My Haunted Media project stemmed from the question of how our modern world would respond to past/historical deaths. We have focused in class on how responses, or at least the mechanisms of carrying out those responses, have changed as digitization pervades. I focused on Princess Diana, whose sudden death in 1997 elicited worldwide mourning as the internet increased digital access exponentially; I chose this case due to that context as well as that of Diana herself. Since her romance with royalty, Diana lived under constant observation, tempered by wide perception of her as a narrative rather than as herself, contextualizing her death as the finale of a story. These phenomena in mind, I developed a fan website of Princess Diana, of which a surprising amount exist in reality even today, and designed peoples’ reaction, through the website, to her demise in real-time.
Press coverage of Princess Diana happens today, showcasing a fascination with her, and tends largely toward her appearance and her emotional problems, objectified elements that I pursued in my site through the inclusion of a “Shopping” page to link visitors to where they may purchase clothes like Diana’s, and in what news prior to that concerning her death I included. Every source I could find explaining Diana’s divorce from Prince Charles painted him unflinchingly as a villain. While I have no intimate experience with the Charles and so cannot say what role he did or did play in driving the split, neither do most of these legitimate commentators. Victimizing Diana by framing him as an aggressor maintains an innocence ascribed to Diana that seems largely to extend from her gender. Barbara Creed wrote in her book The Monstrous Feminine that much horror has emerged from “…the inability of the male order to control the woman whose perversity is expressed through her rebellious body,” (Creed 34). The woman, in this case Diana, needs to be acted upon rather than active to preserve patriarchal integrity. Thus, I described her throughout my site in passive terms, those that would please others interacting with her as opposed to benefitting her in any potential ambition of her own. The obsession with her appearance became a “Shopping” page, in which visitors to the site can find clothes for purchase like those Diana has worn. This element ties into the consumerism of digital culture, too, as the presentation of everything happens in a context of whether or not those concerned have, want or need, or can obtain each thing. Further, I delved into the concern over Diana’s sex life. Prior to carrying out research, I did not know Diana had divorced from Prince Charles or dated other men since; people seem invested in maintaining her as a chaste, traditional woman, continually calling her “Princess Diana” and badmouthing both Charles and Diana’s subsequent boyfriend, Dodi Al-Fayed. Some believe that Diana was pregnant, despite not being married to him, with Al-Fayed’s child at the time of her death. Prior to the fatal car crash, there had been no public speculation about another Diana pregnancy. Controversy about it heightens hysteria in reaction to her death; the idea may have been purposely leaked—or created—by news outlets. I incorporated the anxiety over Diana’s childbearing into my website’s news post after Diana’s death, a list of conspiracy theories (of which many exist) trying to make sense of the situation. These proliferations and the placement of them on my site, after the previous article confirming Diana’s death closed with a note that no or little more news will be published here, indicate several things. First, humans cannot simply escape their emotions, responses to news like that of this death, and so on by wishing to do so, and we crave fame and belonging. Meghan Garber wrote in her article Enter the Grief Police how, especially as facilitated by digitization, mourners reach out to each other and showcase how sad they are, (Garber). I addressed such a notion in my “Bulletin Board” page, on which the comments of website visitors tend, now, toward performative grief. Diana’s gender definitively structured reactions to her demise. Significantly, this structure reminded me of that concerning Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Diana functions as a character for the public to project onto, as many celebrities do. Modern civilization, specifically British in this case, exists symbiotically with a socioeconomic patriarchy threatened by changes of agency. In Hamlet and in Diana Spencer’s instance, the jeopardy or perceived jeopardy of feminine acting with male qualities (Ophelia’s literal loss of chastity, Diana’s love life outside of her ex-husband and the resulting suspicion of her unwedded pregnancy) prompts obsession, (Shakespeare). Royals have died before. Even women tainted both by divorce and by closeness to the English royal family, like Princess Margaret and Wallis Simpson, have died before and not garnered the lingering response that Diana has. Her appearance, stylized and real, has perhaps contributed to the especial attention paid to Diana, as her sudden death preserved her as young and beautiful—again, like Ophelia. I paid attention to the discrepancies of opinions concerning Diana versus her contemporaries or predecessors in how I designed my website. I used pastel and complimentary colors, as well as traditional fonts, to convey a sense of conservatively pleasing aesthetics; further, I chose pictures of Diana that emphasized the demure, ladylike persona ascribed to her. I analyzed Diana’s objectification in my construction of the worldwide event her death became.
Next, I focused on making the website realistic. This phase of research included reading more news coverage from her life and afterwards and visiting several, real Diana fan sites to guide organization and aesthetics; I also instituted features like terms and conditions, a privacy policy, and relevant filler text to introduce pages. Though I had and have no attention to create an actual mourning place for Diana, I wanted to make it as indistinguishable from one as possible, save for designating it as my Haunted Media Project at the top of the homepage in case anyone outside our class does stumble onto the site. Otherwise, I did, in fact, find myself creating a real place of mourning. Do motivations change results? I worked as a character besides myself in an attempt to explore what those obsessed with Diana (or any dead celebrity) might feel; thus emerged a tightening of tone throughout the website. I littered text with reminders that any post must be Diana-related and offered opportunities to subscribe, as well as detailed my Shopping page. While I do not ship out anything purchased from the Shopping area, users of the site go through every motion of doing so, from adding items to a cart, inputting their billing and shipping information, and receiving confirmation. My focus in this area derived not only from the cult around Diana’s gender but also from the existence of these sales in our society. By that, I mean that humans treat appearance as signifiers of status; most style themselves for reasons other than basic protection from natural hazards. The London Spectator newspaper published as early as 1922, decades before Diana, an article describing legal battles over “…what a woman who lives ‘in Society’ (sic) ought to spend on her clothes,” (Spectator). The unnamed author allows that women- specifically women, bringing up gender once again by their shunning to mention male aesthetics of performativity- may feel compelled to express emotions through their clothes, but, in doing so, ultimately sacrifice usefulness to the world, the exact definition of which this author never states but implies pertains to bettering the lifestyles of the poor. The British royal family, while generally viewed positively or at least with ambivalence in today’s world and Diana’s world, represents privilege and socioeconomic unfairness bluntly. Perhaps the family’s members’ involvement in philanthropy aims to mitigate that image? Much of Diana’s 80%+ approval rate arose from her closeness to citizenry, propagated through her work “…as president or patron of over 100 charities,” (Diana Award). I reflected directly in the “What Really Happened” news post on the concentrations of power regarding the British elite, how Diana differentiated herself from them, and how they simultaneously cast suspicion (however irrational) and absolved of engineering malevolence like Diana’s death onto the royal family. An inordinate amount of conspiracy theories exist about the crash which ended Diana’s life. Most, if not all of these frame either the royal family or other wealthy and powerful individuals as culprits. When mourning Diana, to what extent is someone actually mourning the perceived loss of overt class separation? Our class has discussed how people can feel they know, even intimately, celebrities who they probably have actually never met. This commercialism of people, then, prompts our desire to emulate them, encouraging everything from the phenomenon of influencers to sales of merchandise to basing trends on those set by people in power. Humans want to become as close as possible if not simply to become those they idolize, and the mechanism to achieve this end in modernity lies in buying and selling. Thus came my Shopping page, geared toward customers who want to dress like Diana. Finally, I edited my news posts with an eye toward the tones of real super-fans who I read writings from and watched videos of. I distinguished between the roles of the website creators/moderators and of visitors who participate with my website, their level of participation marked by whether they subscribe. Save for my name and the title of this project listed on the upper left part of the layout, I tried to and, I believe, strongly succeeded in making a realistic mourning website—if not a real mourning website.
The internet had but recently begun to spread in accessibility at the time of Princess Diana’s demise. As such, the world concentrated their collective grief, emphasized by the narratives of this specific woman, into other media and manifestations, including multiple, physical memorials. Further digitization has furthered connectivity between fame, economy, emotion, and socialization; I analyzed how this has changed grief through creating this website for my Haunted Media Project.
Works Cited
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