Review: The Creation of Anne Boleyn by Susan Bordo

Oh dear, not another book on Anne Boleyn! Hasn’t this story, about a Tudor whose birth date wasn't even recorded, not been regurgitated umpteen times already? Well, yes, but the very structure of Susan Bordo's revisionist feminist take on Anne is refreshingly different, and in case the tiny grain of prejudice inherent to some of us leads to the conclusion that an American might not quite be able to relate to English Tudor history, well, Bordo is the proof of the pudding. I was keen to get my hands on a feminist portrayal, and I instinctively went for this one rather than Hayley Nolan's shrill-sounding Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies. "Part biography, part social history," the blurb said, arousing my curiosity. What makes this book a sheer delight is that Bordo not only covers the scholarly issues surrounding Anne (Bordo is an esteemed university professor of Gender & Women’s Studies) but in the second segment gives vent to her emotions in a lengthy description of Anne Boleyn's image in non-fiction and plays, TV series and films, now perpetuated in cult groups on Facebook, one of which is aptly named Anne Boleyn Obsessed.

Now, many of us no doubt share Bordo's wish to see justice done to Anne, but the trouble is that although the Tudor Age is astonishingly well documented, practically the only source we have on Anne Boleyn’s crucial years are the very subjective reports of the Catholic diplomat and Catherine of Aragon ally Eustace Chapuys, for whom Anne is merely "the Concubine", and whose information on the latter is, as Bordo points out, an "unreliable source" ("An important man [name unknown] told me...".) Our picture of Anne is furthermore strongly tainted by the trumped-up accusations made against her and by centuries of unflattering, biased male history, and, more recently, historical fiction, creating contradictory myths about the woman (hence the title, "Creation...".) Bordo is clearly fascinated by her (proto-)feminist icon, and the first part of the book is full of information and supposed misconceptions about Anne which diehard Tudor fans already know backwards. Moving forward in time, there is some harsh criticism of television historian David Starkey, who Bordo claims picks out the "juicy" anecdotes about Anne, straight from the horse's mouth, and mingles them with more reliable sources, creating a potpourri of fact and fiction which serves as infotainment for the masses, not unlike Starkey's German TV equivalent Guido Knopp, whose simplistic history programmes are geared towards convincing viewers how "it really was."

Turning to Tudor fiction, Bordo mentions a number of now-forgotten pre- and postwar Boleyn novels before launching a vicious attack on Philippa Gregory, who in her controversial novel The Other Boleyn Girl perpetuates Anne's traditionally negative image by depicting her as a "nasty, screechy shrew", but her sister Mary as "sexual and saintlike" (Bordo). Gregory, who calls herself a feminist, has, in Bordo's view, a warped notion of what feminism is about. 

Bordo mentions a number of respected writers of historical fiction, including the immensely gifted Hilary Mantel and her Wolf Hall books, written from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's chief minister, with the result that Anne, as an arch-enemy of Cromwell's, is shown in an unfavourable light, and the much-lauded historian (and historical fiction author) Alison Weir. Bordo has great respect for star writers of the calibre of Mantel, Weir or Margaret George, who penned a fictional biography of Henry VIII, but she is not happy with Mantel's all-too-negative image of Anne and criticises the Wolf Hall creator for straying from sources which reveal that for a time, Cromwell and Boleyn were on good terms with each other. As for Weir, Bordo maintains that she relies too strongly on Chapuy's dubious sources concerning Anne.

So why has Gregory been savaged by critics in a way that other non-fiction authors have not? The main reason, Bordo reveals, is that every time she is interviewed, Gregory insists that she is a trained historian with a love of precision, despite the fact that it is easy, especially in a book like The Other Boleyn Girl, for someone to expose the blatant inaccuracies and myths the pages are peppered with. It is obvious that Gregory is fond of controversy, and controversy is a way of producing bestsellers. Bordo quite rightly explains that Gregory has largely ignored the factor of religion and the Reformation except in the context of Henry's drive to have his first marriage annulled, although in our irreligious modern age this information, and the role Anne played in the Reformation, is vital for our understanding of the Renaissance. Ironically, however, Philippa Gregory has done more to cultivate a fascination for Anne (and for pre-Tudor and Tudor women such as those who appear in her Cousins' War series of books) than anyone else, and the result has been a mutation of Anne Boleyn into a rebellious feminist icon. How did this happen, despite the century-long propagation of Chapuy's "Concubine" image?

As Bordo explains, the cultivation of Anne's cult status developed in a number of TV and film portrayals of the Tudor queen. Apart from detailing all the relevant screen depictions of Anne, including that of Dorothy Tutin in the realistic series The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), and of Helena Bonham Carter in Henry VIII (2003), Bordo takes us back to her rebellious youth in the Sixties, when she went to see Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), starring an effervescent young Canadian (Geneviève Bujold) as a stoic, overtly feminist Anne, and a bored-stiff Richard Burton as a horribly miscast Henry VIII. More recently, the tremendously popular, albeit inaccurate Showtime series The Tudors owed its success to the sexual chemistry and interaction between Jonathan Rees Meyers as Henry VIII (a poser in real life, as interviews with him, reveal!), and a "show-stealing" Natalie Dormer as Anne Boleyn. In this particularly witty, amusing, and breezy segment of the book, Bordo takes us on a tour to Hever Castle, home of the Boleyns, and tells us in great detail about her delightful meetings with both Bujold and Dormer, both of whom identified strongly with their roles, and here Bordo elegantly bridges the gap between the Second Wave feminism of her youth, featuring Bujold, to that of Third Wave feminism, incorporated by Dormer. The author describes how many young people today see feminism as "poison", yet behave as feminists, and, in the same way, that it was necessary to proceed towards a fair and just image of Anne Boleyn, the attentive reader sees in the subtext that the embittered, bra-burning feminism of the Sixties obviously had to give way to a modern, enlightened feminist movement if this important cause was to survive. If anyone can restore the positive meaning of the F-word, it is Bordo, and Tudor fans will not only love this book of hers but probably embrace the writer's highly convincing, uplifting brand of feminism in the process.

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