There is a scene in the fourth season of Downtown Abbey in which a suitor informs Lady Mary Crawley of his need for a wife. Unable to give her the time she needs to finish grieving for her first husband, Lord Gillingham says, 'We both know I need to marry. I don't need to explain to you how the system we're trapped in works.'
This exchange shows how even wealthy bluebloods may feel imprisoned by society's expectations. Humans install institutions and, through enforced loyalty, these institutions take on a life of their own, until we regard them not as systems of our own creation that we can dismantle at will, but as intractable truths.
While the aristocracy has changed dramatically since the 1920s, the royal family remains trapped in the institution we both love and hate. Some may dismiss them as freeloaders but how many of us would truly want to live life in the goldfish bowl that is modern day royalty?
Eight-month-old Prince George is capturing hearts on his first official tour to New Zealand and Australia. Oblivious to his celebrity status and his future obligations, the son of the wildly popular Kate and William represents our complicated, and contradictory, relationship to the royal family.
George is at once a novelty and, as media reports remind us, a regular baby. One of the most remarked upon events of his visit has been his 'play date' at Government House in Wellington. Ten babies were selected to play with their future king, an honour that had one proud mum declaring she has 'a lot in common with the Duke and Duchess ... we've been through the sleepless nights and we can talk to them about our experiences'.
The casual play date occurred just days after the couple released an official but casual portrait with George and family dog Lupo. The Daily Mail praised the couple for their 'very modern approach to royalty' in which they let 'the public gaze in' with 'the promise of effortless informality'.
It appears that ostentatious elitism is out of favour, and the royal family is just like us.
Of course, if they were just like us, they would not be royalty. Yet we insist on having it both ways. Attachment to tradition won't allow the dismantling of the royal institution, but we all take seriously the claim to human equality. And so we stress that the royal family are just figureheads, that their continued existence as bluebloods is mere nostalgia, that, really, they are just like us.
But they are not. There are rules we must follow. Those who transgress may no longer lose their heads, but they will cop a shellacking in the media, particularly in the UK.
When Paul Keating was presumptuous enough to steer the Queen with a hand at the small of her back, his recalcitrance earned him the nickname the 'Lizard of Oz'. More recently, The Daily Mail took Julia Gillard to task for not curtseying to the Queen, accusing her of 'disrespect' for merely shaking the monarch's hand.
It takes a certain kind of cognitive dissonance to lap up the concept of 'informal royalty' even as we tear down those who breach royal protocol by daring to touch them.
By clinging to this notion that they are just like us, even as we treat them as anything but, we brush aside the inconvenient fact that their status is a relic of a bygone era in which royal rule was enforced through brutal means. Where titles were bestowed upon the court's favourites and inherited purely by accident of birth, while 'commoners' were persuaded to accept their own inferiority by declaring loyalty.
How do we reconcile this with the modern notion of equality? How also do we accept that this wide brown land of ours is still referred to as 'Crown Land', overlooking the thousands of years of history of its First Nations? Is it right to forget that the British monarchy presided over colonialist expansion with all its associated genocides? A class system that bestows inherited superiority is a remnant of a more oppressive era best left in the past.
Now, I harbour no animosity towards the royals. They are merely living in the world as it is presented to them. But while the titles we perpetuate are merely symbolic, we are kidding ourselves if we claim that symbols don't matter. We may dilute them to make them more palatable, but in doing so we keep the original concept alive.
In the case of the royals, what we are keeping alive is the notion of inequality. Because royals cannot be royals and regular people, no matter how often Kate gets photographed doing the shopping at her local grocery store. And so we continue we fawn over them, even as we force them to make pretences to normality.
Many of us will gush about that one time we saw the Duchess of Cambridge in our own backyard, even as we marvel at how ordinary she seemed. 'She is a mum,' effused one New Zealand 'commoner' to the waiting media at one of Kate's official engagements. 'Just like me.'
Ruby Hamad is a Sydney writer and associate editor of progressive feminist website The Scavenger. She blogs and tweets.