Thursday, 20 June 2013
Nigella Lawson: from marital spirit to the face of domestic bloodshed.
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Nigella Lawson: from marital spirit to the face of domestic bloodshed.
In 2000, Nigella Lawson in print the book that was so victorious
its title became both her nickname and the byword for her vocation: How To Be a
marital spirit. Britain had known plenty of celeb cooks before, from the mumsy
(Fanny Cradock, Delia Smith) to the macho (Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay),
but Lawson was the first one to suggest that baking cakes translated into a
blissful home life. Lawson insisted her lifestyle was "normal" and
that while the enviable kitchen on her TV show was not her own, those were
definitely her real children darting in and out of the room, scoffing down
ricotta cakes with grilled radicchio baked by their picture-perfect
mother. This elision between fiction and reality confirmed her title: Nigella
Lawson, domestic goddess.
It's hard to think of a sadder
and more brutal ruination of such a high-profile image than what has happened
to Lawson. In the past few days, she has gone from domestic goddess to the face
of domestic violence, with her
husband, Charles Saatchi, accepting
a police caution on
Monday night for assaulting her in front of Scott's restaurant in London. Part
of what makes the photographs of the incident so scandalous, in which Saatchi's
hands are alternately around her throat and tweaking her nose, is that they
look like a bitter public inversion of the idyllic private world portrayed by
her programmes.
When printing the pictures, and
reporting on the story, tabloids including the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror
made sure to include just how much the couple's house is worth, with the Mail
taking its obsession with real estate to a self-parodic extent by adding
how much Lawson and Saatchi had recently spent on renovations,
beneath a photo of Saatchi's hand around Lawson's neck, her eyes full of tears
and fear. In the meantime, the photograph are printed and reprinted. While on
the one hand they draw attention to a serious problem, for the media they come
with the additional aspect of showing a woman being assaulted and, as the
popularity of murder mystery TV shows and a
recent fashion spread depicting female writers killing themselves prove, one of the few things that
seems to sell as much as sex is violence perpetrated against a woman.
Lawson and Saatchi have been
photographed dozens of times sitting at that very same table at Scott's, eating
peacefully, save for one bizarre
photo from December
that showed Saatchi clapping his hand over Lawson's mouth. One tabloid
describes that moment as "playful", unwittingly anticipating Saatchi's
later claim that the photos of him with his hands around his wife's throat simply
trapped them in the core of a"playful
tiff".
Some columnists have opined
that part of the shock of this very sad story is that it is happening to a
famous, successful woman: "Nigella Lawson ... isn't the sort of woman we be
expecting to get hit by her husband," claimed one, beneath the headline Yes,
it Can Happen to Her. I'm
not sure what sort of woman "we" expect to suffer domestic abuse, but
those of us who spend too much of our lives reading celebrity autobiographies
are not quite as shocked by proof that domestic abuse is not solely "the
grubby problem of the inarticulate and poorly educated, who can't eloquently
express their frustration, who are not self-aware or emotionally intelligent
enough to thrash out their differences via a civilised heart-to-heart, rather
than simply with a thrashing". (Seriously, does anyone think that?
Anyone?) The celebrity world may not offer much in useful instruction but one
thing it does teach is that domestic abuse is not limited to a
Roddy Doyle novel. Tina Turner, Lana Turner and, of course, Rihanna have all suffered from it and, just
because they all had the means to leave their abusive partners, many of them
stayed for some time. Practicalities are not the only factor in why some women
stay with men who assault them.
The reactions to Lawson's
assault – from customers at the restaurant craning to watch but apparently
unwilling or unable to help, to the gawping paparazzi, to the astonished
public, to the behaviour of Saatchi and Lawson themselves – all exemplify some
of the problems in tackling domestic abuse. The reluctance of others to intrude
on what may well be just a "playful" argument between husband and
wife, and the fact that neighbours have since spoken up describing Saatchi and
Lawson's relationship as "volatile", emphasise how hard it is to know
when or how to intervene, and the powerful effect of retrospect. That Saatchi
and Lawson are both famous doubtless makes intervention even more intimidating
for many people. Saatchi insists he only accepted the caution "because
I didn't want it hanging over us". Lawson has – as many women
who have been assaulted do – remained silent.
Whether Saatchi's reputation bounces back as buoyantly as Chris
Brown's has done, or is destroyed as Ike Turner's was, remains to be seen.
Whatever Lawson decides to do next is her business alone, because she is not
the "Nigella Lawson" image she helped to promote: she is a woman
going through something that 25% of all women will endure. It turned out Lawson
was more right than she knew: her home life was "normal", albeit
probably not in the way she meant.
• This article was modified on 18 June 2013. The original stated
that How To Be a Domestic Goddess was published 10 years ago. It was further
amended on 19 June 2013 to change the word "silence" to "disinclination".
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