dragon-femininity. The 1981 Falklands conflict allowed the discourse around Thatcher to reference the precedents of both Queen Victoria and Churchill, and she was photographed on a tank in an image that the Daily Telegraph described as ‘a cross between Isadora Duncan and Lawrence of Arabia’.

Justine Picardie, in a grimly fascinating read, roots Thatcher’s style in the rigid grooming of well-turned-out 1950s femininity in general and her sartorially plain Methodist upbringing in particular:

Interviewed by Dr Miriam Stoppard for Yorkshire Television in 1985, she gave a glimpse of a childhood desire for the luxury of colour, and shop-bought extravagance, whether a new dress or sofa cover: ‘that was a great expenditure and a great event. So you went out to choose them, and you chose something that looked really rather lovely, something light with flowers on it. My mother: “That’s not serviceable.” And how I longed for the time when I could buy things that were not serviceable.’

Even at the height of her political power, she chose to retain the ‘pretty’ and ‘softening’ effects of her trademark horrible bows. Alongside this tendency towards aspirational frivolity, she cultivated connotations of the provincial housewife – a ‘Housewife Superstar’ – wearing an apron while on the campaign trail and being shown washing dishes while contesting the party leadership.

Her ‘Iron Lady’ speech distinctly echoed the ‘body of a weak and feeble woman… heart and stomach of a king’ construction associated with Elizabeth I in its drawing on the tension between conflicting signifiers:

I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved, the Iron Lady of the Western World. A cold war warrior, an Amazon philistine, even a Peking plotter. Well, am I any of those things? Yes… Yes, I am an iron lady, after all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an iron duke.

Not a Man to Match Her?

Thatcher’s courting of various feminine roles did not prevent the assigning of masculine attributes to her – notably in oppositional parodies and satire. Her iconic Spitting Image puppet was shown wearing a suit and tie and smoking a cigar, addressed as ‘Sir’, and given a more or less explicit emasculating effect upon male colleagues and political opponents:

Outside satire, the 1984 Miners’ Strike has been conceptualised both as a mass emasculation of ordinary male miners and an overt bout of cock-duelling between Thatcher and miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, each of whom were criticised for an absolutist and stubbornly Napoleonic approach to the conflict rather than a more ‘feminine’ openness to negotiation and compromise.

As Dawn Fowler notes in her consideration of dramatic treatments of the Falklands War, a problem with such portrayals of Thatcher is that she ‘can be represented as simply denying her true feminine self in favour of a crazed fascist agenda.’ The Comic Strip’s satirical take on Thatcher’s battles with Ken Livingstone and the Greater London Council presented her as the victim of alien or demonic possession, the ending of which left her soft and passive – restored to her presumably appropriate, natural form. Both applauding Thatcher for her ability to overcome ‘traditional’ feminine weakness and irrationality and behave symbolically as a man, and castigating her for her failure or suppression of a ‘true’ soft and accommodating female nature, are equally dubious in the qualities they seek to assign to ‘real’ women.

Thatcher was repeatedly likened to a female impersonator, a man in blue dresses. The reason for this is simple, and apparently shatterproof: we have so firmly linked power and masculinity that we think a powerful woman is a category error. Instead of changing our ideas about power, we change the sex of a powerful woman.

– Sarah Churchwell

No Job for a Lady?

While Thatcher’s election to Prime Minister was of course a landmark for women in politics, her much-vaunted ‘grocer’s daughter’ outsider status was mediated through an Oxford education and marriage into wealth. The number of prominent women serving as MPs and Cabinet ministers prior to or alongside Thatcher – Nancy Astor, Margaret Bondfield, Betty Harvie Anderson, Jenny Lee, Barbara Castle to name a few – make her ascension exceptional but not unique. Nor should Thatcher’s progress in the male-dominated world of British politics obscure how little she actually did for women once in office: the lack of women appointed to ministerial positions; her disparaging of ‘strident Women’s Libbers’; her invariably male ideological protégés. Historian Helen Castor, discussing the ‘extraordinary’ parallels between the iconography of Thatcher and that of Elizabeth I, points out that both women emphasised themselves as the exception to a rule:

…what those two women both did was not say, Women can rule, women can hold power. They both said, Yes, OK, most women are pretty feeble, but I am a special woman.

At a point where Thatcher’s chosen ideology is resulting in falling standards of living for women – and men – across Britain; where the dim and insubstantial Louise Mensch can manage to position herself as a rising star, and where the Home Secretary’s political decisions make fewer headlines than her choice of shoe, I’m relieved to see that attempts to rehabilitate Thatcher as any kind of feminist icon are largely being resisted. It remains to be seen whether The Iron Lady, and its fallout in the form of frankly offensive Thatcher-inspired fashion shoots, means that her image is now undergoing a further transcendence into the realms of irony and kitsch (as has happened with both Marilyn and Che), or whether this is part of a conscious revival of the political associations her image originally carried and to which we are being returned – conditions profoundly unfriendly to female independence and agency despite the women occasionally employed as their shock troops.

But I was in for a shock one day at school, when I settled myself down in the Book Corner with the Ladybird Well-Loved Tales version of Hans Christian Anderson‘s text. The Mermaid died at the end? She didn’t marry the prince? And then was turned into a “Daughter of the Air”, and wasn’t allowed a Christian soul unless a zillion children did good deeds and something-something-virtue? What a letdown. Expecting a straightforward happy ending, I was utterly bewildered. Prince or no prince, I hadn’t been prepared for quite so much all-out morbidity, and if you asked me, this Daughters of the Air business just sounded a bit suspicious.

It’s one hell of a leap from the all-out romance of Disney’s riff on the story to Anderson. Disney takes Anderson’s curious young mermaid princess and gives her a bit of sass, focusing the story on themes of adolescence and coming of age and adding a saleable happy ending into the mix. It’s a common refrain on feminist blogs to say that Disney “sanitised the originals” (whatever “original” means). Here, though, Disney at least allows Ariel her desires, even if they are chastely presented, and allows their fulfilment at the end. By contrast, Anderson focuses on the dangers of curiosity and makes the story arc a recognisably tragic one – and later, it seems, tacked on the stuff about the Daughters of the Air to add in a moral imperative for the reader: children, be good, else the mermaid will never earn her Christian soul!

In both stories, identity and self-knowledge is a key theme – and both mermaids are willing to give up their voices and identities for love and to gain access to the exciting, adult, otherworld of the land. There’s something problematic about both of them – with Anderson’s version, as Marina Warner puts it in From The Beast To The Blonde: On Fairy Tales And Their Tellers, “the story’s chilling message is that cutting out your tongue is still not enough. To be saved, more is required: self-obliteration , dissolution.” With Disney, Warner ruminates that “the issue of female desire dominates the film… the verb ‘want’ falls from the lips of Ariel more often than any other – until her tongue is cut out”, concluding that – however much we want to cry “sanitised!” – it is more that in the film “romance constitutes the ultimate redemption, and romantic love, personified by the prince, the justification of desire”. So it’s a kind of sanitising, but it’s also a secularising.

All of which brings me to The Flight of the Mermaid, Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao‘s adaptation of the tale, a wonderful picture book, now recently reprinted by India-based publishing house Tara Books. This version re-energises Anderson’s original storyline and tells it in such a way that it becomes, devoid of its Victorian moralising, a genuinely life-affirming, feminist story. The real achievement, though, is that it keeps the Daughters of the Air stuff, and Anderson’s story structure, but tells the story in such a way that a happy ending is forged. And it’s an ending that retains the sense for wanderlust Disney gives its heroine, but doesn’t end in the mermaid trading selfhood or identity for marriage – at the same time neatly avoiding Anderson’s preachy, morbid shutdown of female desire or personal autonomy.

But let’s start with basic facts: the book is gorgeous. Check it out!

Flight of the Mermaid – skipping out the diminuitive little from the title for a start – is a treat for the senses from start to finish. Beautifully letter-pressed on tactile, thick-grain paper, the cover has a press-out fish shape which doubles as a bookmark and reveals the mermaid herself underneath. The book is fully illustrated with acclaimed artist Bhajju Shyam‘s distinctive artwork in the Gond tribal style, and the results are a wonderful, fresh contrast to the European visualisations of this story I’ve become so used to. Look how colourful it is!

The title of the book also describes the ending (skip to after the grey blockquotes if you don’t want the detail spoilered!) – the mermaid comes to the realisation that the prince, though he is fond of her, does not love her romantically. She is saddened, but will not kill him – the only way she can save her own life – and chooses to sacrifice herself instead: yes, familiar Anderson territory. And yet:

Slowly, the truth came over her – her plight had nothing to do with the prince at all… he knew nothing of her, and could not carry the weight of her dreams.

And at the point where, in Anderson, her tragic end is mitigated only by the Daughters of the Air announcing “welcome to the airy feminine purgatory party!”, Wolf, Rao and Shyam show the mermaid’s transition into the air as a change, not an ending:

“Who are you?” she asked, and found that her voice had returned.

“We are the daughters of the air, they answered. “And now you are one of us.”

The mermaid was delighted. “I was born into water,” she said to them. “And I know the world on the shore too. Only the air is left to explore, and it seems to hold more freedom than sea or land.”

The air is, logically, her next destination on a continuous journey. Always on the move, the mermaid’s real aim is constant self-discovery and adventure. Visually, in each of her phases on land, sea, and air, she retains her flowing hair and colourful attributes, whether they are feathers or scales. Her identity is always hers, and is never relinquished.

It’s a wonderfully executed blend of the positive points of both Anderson’s text and the optimism the Disney generation have come to expect from the story, and for parents, schools and people who love beautifully made books, I just can’t recommend Tara Books highly enough.

We managed to grab five minutes of co-author Gita Wolf’s time, via email, to ask her a little about the book – why this story?

“We felt that the story had universal resonance,” says Gita. “It was both a coming-of-age tale as well as the story of a journey (both literal and spiritual). When we first told the story to Bhajju Shyam, he related to it right away. ‘That’s exactly it!’ he said, ‘That’s what it feels like to come into a completely new element – like when I traveled to another country for the first time. I lost my language, and it felt like I was [as Anderson’s mermaid experiences when she loses her voice] walking on knives.'”

How about the ending? “We wanted to give the tale a feminist twist, and not focus on the loss of the prince as an absolute tragic end of everything – nor did we want the Disney ending. In keeping with Anderson’s basic narrative, the Mermaid in a sense does go up in the air, but the air is here a new element to explore, and her journey will continue.”

All hail the flying mermaid!

Order your copy from Tara’s UK distributors or on Amazon.

Find out more

• See more of the interior of the book at Drawn.ca here
• Check out the Tara Books blog here, and read about their work in their recent article on For Books’ Sake. Be sure to check out their catalogue (available on their homepage as a PDF file – I’m especially excited for Sita’s Ramayana!

Warm thanks to Maegan Chadwick-Dobson, Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao at Tara Books for taking the time to talk to us, sending us parcels and being generally lovely.