Now Margaret Thatcher and her handbag have been parted, its mumsy, nurturing qualities can be restored
Margaret Thatcher's handbag has just been sold for �25,000. It is fitting that one of the charities to benefit is Combat Stress, since the bag has seen a fair bit of military action. In the 1980s, a new word entered the language, as civil servants muttered about their dread of being "handbagged" by the Prime Minister, though we remain ambivalent about how injurious assault by handbag might be. Football commentators dismiss spats between players as "handbags at dawn'", but to be "handbagged" ? as Tony Blair was said to have been by the Women's Institute when its members slow-handclapped a speech he gave in 2000 ? is to have undergone serious political assault and battery.
But Maggie's handbag did more than introduce a new mode of aggression. It violently wrenched the bag from its traditional associations. The mother's breast is perhaps the origin of the sense of promise and secret prosperity attaching to bags, embodied in Santa's bulging sack. (Indeed the word "bulge" comes from Latin "bulga" ? a bag, but also a slang term for womb.) Myths and legends are full of the delicious and dangerous powers stowed away in bags, like Fortunatus's purse, or the bag of winds given to Ulysses by Aeolus. When the handbag is turned to offensive purposes it inverts the sense of nurturing and swelling abundance that ordinarily dwells in bags.
Margaret Thatcher's handbag is emptied of these mumsy associations. There is a 1985 photo in which she is striding across the White House Rose Garden after Ronald Reagan, being pulled along by his big shaggy mutt, Lucky. The contrast between his clownish flailing at the end of a dog-lead and the firm hold Thatcher maintains on her handbag, chunky as a brick, says it all.
Ultimately bags signal not the Iron Lady's fierce, asocial autonomy, but an all too human dependency. In a cute inversion of the fact that we spend our early lives hanging, like little baggages, from parents, as adults we depend on things that hang from our arms. Maybe we love and cling to our portable property because at bottom this is what we are. Now Thatcher has at last been parted from her bag, we can perhaps read back into her tenacious grip a kind of neediness, a hanging on for dear life that will one day let go of us all of us.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/28/thatcher-bag-legendary-nurturing
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