In first grade, nothing captivated me more during class reading time than a glossy photo book of Princess Diana’s wedding—those massive puffy sleeves on her dress, the regal red-and-black parade procession, the horse-drawn carriages. By middle school, I discovered Diana had two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, both about my age—and naturally, I started daydreaming about marrying one of them and becoming a princess.
Alas, Europe wasn’t in the cards for a small-town South Carolinian like myself. But it was for a California actress exactly my age and, let’s face it, one slightly more model-esque. As we all know now, the American Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex, snagged the younger prince, the redheaded Harry. Since stepping back from official royal duties in 2020, however, the couple has largely receded from traditional royal life—and, for many, from top-of-mind public consciousness. More recently, I was reminded of her—and my heretofore forgotten childhood dreams—when a viral Instagram clip of the duchess popped up on my feed. There was Meghan, twerking while very pregnant, while a smiling and charming Prince Harry also danced for the camera.
As I watched that video, my first feeling was, quite simply: ugh. My second feeling was guilt: Why should I care about what she’s doing? But for some reason, I was incredibly annoyed. And, from the comments under the video—and under the various iterations of the video that popped up on my feeds—I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. As I scrolled through these comments, I wondered: Why does Meghan inspire such massive ire among Americans? Shouldn’t we be cheering that one of our own crashed the ultimate fairy tale—the first American woman this century to marry into the top tier of British royalty and, at least at first, get the full royal treatment? And shouldn’t we love this new kind of royalty—a duchess who twerks, who grew up eating Hungry-Man frozen dinners, and who supposedly counts Mindy Kaling and Serena Williams as besties?
The truth is, Americans don’t just want any princess: We want a princess with moral substance and authenticity, not surface-level spectacle. (Yes, Meghan is technically a duchess, but in our Disney-fed hearts, she’s still a princess—and we judge her accordingly.) Indeed, the fairy tale as a genre is alluring because it’s rooted not in money or status, but in an aspirational truth.
It didn’t start that way at all. The 17th-century French Catholic author Charles Perrault is credited with inventing the genre, including the beloved Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper, the very real-life dream that Meghan seems to be living out. Upon retiring from government and considering his own children’s moral formation, Perrault created the fairy tale with the intent of evangelizing Christian virtue. In contrast to Cinderella—and even to Perrault’s original vision—I suggest we feel let down by Meghan because what we see mapped in front of us isn’t virtue, but lifestyle branding.
Consider: In the original Cinderella, the godmother is named so specifically; her role is to teach Cinderella how to act with humility and grace, and how to best serve God and put her family and those within her kingdom before herself. That the godmother is a fairy at all is mentioned in passing and done so only in service to the grander, religious plot of helping Cinderella achieve not money or the prince’s heart, but higher moral virtue. The fairy tale ends with a paragraph labeled “Moral”—just in case the takeaway wasn’t clear—that reads: “Beauty in a woman is a rare treasure that will always be admired. Graciousness, however, is priceless and of even greater value … Young women, in the winning of a heart, graciousness is more important than a beautiful hairdo.” In other words, we as readers can forget the shoes and the sparkles: The godmother’s real makeover is one of the soul.
Significantly, too, at the story’s end, Cinderella makes it a point to unify her new royal family and make peace with those who once wronged her, even when they were cruel for no reason at all. Perrault concludes with the following: “Cinderella, who was no less good than she was beautiful, gave her two sisters lodgings in the palace, and that very same day matched them with two great lords of the court.” It is not marriage to the prince only, but a selfless act reconciling families that leads to the happily-ever-after as we well know it. It’s not about the couple; it’s about building the community and those they love and serve.
Understanding this past tradition helps us as we tease out what makes Meghan’s decisions so frustrating to watch. Perrault’s stories taught girls (and women) that moral goodness was more powerful than status, and that kindness—not just beauty—wins the day. Although the Disney versions most Americans have grown up with add a glossier sheen, the Christian virtue ethic at the heart of the fairy tale genre still transcends the marketing: A princess, we know in our hearts, isn’t just someone who sparkles only on the outside, but someone who forgives, loves, and tries to do what’s right, even when she’s been “royally” wronged. And that’s exactly what feels missing in Meghan’s arc: Her “story” reads more like a marketing campaign than a moral tale—heavy on outer beauty, light on the inner beauty that lets a princess’s tale feel like kindling for the soul. She is, just as her product line suggests, “As Ever” the same.
The gap between fairy tale virtue and modern spectacle is especially evident to anyone who has watched Meghan’s Netflix show, With Love, Meghan. Ostensibly about hostessing, the series feels oddly staged: It doesn’t take place in her own home and rarely features her with more than one guest at a time. Even Meghan seems aware of the artificiality, awkwardly joking “Cue the montage” as she stands crafting alone in a room. A similar type of artificial dissonance emerges in a 2022 episode of her podcast Archetypes, when Meghan tells Mindy Kaling: “I always thought, I’m the smart one. Not the pretty one. I was the ugly duckling.” Yet this fairy tale reference to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling doesn’t ring as a revelation of actual truth: Markle is beautiful by any standard, and in her early 20s, she appeared as a briefcase model on the game show Deal or No Deal, a job whose main requirement is to look glamorous.
It can be disorienting to hear someone so unaware of how they come across; what may have been intended to sound like humility ended up instead sounding like a humblebrag. In the end, Meghan doesn’t project humility or authenticity, even when she purportedly tries so very hard to do so.
Overall, then, the fairy tale promise of purpose has given way to the polished spectacle of personal branding. Critics might argue that we shouldn’t dismiss the philanthropic work Meghan and Harry have done through their foundation, Archewell—nor the meaningful advocacy she undertook before her marriage, including her speech for UN Women in 2015. But those gestures are obscured by her self-styled branding. The image Meghan promotes centers not on service, but on a highly stylized lifestyle—and it conspicuously omits any effort to reconcile with the royal family she’s married into.
As a whole, what the Meghan-Harry saga has revealed is that Americans don’t just want any princess: We want (and perhaps have been taught to expect) a princess with moral substance and authenticity, not surface-level spectacle alone. While Meghan may aspire to Kardashian-level fame, Americans still seem to hold princesses to higher standards than reality TV stars—standards still rooted in Perrault’s classic vision of virtue. Research confirms this isn’t mere nostalgia: A 2024 study on early childhood development found that fairy tales still play a “crucial” role in shaping young people’s moral values, helping them learn to distinguish good from evil and internalize virtues like kindness and empathy.
Royal behavior still matters to us, or we wouldn’t keep talking about it so much—or asking questions about it. A 2024 YouGov poll, for example, shows that 76 percent of Americans still admire Diana, while only 46 percent view Meghan favorably—a striking 30-point gap. Just 22 percent believe today’s royals are “mostly good role models,” underscoring how much we still care about royal behavior—and how disappointed many are in what they see, even with an American-born duchess.
Part of that comes down to Diana. She was, in many ways, America’s first princess—not by heritage, but because she was the first royal to come of age in the era of the paparazzi. We didn’t just hear about her; we consumed her (as I did in that photo book), frame by frame, tabloid by tabloid, broadcast by broadcast. And when she broke away from the royal family, she became, in a sense, ours—brave enough to walk away from the institution and strike out on her own. Yes, Meghan broke away, too. But unlike Diana, she never seemed to fully inhabit the role she was taking on to begin with: She never quite engaged with the institution, the royal family as people, or what the position symbolized to the British public and to admirers around the world. Meghan sashayed into the ball with the image makeover, but not the moral one.
Diana, though, won America’s heart, not because she was flawless, but because she showed both independence and compassion. She cared—not just for her family, but for strangers she met through charity—and to the millions who admired her from afar, she became a global sensation and superpower. (In recent years, many have also drawn comparisons between Meghan and Kate Middleton. However, while we may admire Kate, she’s no “American princess.” She’s a fully British royal—poised, polished, and clearly committed to the institution. We respect her: Meghan’s unfavorability rating is 17 percent higher than Kate’s according to the aforementioned YouGov poll. But we don’t claim her.)
As Diana understood, being a princess means you’re the protagonist—but you create a happy ending for others beyond yourself, too. Unlike Diana, who often spoke candidly about her family’s struggles and her efforts to g bive her sons a full life with both parents, Meghan rarely speaks about her estranged royal family members. Instead, as she famously told Oprah in 2021 regarding them: “I went to the institution and I said I needed to go somewhere to get help . . . I remember this conversation like it was yesterday, because they said: My heart goes out to you because I see how bad it is, but there’s nothing we can do to protect you.”
Meghan is within her rights to air grievances about her in-laws. Yet maybe we wish she would show that she understands how hard it is for everyone else involved, not just her. As Diana phrased it in her famous 1995 BBC interview that won over so many and preceded her divorce from Prince Charles: “I’d like to be a queen of people’s hearts, but I don’t see myself being queen of this country.” She acknowledges that the people she serves matter. Meghan, on the other hand, only acknowledges that Harry “loves [her] so much.”
Last week, on July 1—what would have been Diana’s 63rd birthday—Meghan launched a new wine brand under her As Ever line. Rather than acknowledging Diana’s legacy or the fact that a drunk driver caused her mother-in-law’s death, Meghan decided instead to make what felt like a calculated move to grab headlines—a marketing flourish that once again overshadowed humility or any sincere effort to embody Diana’s dream of being “the queen of people’s hearts.”
In this way, Americans might accept Meghan as a reality TV star, but not as a princess, and certainly not as yet another new brand she’s recently claimed: that of an American founder. Her Confessions of a Female Founder podcast, launched in April, sounds about as authentic as Meghan playing Martha Washington—a linguistic nod she’s clearly using to align herself with our nation’s forefathers and foremothers. But I suspect we still want our “founders” to represent something more than image: We want them to stand for service, courage, and civic virtue. Plus, believe it or not, we’ve made peace with Britain—even if Meghan Markle hasn’t.
Inspired by Meghan herself, however, let’s remember how our own Declaration of Independence closes—not with bitterness, but with a pledge to build a better future together: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” That reads like a real-life fairy tale: ordinary people choosing sacrifice so others can live free. The best stories, like those of the original fairy tale genre, aren’t built on crowns or castles, but on character. That’s what a true founder—and a true American princess—looks like: someone who chooses courage, sacrifice, and peace, even when it’s royally difficult. And maybe one day, Meghan will finally step into that story, giving us all a true happily-as-ever-after.
