"More Than a Woman": Elizabeth I's Self-Representation as an Exceptional Woman in "The Golden Speech"

Abstract

In The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, John Knox vehemently argues against women’s capacity to rule because of what he believes to be their natural inferiority to men. However, he also allows for the possibility of outstanding women who have been elevated by God, through no merit of their own, as an exception to their otherwise weak sex. Queen Elizabeth I’s rhetorical strategy, in the "Golden Speech" and elsewhere, relies heavily on this construct of the exceptional woman as a means of legitimizing her power within a patriarchal system of governance. Elizabeth presents herself as an exceptional woman by justifying her authority through God, negating her learned eloquence in the very act of expressing herself, and maintaining the inferiority of women in order to foreground herself as uniquely powerful. She furthers her exceptionality by claiming a special access to masculine modes of authority, constructing an authority that is inseparable from herself and thus not available to women generally. Reading Elizabeth through this strategy undermines the idea that simply having women in positions of power abolishes patriarchal systems of governance, and shows that the power of patriarchy to persist relies, in part, on its capacity to implicate women in their own subjugation.