Meghan Markle and the Enduring Crazy Woman Trope

I can’t say I am a fan of Meghan Markle. I would perhaps use the word ‘apathetic’ to describe my feelings towards her. I did try to watch ten minutes or so of her recent Netflix show and found it pretty vacuous. But then there is a huge market for vacuous telly, so what do I know? What I am a fan of though is standing up for women who are called crazy.

At the weekend a friend sent me a clip of a Talk TV show discussing her, the title of the show was ‘analysing the failure of Meghan Markle’ — which is pleasant.

In this clip of the show, three commentators spend thirty minutes trashing this woman they love to hate. A woman, I hasten to add, who is also a human being. She was in turn called ‘an idiot surrounded by idiots…a shouter…a screamer…a dictator in high heels’ – and that was just by the female pundit among the men. Her new business logo was compared to an old Nazi logo, and they suggested she only married Harry for his money.

The reason for this new outburst of vitriol? Meghan had posted a video of her ‘twerking’ in the labour ward after she had been admitted to birth her daughter, Lillibet, who turned four last week. What was it about this perfect stranger to them posting this video that aggrieved them so much? Is it because she had the temerity to show childbirth as something that can have fun poked at it (until of course the moment you get to the hard push)? Is it because we prefer women deeply serious, respectful and filled with dread about the whole thing? Or is it, as host Kevin O’Sullivan insisted, that she had posted it for attention and hard cash? (Erm, even though it was posted for free on her instagram account).

It’s interesting that those three pundits, who presumably go on telly to get attention and earn hard cash spent thirty minutes criticising her for doing… well, exactly the same as they do. But they mostly seem aggrieved that this particular witch had a baby bump which did not suit them. Apparently it was the ‘wrong shape, strikingly huge… and strangely low-slung’ (forgive me, I’m not midwife, but maybe in preparation to exit the cervix).

You see, when you’re running out of things to criticise one woman for, it is possible to find something else – the shape of her during pregnancy ‘Is that a real baby bump or a pillow strapped on just for the cameras?’ O’Sullivan asked. ‘You decide.’

Well, considering a baby came out of it, and she was admitted to hospital to deliver it, then I’m going to go out on a limb and say yes, it’s a real baby bump.

But I think it is the female pundit, Samara Gill (who also writes here on Substack) who should win the prize for service to the patriarchy by posing the question: Is Meghan Markle clinically insane?

Gill insisted that a woman who had just experienced a high-risk pregnancy would never dream of twerking. Perhaps Gill, like those male doctors of yore, would prefer us on our backs to deliver, rather than grunting, groaning, squatting as we do. But Gill also has more in common with those old dinosaur doctors than she thinks: her desire to paint woman who cross some kind of invisible patriarchal line as insane.

As you know I am currently writing a book about female madness, although I should perhaps dangle a question mark over that because so many times I am actually writing the stories of rebellious teenage girls, women who danced outside of the lines, those who refused to behave in a way that society expected of them, who got involved with men for whom it was convenient to label their wives mad, and were in many cases found by hindsight to have nothing wrong with them at all.

What I’m trying to say is that society has form for suggesting difficult women are mad. In fact it has been happening for time immemorial. We’re very good at building women up, at pushing them off their pedestal when they take too much pride in their achievements and then treating them as roadkill, rolling our metaphorical tyres across them again and again. But what do we do with a woman who just refuses to go away? We call her mad, of course, which is exactly what Samara Gill did.

I am old enough to remember pundits saying the same about Harry’s mother, Diana. She was of a new generation too, one which spoke about feelings, one which revealed eating disorders and in Diana’s case her suicidal ideations and anxieties of being not good enough. I believe she did it as a cry for help, to let people (the media) know that she was a human being, that she was struggling, but what she did instead was create an open goal for the pundits, they called her crazy for sharing experiences that many ordinary women could empathise with. They called her attention-seeking, too.

There is a reason that twice as a many women were incarcerated in asylums as men, that even today twice as many women receive electric shock therapy, or are three times more likely to be diagnosed with depression. And it is because they talk about it and they ask for help.

I can’t say I have followed Meghan’s story particularly closely, but I know she has also spoke of suicidal ideation, of anxiety, or post-partum struggles, and as a result, she is dismissed as crazy by another woman.

If you call someone crazy, you dehumanise them. If you dehumanise someone you don’t need to care for them, they are fair game. Did you know that the attendants who cared for women in asylums were called ‘keepers’ because those institutions were basically thought of as zoos? Go through old records and you will come across animalistic references to patients written by the male doctors who ‘cared’ for them.

The media does not want us to care about Meghan because they are the ones making the hard cash from her, they are the ones grabbing our attention. They are doing exactly what they are accusing her of doing, and if we saw her as human, we would care and might ask them to stop.

Calling a woman crazy has become a shorthand in society, but it has real-life consequences: lives stolen by medical interventions; women’s minds turned to mush; many who have taken their own lives leaving men to get away with their crimes against them. Remember this story that I wrote a few months ago? A mother who was driven to suicide when she was labelled crazy by the ex who beat her. He told her nobody would believe her accusations against him because she had previously sought help for mental health problems, and he was right because a jury acquitted him for being responsible for her death.

Who Decides Women Are Mad?

Over and over we have seen the effects of women being labelled crazy and yet not only do we continue to do it but it is seen as light entertainment. Even worse, women like Gill, make ‘hard cash and get attention’ from doing so.

I have spoken a lot about family court in the past and the experiences of mothers who find themselves there, they know that their mental health will be used against them, that their children could be (and have been) taken from their care as a result. I have a friend who has not seen her children for years because she was wrongly labelled with a personality disorder by her ex and not even confirmed by a medical professional.

And yet still it goes on. Think of all the people at home watching that Talk TV show, how these acts of violence against women are normalised on their TV set, and countenanced by another woman, and how that shorthand, this societal sexism and misogyny is ingrained a little deeper as a result. Well, I hope you all enjoyed your fees.

The psychiatrist Thomas Szasz said that ‘insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane society.’ A society that devotes a thirty-minute show to trashing a woman they don’t know, a society that considers light entertainment to study a woman’s baby bump and accuse her of not being pregnant at all, a society that recruits women like Gill to do their patriarchal bidding for them and she gladly agrees to earn hard cash.

I don’t know about you, and I don’t know about Meghan, but that all seems pretty insane to me.