There’s something a little bit queasy about watching two series about the British monarchy at a moment when the United States is about to inaugurate a president with decidedly imperial stylings. For all that I remain staunchly committed to American independence, the change of scenery and era involved in watching the first season of “The Crown,” Netflix’s sumptuous biographical series about Elizabeth II (Claire Foy), and “Victoria,” PBS’s latest import starring Jenna Coleman as the queen who would give the Victorian age its name, illuminated a particular problem in contemporary American politics for me.
Even as we failed to elect a woman as president of the United States for the first time, we can root for these young queens to consolidate power and exert their own wills independent of their advisers, because they were born into power rather than having campaigned for it. Elizabeth and Victoria didn’t do the thing that Americans appear to find so unseemly in ambitious women: go to the public and advertise their own qualifications and their desire for high office.
The circumstances of their very existence constitute a kind of womanly demurral. Pushing back against a domineering mother, as in “Victoria,” or refusing to be cowed by a minister who underestimates her, as Elizabeth does in “The Crown,” doesn’t make queens shrill or arrogant; it’s simply them making the best of a situation and a station that they have no choice but to weather.
As with Hillary Clinton’s approval ratings, which tended to go up when she was doing a job and took hits when she was seeking new positions, these responses reveal an unresolved tension in our attitudes toward women in public life.
It’s one thing to object to the prospect of giving women prominent roles in public life at all; that would at least be consistent with a squeamishness about women’s participation in the process by which politicians seek office. Instead, it seems that we would prefer some sort of magic that places women in these jobs without our having to witness their participation in the quest for power. Maybe we would be happier if women got into politics only when their husbands died and their widows were appointed to fill their seats, or some other process that circumvents the prospect of actual campaigning. Maybe it’s that we like the idea of benefiting from women’s talents and women’s work, but heaven forfend that a woman actually enjoy the power of her office, or think so highly of her own skills and character that she has the temerity to think she deserves it.
And in fact, both “The Crown” and “Victoria” have plots in which their young queens face humiliating confrontations with their shortcomings. Victoria, eager to free herself from the manipulations and insinuations of Sir John Conroy (Paul Rhys), makes an impetuous allegation that he has fathered a child out of wedlock and subjects Lady Flora Hastings (Alice Orr-Ewing) to a humiliating medical examination that ends up disproving Victoria’s own charges. Elizabeth must face the consequence of her limited education, which leaves her to send her staff searching for school-room notebooks so that she can find talking points for a debate on constitutional principles.
Victoria and Elizabeth overcome these obstacles and become better women and more confident rulers for it. But it’s still telling that even in stories that take as their premise young women rising to meet difficult challenges, the enemy often lies within, rather than presenting itself in the form of political obstruction or foreign aggressors. (Both shows also delve into the dilemmas of young men who marry into a position that requires them to walk a few steps behind their wives, a historical reality that nonetheless reinforces the age-old message that marriages in which the woman is more powerful necessarily involve strain and unhappiness.)
The test of how we really feel about women in power isn’t whether we can accept fiction about women who have power thrust upon them because of their birth. It’s whether we can continue to see a woman’s merits when she calls attention to them herself and whether we can choose a woman as a leader instead of simply accommodating ourselves to her.
