English novelist Hilary Mantel sparked a heated debate when she called the former Kate Middleton a "jointed" doll with "no personality of her own" in a recent lecture at the British Museum.
Mantel argued that the Duchess of Cambridge has become a sort of marionette created and controlled by public perception. She said Kate has long been "entirely defined" by her clothing and outer appearance, and that any personality she once had as been stripped away.
Now, Mantel argues, her sole function is play the part of a young royal wife and mother, a part already scripted for her by the press and the general public.
"These days she is a mother-to-be, and draped in another set of threadbare attributions," Mantel said. "Once she gets over being sick, the press will find that she is radiant. They will find that she is radiant. They will find that this young woman's life until now was nothing, her only point and purpose being to give birth."
Mantel compared Kate to Marie Antoinette, who she says was "a woman eaten alive by her frocks," and a person "with all body and no soul: no soul, no sense, no sensitivity." Mantel also compared Kate unfavorably with Princess Diana, saying that while Diana had a certain charismatic vulnerability, Kate "appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished."
Mantel's inflammatory remarks drew swift criticism from Prime Minister David Cameron, who told the BBC that Mantel "writes great books," but "what she's said about Kate Middleton is completely misguided." Others argued that Mantel's remarks had been taken out of context, and that her lecture was not attacking the Duchess herself, but rather the way the press and the public expect monarchs to conform to their views of how royalty should look and act.
"It's actually a tender and sympathetic piece of writing, filled with compassion for women trapped in their gilded cages," said The Daily Beast's Tom Sykes (read more of his argument here).