Milli mála - 05.07.2016, Síða 168

MARGINALISED MONARCH

Milli mála 7/2015

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that was forced to make way for the new religious order promoted by
Elizabeth and her councillors. As a Scottish monarch, Mary can now
also be read as representative of the subjugation—and even assimila-
tion—of Scotland by England, despite her historical repudiation by the
Scots; cultural and national memory is highly selective, and today we
only need to visit Holyrood Palace or tourist shops on the Royal Mile
in Edinburgh to see that Mary Queen of Scots is accorded a highly
significant status in representations of Scottish history, cultural heritage
and identity. Indeed, according to Esther Breitenbach and Lynn
Abrams, Mary remains one of few popular icons of Scottishness that
are female, in the company of male figures like William Wallace and
Robert Burns (Breitenbach and Adams 2006: 17). Nevertheless, Mary’s
symbolic function in Scotland is both paradoxical and problematic in
the historical sense, both because Mary’s Catholicism allied her with
Europe, in particular France and Spain, and because she was in her
own time rejected by the country whose tourist industry now claims
her as the Scots’ most potent romantic icon.
Comparable to Mary, Elizabeth I has become an English icon and
“England’s most recognizable royal export” as noted by Julia M.
Walker (Walker 2004: 3). Elizabeth I is seen to represent an English
“Golden Age,” standing for “the beginnings of empire, the defeat of
the Armada […] and an England without the complications of a fallen
empire, postcolonial immigrants, or economic recession” (Moss 2006:
807). Through such associations, the figure of the Virgin Queen, Good
Queen Bess, or Gloriana, has retained a considerable hold on the
public consciousness. Elizabeth has become a sort of trademark, or
logo, for England, her image even marking England as the centre of
the literary world (Moss 2006: 798). While each queen can thus be
seen as a symbol for her country, Elizabeth’s image is much more
clearly invested in a notion of national, cultural, and even historical,
superiority. Indeed, it is my contention that in filmic dramatisations of
Mary, there is a clear tendency to measure Mary’s story against that of
Elizabeth’s in a way that Mary’s role, her political importance, her
value and strengths as a monarch, are trivialised or even marginalised.
This applies even to some films where the main subject is the life of
Mary Stuart herself. In addition, there is even a tendency to glorify the
power and success of the English Gloriana as a means of upholding a