Diana: Her true story: post-modern transgressions in identity

This article considers the life and death of Diana from a theoretical persp ective. It makes use of post-structuralist and psychoanalytical theory in o rder to examine representations of Diana as a fetish point for cultural inv estment, a collective phantasy around which absence and melancholia oscilla tes for the post-modem subject. Andrew Morton's book Diana: Her True Story is referred to in order to concentrate upon her identity as a locus of text uality. The paper considers the act of telling as central to such identity so that the destination of the story of self is fully implicated in recogni tion by the reading other. It moves on to comment upon Diana as intertext w hich results in a complex textual web where any idea of 'true story' must b e radically lost. The idea of biography as an 'authorized version' of an ot her will be questioned. The paper then argues that the story of the life an d death of Diana represents an ironic metanarrative for a post-modem arena.