The Creation of Anne Boleyn (44 page)

An International Community of Myth Busters, Inspired by a Television Show

It’s not surprising that, with the exception of
Tudorhistory.org
, the Tudor websites and Facebook pages postdate the April 2007 premiere of
The Tudors
and that some of the most popular sites were begun after the record-breaking second-season finale in June 2008, in which Anne’s execution drew 852,000 viewers—83 percent above the numbers for the season-one finale. Google Trends recorded a dramatic peak in surfers for “Anne Boleyn” during 2008. But even after the second-season finale, the numbers did not return to their pre-
Tudors
levels, and sites continued to flourish—among them Barb Alexander’s delightfully “cheeky guide to the dynasty,”
The Tudor Tutor,
and Natalie Grueninger’s
On the Tudor Trail,
which began as a place to document surviving locations that Anne Boleyn had once visited and now has grown to include interviews with authors and historians, its own line of Anne-inspired greeting cards, and plans to lead a tour, In the Footsteps of Anne Boleyn.

The Tudor Facebook pages and websites constitute an international community of Tudor scholars, many of them disappointed by the lack of available materials and discussion in their home countries. Jessica Prestes, who is Brazilian, was introduced to the Tudors at the age of eleven, when her history teacher took the class to watch the movie
Elizabeth
. But at the time she knew nothing about the story of Anne Boleyn, only that Henry VIII was Elizabeth’s father. After
The Tudors
premiered, however, Anne became her “obsession.” She’s now a graduate student in history who runs several Facebook pages and sites with an international following.
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Sarah Bryson, in Australia, was having trouble finding people with an interest in Tudor history there; today, her Internet site and Facebook page is one of the most personally engaging, with reviews of the latest books alternating with warm conversations among members.
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Sylwia Sobczak Zupanec has been fascinated by Anne since she was thirteen, but with little information available in Polish, she was frustrated. Noticing the historical inaccuracies of
The Tudors
, she started purchasing books in English about Anne and joined a Polish forum about the show. “And then I thought: why not start my own website, where I could write about Anne and the Tudor period in Polish language?”
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Sylwia started her website—the only site about Anne Boleyn in Polish—in 2010. It ultimately led to Sylwia creating a sister site and a Facebook page in English.

The Tudor websites and Facebook pages are far from being just “fan pages.” Because most of those who run them are not professional historians (although some are graduate students in history, and many are writing books), they are freer to allow curiosity and skepticism—rather than the demands of specialization or publication—to guide their thinking. Each new book, media presentation, or public controversy immediately becomes a subject of review and debate. And because the nature of the sites is collective exploration, particular issues are much more rapidly and thoroughly explored than they typically are in academic forums. Poked and prodded by members, who together constitute a phenomenally well-read critical community, these sites have become think tanks of Tudor research, questioning some of the most entrenched myths, raising serious issues about documentation, and delving into issues that appear only as footnotes in the scholarly literature. In many ways, they operate as the critical conscience of published Tudor research. A few prominent examples: Ridgway has exposed numerous scholarly soft spots in Alison Weir’s book about Mary Boleyn, Grueninger led a rigorous investigation into the historical meaning of the color yellow (which sources have claimed Anne and Henry wore after Katherine’s death), Zupanec was the first to notice that a famous quote about Anne attributed to Francis I and endlessly recyled in much of the literature has never actually been documented in any of the books that cite it. She presented her research and spearheaded a collective exploration that, despite the efforts of many scholars in many fields, has yet to be able to validate the quotation. These critical investigations are the stuff of scholarly findings of significance and potential widespread interest.

“Third-Wave” Anne/“Postmodern” Anne

According to Princess Diana’s close friend Simon Berry, Diana confided one day that she was going to marry Prince Charles. Teased about how she could be so sure (she had met him just once), Diana responded (not knowing, apparently, about Henry and Katherine), “He’s the one man on the planet who is not allowed to divorce me.”
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Berry recalls their nocturnal drives. “One time we went past Buckingham Palace,” he says. “I remember her saying, just drive round a few more times. It was late at night. She said, ‘What do you think? What do you think? Do you think I stand a chance? It could be quite fun. It would be like Anne Boleyn or Guinevere.’”
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Did Diana not know how Boleyn met her end? Perhaps she did—and didn’t care. Life with Prince Charming, even if short, may have seemed worth it to her. More likely, though, Diana—like Anne, centuries before—wasn’t thinking of the end, only of the beginning. Which we, ironically, imagine as the end. “Happily ever after”—the fairy tales (including adult ones such as
Pretty Woman
) promise this perpetual bliss just at the point where, in real life, things often begin to go awry.

Few of the young women in the Boleyn Internet community are wistful Dianas, dreaming about snagging a prince or looking dazzling in royal jewels. They may have heard the same fairy tales as Diana did when she was a child, but few of them were old enough to have watched the royal wedding on television, and they all know how
that
fairy tale ended. Having watched
The Tudors,
many people—including me—were annoyed but addicted, and they knew how that one ended too. None of them see Anne as a tragic victim either. Yes, they felt that a huge injustice had been done to her; but “victim” is not a word in their vocabulary. Even the youngest interviewees (twelve to nineteen), when asked what made them an Anne fan, spoke of her intelligence, her independence, her refusal to be silenced, and her spunk. “I love her motto—‘This is how it’s going to be; let them grumble’; it’s basically an elegant way of sticking two fingers up to the people who hated her. She definitely had guts.”
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“For shy, soft-spoken girls, she is an inspiration to stand up and say something, and for not so soft-spoken girls, they can relate to her forwardness.”
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As someone who’d researched girls’ pain and depression over their bodies, I was touched by how often the younger girls mentioned Anne’s confidence in her own appearance, “even though she wasn’t overly pretty,”
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“not just a pretty face,”
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even “the antithesis of the ideal beauty.”
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“She wasn’t the conventional beauty and yet she showed that you didn’t have to fit the norm and that it was good to be different.”
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I hardly ever asked a question or posted a feature that “announced” itself as feminist or that suggested that label in connection with Anne. (The one time that I did—on another page—I was trounced for being “anachronistic” and “ahistorical.”) Yet without the word itself—poison to many young women nowadays—quite a few of my interviewees came pretty close to a classically feminist view. Especially among my post-twenty-year-old interviewees, phrases such as “male-dominated world” began to show up, and the analysis of inequality in Anne’s time went beyond “roles.” One twenty-six-year-old, while admitting that “Anne had power” and “made a difference in the world,” also saw her as representing “the struggle women can have with men. Some men cannot handle it when a woman is so intelligent.”
²⁸
On another website, a reader complained: “It makes me CRAZY when people place all the blame on the ‘loose woman’ who ruins a marriage. They did it in the sixteenth century and they still do it today. Where is the man’s/husband’s culpability? Why do we always fall back on the easily blamed ‘whore’? Why must the man be ‘led’ astray? He has no mind or libido of his own? Please.”
²⁹
“Look at Jane’s motto: ‘Bound to obey and serve,’” said a thirty-year-old interviewee. “If Anne lived nowadays, she would have said: ‘What the hell is that?! We’re not meant to be a man’s doormat!”
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Even my one twelve-year-old praised Anne for the fact that “she knew she wasn’t a second-class citizen.”
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But although these young women might complain about continuing sexual inequality, they, like their younger counterparts, put more emphasis on the degree to which Anne triumphed over her situation, making use of whatever resources were available to her. As Lynn Phillips brilliantly demonstrates in her study of young women’s attitudes toward sexuality,
Flirting with Danger,
these are generations that have grown up believing that being seen as a “victim” is the worst fate one can suffer. “Contrary to right-wing claims that women are eager to go public and ‘cry victimization,’” Phillips found that her subjects (they were undergraduates in college in the late 1990s when her study was conducted) went to great psychological lengths to “disqualify” themselves as victims.
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“Young women recounted many detailed stories of pain, humiliation, manipulation, violence, and force in their hetero- relations . . . Yet they were largely unwilling to use such labels as ‘rape,’ ‘acquaintance rape,’ ‘battering,’ or ‘abuse’ to describe those experiences.”
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Phillips suggests that “the generation of young women currently coming into adulthood may have quite different understandings of gendered power than those of second-wave feminist activists and scholars, perhaps twenty to fifty years their senior . . . Whereas feminist scholars may speak of male domination and women’s victimization as rather obvious phenomena, younger women, raised to believe in their own independence, invulnerability, and sexual entitlement, may not so readily embrace such concepts.”
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My twenty-somethings, like their younger counterparts, praised Anne’s intelligence, independence, courage, determination, and strength. But they also applauded (what they saw as) Anne’s forthright sexuality. “She came across as fiery, but also as sexy and desirable.”
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“She was a modern-day girl in the wrong time period and people weren’t ready for that. We relate because we act that way today. We are outspoken, a little feisty, and do what it takes to get what we want by using sex.”
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Surveying my interview responses as well as material from other websites, it became clear to me that Anne’s young fans have not followed any of the historical prototypes, but have created their own Anne, patched together out of those pieces of the media images that they find attractive (beauty, style—Anne’s favorite magazines would be
Vogue
,
InStyle
,
Elle
,
Marie Claire
, and
Cosmopolitan
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), actual historical information from the “elders” on the sites (which debunks many of the most vicious myths the media images promulgate), and, most of all, what they see as the many-sidedness of Anne’s personality, which resists definition as either flirt or “brain,” “feminine” or feisty, mother or career woman, sexpot or “one of the guys,” saint or sinner. They identify passionately with, or aspire to, this many-sidedness; it’s what has made Anne a distinctly contemporary heroine for them.

So, when asked on another website to respond to the query “Anne Boleyn—Angel or Devil?”
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most participants refused the terms of the question.

“She was human, she had her assets and her flaws, and she showed off both.” “She was neither an angel nor a devil. She was human.” “I don’t believe that Anne Boleyn was either a ‘witch,’ a ‘whore,’ or a ‘saint.’ I believe she was an ambitious, intellectual woman who like all the others before or since are rounded up into one of those tidy categories. Categories that allow society to pigeonhole ‘difficult’ women whom they don’t know what else to do with. Certainly, her life contained elements of all three, but this is a complex, multifaceted personality that was more than the sum total of all her parts.” “It’s far too simplistic to define her as either an ‘angel’ or a ‘devil.’ She was an intelligent, educated, highly sophisticated woman, who certainly possessed many flaws, significant among them being considerable arrogance, but who was also far too complex to be dismissed as simply a ‘bad’ or ‘good’ character . . . She really was a great deal more than a home-wrecking harlot who ran off with another woman’s husband, but she also wasn’t an innocent lamb who had no idea what she was getting herself into. She was hugely complicated, and not easy to dismiss.” “In Anne we have intelligence, strength, coquettishness, vulnerability, outspokenness and culture. And that may only be scratching the surface.” “Anne was an extraordinary woman, and can’t be lassoed into a single category.”
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