3 - Monuments and Maidens and The Lost Father

Summary

Prior to the UK general election of 1983, the Sun newspaper carried the front-page headline, ‘Vote for Maggie’: it was urging its readers to re-elect as prime minister the leader of the Conservative party, Margaret Thatcher. This was accompanied by a depiction of her in the figure of Britannia. The image was intended to convey her patriotic commitment, as evinced by the recent victory in the Falklands, defending British territory against Argentinian claims. In the third chapter of Warner's Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985), she considers the significance of the tabloid's choice of icon:

The identification of the Prime Minister with the renewed military grandeur of Great Britain was accomplished in part through the language of female representation; it was natural, as it were, to see Mrs Thatcher as the embodiment of the spirit of Britain in travail and then in triumph, because of the way that spirit of Britain had been characterized, through its famous great queens on the one hand, and the convention of Britannia on the other. The first female premier did not rebel against the assimilation of the nation and herself; what Prime Minister would? For Britannia's image, developed through coins, banknotes, stamps, political propaganda and cartoons, has become synonymous with being British, with belonging to Great Britain. Any politician who can make her party seem inextricably entwined with the nation's identity, and any dissent from her views as unpatriotic, has achieved a notable propaganda success, however fallacious that popular impression may be. (MMA 43)

As with the various appropriations of the image of Joan of Arc which we noted in the last chapter, myth is seen to be inevitably implicated in history.

But as we have also seen, it is necessary to be wary of the way the present appropriates the past. Thus, it might be worth pondering the cultural roots of the ‘popular impression’ just mentioned. Tracing the origin of the figure of Britannia, Warner discovers that her image was first used on Roman coins, intended to depict the country Rome had conquered.