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STELLA ATRIUM
SPECULATIVE FICTION WRITER
STELLA ATRIUM
SPECULATIVE FICTION WRITER
Gertrude Bell Deserves Better
We get a fresh version of Pride and Prejudice every year, so why not a truthful account of this unconventional woman and her many accomplishments?
When Queen of the Desert came out, a story about the Middle East adventurer Gertrude Bell, I was eager to see how the character was handled. So disappointed. The fault isn’t all on Kidman but on the director Werner Herzog, a once-brilliant director doing a final major film. Herzog presents the character as a Victorian lady trapped in the mannerisms of the age, a great disservice to Bell.
**Spoiler Alert**
Nicole Kidman has been in some great movies, and some awful ones. Who can forget Rabbit Hole? It’s hard for me to be critical since I suspect my urge is from jealousy. Her boy toy is Keith Urban, and who can beat that?
But… there was all this fainting and sighing and appealing to men on the basis of her connections with uncles in the British military, rather than Bell’s own talents with language, map-making, respect from colleagues, and stamina in a difficult climate. If Kidman caught her breath in fake surprise one more time, I was going to end my subscription to NetFlix.
So what’s the truth, and why was it discarded?
Gertrude Bell was an affluent woman born into Victorian society in 1868. Her uncle was Frank Lascelles, the British Minister at Tehran, Persia (Iran) from 1892-94.
Her own credits include writing several books about the Middle East, developing maps of the region used by the British military, mastering the many dialects of tribal leaders – well enough that she was invited to take tea with them in the villages.
Early on, she lived in Cairo and worked at the Arab Bureau under General Gilbert Clayton. She worked with the Red Cross and led expeditions into danger zones due to alliance she had developed with Arab groups of Shia, Sunni, and Kurds. She protested the Armenian genocide by Turkish forces. She knew Lawrence of Arabia in the tribal lands and Winston Churchill in the seat of power. Maps she had developed were used to create the boundaries of the British Mandate that demarcated the present day countries and gave Saudi Arabia to Faisal bin Hussein – for better or worse.
She wrote more books while living in Beirut and Antioch in 1907, and in Damascus and Baghdad in 1913, committed to the region and helping the tribes who called her al-Khatun, or queen.
But Herzog presents Gertrude Bell as a fainting ingénue who pines after this lover or that one, played by James Franco and Damian Lewis, both treating her as decorative with no reference to her considerable skills. Her journeys into the desert were side issues with no outcomes.
My question is why did Nicole Kidman (and producer Ridley Scott) go along with the script and this portrayal? When did Kidman stand up to the powers-that-be and demand a more truthful version? What would Bette Davis have done with this role?
Whatever. We get a fresh version of Pride and Prejudice every year, so why not a truthful account of this unconventional woman and her many accomplishments? In our era of identity politics, is Gertrude Bell an embarrassment to the British Empire?
THE BUSH CLINIC
A planet story of colonisation where tribal wars force hard choices for Dr. Greensboro and the coming-of-age students in her bush clinic classroom.
