ESFP 3w4 Characters
Natalie Portman’s performance as Anne Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl gives us a fiery, ambitious, and manipulative version of the infamous Tudor queen. Unlike Scarlett Johansson’s Mary, who is sweet, peace-loving, and passive, Anne is bold, opportunistic, and determined to carve her way to the throne, even if it means betraying her sister and defying the most powerful people in England. This MBTI and Enneagram analysis of Anne Boleyn explores her ESFP impulsiveness, her hunger for attention and admiration, and her destructive 3w4 ambition, which fuels her rise and ultimately her tragic downfall.
The Bold Huntress: Extraverted Sensing
Anne is opportunistic, extroverted, and confident, leaping at the chance to further her own agenda through attracting the king’s attentions. She rushes into a ravine to impress him on a hunt, causing him to fall, then feels jealous and resentful when her sister’s dutiful nursing causes Mary to attract his attention instead.
Saying “betrothed is not married,” she pursues and marries Henry Percy against the wishes of his parents and her own, consummating the secret marriage, even though she knows her uncle and father have higher prospects in mind for her, because she loves Percy. It offends her when they refuse to honor the match and separate them.
When they ship her off to France to learn manners, Anne comes back with better social skills and more ambition, determined to take the king away from her sister and advance her own position at the same time. She flirts with and lures the king to her, knowing she can drive him mad with desire if she rejects his gifts and pretends to not want to hurt her sister by falling in love with him.
But she continually shows opportunistic behavior that backfires with later consequences, from her rash marriage to concealing her miscarriage and attempting to conceive a replacement child with her brother (even though she does not go through with it).
A Self-Serving Heart: Introverted Feeling
Anne’s motives are all self-serving; she takes the king away from her sister, and when Mary objects, tells her maybe she ought to “fall out of love with him,” since Henry now belongs to her. She risks offending him by asserting that women are as important, if not more so, than men, but have decided to consider men their equals. Anne uses the same conversation as a personal challenge to him, by inferring that a great king knows how to forgive mistakes and would not hold her previous bad impression against her.
Her boldness and her strong opinions catch others off guard, shocking her mother with her statement that the king should just seize power from Rome and annul his marriage. It is what she wants, but it fails to take into consideration the consequences it could have at court or on anyone else.
Anne wavers between being emotionally-driven and unscrupulous in her ambition; she doesn’t like the queen to look down on her and avoids confrontation, but also promotes her own interests ahead of the family. She is able to withhold herself from the king for years at a time, whispering in his ear and flirting with him, but complaining that they must meet in shameful secret corners.
Schemes, Strategies & Survival: Extraverted Thinking
Anne can be blunt, opinionated, and rational at times in achieving her goals. She says she doesn’t understand why he doesn’t just break with Rome and annul his marriage, so they can marry, but once he does so, she feels things spiraling out of her grasp, and becomes more and more anxious about her future.
After their marriage starts falling apart, she says she must do more and more degrading things to him to make him sleep with her, but then “he hates me in the morning, he hates what I made him do,” and she hates herself for it also.
Anne is rational enough to know that as a supposed virgin, she is marketable and has something to offer the king. She promises him sons, believing she can deliver them. When her life starts to fall apart, she makes what she thinks are rational decisions to keep it going (concealing things from him, convincing her brother to help save her life, getting her sister to appeal to the king’s better nature and soften him, etc), but a lot of them are short-sighted.
A False Promise of Future Glory: Introverted Intuition
If her early life showed too little intuition about the future, her later life shows too much over-confidence in it (she’s sure she can give him a son, she’s sure he can break with Rome on her behalf, and she’s sure she can control him, none of which happens). As Anne becomes more unhinged, she starts worrying about the future—fearing what will happen to her if he takes Jane Seymour as his mistress, wanting to solve her problems with incest and adultery, and not having control over her life or situation any longer.
The Ambitious Boleyn Girl: Enneagram 3
Anne starts out desperate to win her father and uncle’s approval by rising to whatever occasion they put ahead of her; she opposes the idea of being the king’s mistress until she realizes it would gain her an advantageous marriage, then leaps at the chance to impress him and is thankful for this opportunity to honor her family. It humiliates her to fail and disappoint them, incurring the king’s wrath for having shown him up on a horse with her brash self-confidence. That Mary has to be sent in to soothe his temper upsets her, because it is a public acknowledgement that she failed and Mary is better than she is at knowing how to appeal to royalty.
When they come down hard on her for being impulsive and send her to France as punishment, she uses the opportunity to improve herself and come back “magnificent.” She has learned poise and self-control, and asserts herself as a power broker at court. Her mother told her to learn how to control men not by stamping her feet, but by leading them on to believe that they are indeed in charge… and she succeeded.
Anne is bold, confident, and assumes herself worthy of the throne.
Envy, Spite & Self-Destruction: The 4 Wing
One of the downfalls of a 4 is that their core sin is envy and spite; Anne not only resents her sister for winning over the king’s approval, she does not want her to find any happiness with him or to take any part of his affections. She intentionally pulls them apart out of resentment, jealousy, and anger that Mary succeeded where she, Anne, failed. She just cannot stand her sister being better at anything.
Part of her bargain with Henry is he must forsake her sister and their child, if he ever wants to be with Anne. This pulls them apart. She cruelly tells Mary she needs to “fall out of love” with Henry, because he doesn’t care about her anymore. 4s can be selfish and self-destructive, poisoning their relationships and then wallowing in their despair. Often, they are attached to longing and hate the life they achieve, and the same can be said of Anne. She wastes no time in becoming miserable as soon as she gets what she wants and looks for reasons to be anxious, upset, and certain of her impending doom.
As time goes on, Anne becomes more and more emotional, unhinged, and self-serving, in her desperate need to maintain control over her own life. She admits she has ruined her life, the very one she built up, out of self-destructive behaviors (4ish envy and the desire to take things away from her sister, to punish her for being the “sweeter, milk and honey” sister).
Anne the Bitch Boleyn
I make no secret of my loathing for Philippa Gregory adaptations. It’s a shame Natalie Portman got stuck in this film, rather than got to play a decent Anne Boleyn, because in a remake of Anne of the Thousand Days, she could have been a real inspiration. She does her best with a thankless role that makes us hate and feel sorry for her in turns, but shines the most in the few scenes in which the “real” Anne peers forth, such as when she challenges Henry upon her return from the French court. For one glorious minute or two, we get a glimpse of what the real Anne must have been like, a fiery, opinionated intellectual amid a sea of dull courtiers. Natalie is splendid, but the movie is terrible.
