ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses what was accomplished through the prominence of children during this period of national mourning when, for many twentieth-century children, death has become masked or hidden and their participation in mourning is often downplayed. The extent of children's involvement in mourning Diana has been remarked by many and it took place in a variety of different ways. A point of departure for exploring the ways in which idea of 'the child' and children themselves have helped to shape and make manageable death of Diana is to examine the literal figuring of children in both her life and her death. The chapter suggests how through a process of infantilization, Diana was literally rendered childlike, dependent and vulnerably innocent. The infantilizations which surrounded death of Diana, Princess of Wales, were not however without their dangers for, in death, she lost the ability to affect shifts or transformations in her own persona, to move between a royal and a child/Other domain.
