The seventeenth century and the times before that were not particularly great times to live in as a woman. Today we live in a mostly patriarchal society where men often have a lot more to say than women, but we also have feminism and feminist theory. Simone de Beauvoir states that One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman , which suggests the society at large and its arbitrary rules concerning boys and girls, men and women, are what makes certain things feminine and thus, part of the female gender. We have critical engagement with the concept of gender as well, which is described by Judith Butler as being a performancethat is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing. . This means that gender is not fixed, but acted out in manners according to social conventions. In earlier times, though, awareness about gender was much less present, and gender roles were kept intact much more strongly than today. However, not everyone always did. While writers were certainly bound by conceptions regarding gender, through the use of voice, they had a certain sense of freedom and an ability to speak their minds implicitly. Voice is term used in this essay to describe not what the author or narrator sa
ys, but what is conveyed beyond a regular surface reading of a text. Voice may reveal an authors attitude or opinion that conflicts with the most literal meaning of a text. In order to explore the concept of gender, gender stereotypes and conventions and the way writers defied this in and around the seventeenth century, the use of voice will be applied to two relevant historical texts: Elizabeth Is Speech to the Troops at Tilbury and Andrew Marvells To His Coy Mistress. The former is a speech which Elizabeth I is thought to have written herself and orated in anticipation of an imminent invasion by the Spanish, which she famously delivered without her guard detail and during which she walked among her armed troops. The latter is a very well-known Carpe Diem poem written some sixty years later, in which a narrator tries to seduce an unknown lady. A surface reading of both texts will be given in order to illustrate how a text might at a glance be interpreted, both now and at the times they were written. A comparative reading, which makes use of the concept of voice for each text, will also begiven for each text to gain insight in what the author might have intended to convey that would be inappropriate, if not impossible, to state overtly.