superfluous children

Hilary Mantel's piece in the Guardian on Princess Diana ruthlessly lays bare deep truths about the blushing blond princess. In doing so, Mantel also has a lot to say about the public's--our combined--ok my own!--projections and fantasies. Without quite knowing why, I examined every page, pored over every deliciously airbrushed photo in the 1997 Vanity Fair cover story, Diana Reborn. I wasn't a romantic, I didn't believe in fairtales or happyily-ever-afters. And yet, I was dazzled too. I too could not look away. "Was she complicit," Mantel writes, "or was she an innocent, garlanded for the slab and the knife?"
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As the third daughter, was she, a third girl child, a disappointment to her aristocratic parents, desperate for an heir? I hadn't known that Diana's older brother died as a child, or that her mother deserted the family. Quoting a Jungian: "Unwanted or superfluous children have difficulty in becoming embodied; they remain airy, available to fate, as if no one has signed them out of the soul store."
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And the real kicker:

When people described Diana as a “fairytale princess," were they thinking of the cleaned-up versions? Fairytales are not about gauzy frocks and ego gratification. They are about child murder, cannibalism, starvation, deformity, desperate human creatures cast into the form of beasts, or chained by spells, or immured alive in thorns. The caged child is milk-fed, finger felt for plumpness by the witch, and if there is a happy-ever-after, it is usually written on someone’s skin.

 Read the entire piece, if you dare.