Long Live the Queen! Queen Victoria as a National Icon in Film

How do films about Queen Victoria use the Victorian monarch as a national icon? And how do their representations speak to the present in which they are made? The following contribution focuses on Victoria the Great (1937) and Sixty Glorious Years (1938) by Herbert Wilcox and Anna Neagle as well as the recent feature film Victoria & Abdul (2017), directed by Stephen Frears and starring Judi Dench. Responding to the Abdication Crisis in 1936 and the geopolitical situation in the late 1930s, the first two films construct Queen Victoria as a figure who stands for the stability of the monarchy and, in so doing, unifies the nation as an imagined community. Focusing on the queen’s friendship with her favourite Indian servant Abdul Karim, Frears’s comedy of manners juxtaposes Victoria’s tolerant attitude with the racist bigotry of her royal household. It does so in order to construct the Victorian queen as a benign monarch but, in so doing, promulgates a spirit of imperialist nostalgia. Created in the context of the Brexit debate, Dench’s sovereign thus represents a national figure that is inseparable from a problematic longing for an imperial past