Conclusion: No Country for Old Women

Abstract

The book concludes with an exploration of the representation of Queen Victoria in four contemporary biopics: Mrs Brown (1997) directed by John Madden; the two-part BBC mini-series Victoria & Albert (2001); the film The Young Victoria (2009), written by Julian Fellowes and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée; and the first season of ITV’s Victoria (2016). While Mrs Brown’s treatment of Victoria’s relationship with John Brown is interpreted as heritage cinema’s respectful depiction of monarchy, it also puts into relief the lack of interest in older women’s subjectivity in more recent postfeminist media culture, evident in the three later biopics which all depict Victoria’s early years and construct the queen as the ideal postfeminist subject thanks to their focus on her courtship, marriage to Albert and motherhood. Cumulatively, these portrayals of a youthful Queen Victoria are read both as generating a cultural memory that rewrites the received image of the monarch, and as indicative of the genre’s collusion with postfeminism through its focus on youthful, white, heteronormative, middle- and upper-class women.