Two opposite representations of Mary, Queen of Scots in Philippa Gregory’s The Other Queen

Abstract

[eng] Historical fiction has served as a medium to give voice to characters whose narratives have been excluded from History, particularly female narratives. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots has been regarded as a secondary and almost invisible character in the Histories of the Tudor dynasty. She came down in history as either a suffering woman who eventually became a political and religious martyr after her execution, or as a manipulative woman with great powers of seduction, who is usually represented in arts and literature through the image of a siren. In this dissertation I will analyse how Philippa Gregory includes these representations of Mary in her novel The Other Queen (2008). Gregory presents Mary’s captivity in England through the voices of three different narrators that will allow the reader to perceive Mary’s situation from different perspectives. The novel includes a first-person narration from Mary Stuart, Lord Shrewsbury and his wife Lady Shrewsbury. Each reinforcing different representations of Mary. Her own narrative contributes to her representation of a doomed woman, similarly to her representations at the beginning of Lord Shrewsbury’s narration but this changes at the end of the novel when he describes Mary as a manipulative woman as it can be interpreted from Lady Shrewsbury’s narrative. Consequently, the representations provided by each narrator will be determined according to the narrator’s relationship with the Scots Queen. With her novel, Gregory is visibilising the importance of Mary Stuart in the Tudor period while contributing to reinforce already existing representations of the Scots Queen.