I recently caught a documentary on TVO called The Ascent of Woman, a four part series chronicling powerful and ground-breaking female leaders and religious figures throughout history. I have always been, and am a proud feminist. Growing up with a strong mother figure and two incredibly strong-willed and capable sisters has led me to value women and now that I have two young nieces, I feel like I've become much more outspoken about the need for equality. I find the bias and discrimination against women completely unfathomable. It's one of those issues I'm passionate about because I've been faced with blatant sexism in the past, predominantly in the church. And that's why I love historical figures like Elizabeth I, who stood up to minsogynst church "norms" and shut their backward thinking down. She was even excommunicated by Pope Pius V and labelled "the Pretend Queen of England, the Servant of Wickedness" by the Catholic Church.
But I didn't want to write a post about my feminist views. Instead I wanted to touch on Elizabeth I's speech to the troops at Tilbury, particularly the line that's mentioned in the video below: "I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too..." The video highlights, so incredibly well, how words and phrases can be strung together to evoke meaning. In the video actress Fiona Shaw says "that the battle between thought and feeling is captured even in the word itself." She notes how vowels hold emotion and consonants hold intellect, and that in Shakespeare's writing, and in many Elizabethan speeches and poems, the writers tend to balance those two, while slightly favouring intellect. Shaw goes on to explain how Elizabeth does this with her famous line from the speech.
As a writer I absolutely loved this explanation. I remember learning about emotion verses intellect in English during grade school, but back then it went COMPLETELY over my head. Since then, I've tried using that same principle in my own writing, especially in my dialogue. I favour vowel heavy words and really strive for the opposite of many Elizabethan writers, I favour the emotional side and try to weight my dialogue in emotion's favour.
As I was watching this, I was just amazed at how powerful language can be. Elizabeth I took a simple line like, "I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king..." and weighted it in such a way that her female identity (something that was considered weak at that time, something that often put her at odds with the men in government beneath her) was outweighed by the fact that she was England's king, it's ruler, it's protector. And, if you know your history, the Spanish armada never came, and they defeated Spain's push against England.
You know it's funny. I can remember sitting in my high school English class, being asked to look for hidden meanings, or metaphors, or various interpretations of passages from novels, and a lot of the time, myself and my classmates were like, "I don't think there are any, they probably just wrote what came to them, and we're reading WAY too much into it." But having written multiple novels and poems, I can tell you that (for the most part) every single sentence is carefully constructed and layered with meaning, with weighting, with metaphor, to the point where I wonder if anyone will actually get what I'm subtly injecting into my words. Language is such a funny thing. You can express so much with as little or as much as you want, you can evoke feeling through certain words, you can topple an entire construct or bias just by carefully choosing the words and their combination. It's an incredible craft, writing, and something I am always improving upon and learning.
The video below is a clip from The Ascent of Woman. It's currently playing on TVO, and you can catch the full four episodes on TVO.org, and I highly suggest you do especially if you're a history enthusiast like I am. It's incredibly informative, interesting, and a great documentary about some of the powerful women who dared to stand up for womankind in a male-dominated, and ruthlessly sexist world.