Speaking as the North
by Lowell Duckert
Upon realizing her (unintended) involvement in Desdemona’s tragic death, Emilia’s next lines burst forth: “’Twill out, ‘twill out! I peace? / No, I will speak as liberal as the north” (5.2.217–218). Editors commonly gloss “the north” as “the north wind” and “liberally” as “freely, without constraint” (ca. 1500), including the additional (now outmoded) connotation of “insolently, licentiously.” Iago fatally stabs her shortly thereafter. Othello’s (1602–3) deep-seated patriarchal violence demands immediate correction; Emilia, the windy wife, must be silenced by blows from her husband’s hand. But Shakespeare’s reference to the “north,” even more unfortunately for her, expands the phrase’s pejorative meaning.
Early modern meteorologists (also known as “natural philosophers”) believed that the north wind — named “Boreas,” and coming from the globe’s “frozen zone” — was piercingly cold, cruelly fierce. At the time the play was performed, a colder climate had dramatically altered life in northern Europe by just a few degrees’ drop in centigrade: a period historical climatologists call “The Little Ice Age” (ca. 1300–1850). To some, “the north” scattered cold southwards, sending a particle-like substance to invade the vulnerable body and thereby upset its delicate humoral balance. Physicians, poets, and playwrights alike shared in shunning its sharpness as well as the various human-nonhuman populations it pervaded. (It is a predilection we have inherited: think Game of Thrones’ “white walkers”).
In A Winter Dreame (1649), for instance, James Howell thought himself sufficiently girded against the wind — “though the Cousin german of Death [i.e., winter] had so strongly seiz’d thus upon the exterior parts of this poore Tabernacle of flesh, my inward were never more actif, and fuller of employments then they were that night” — and yet he dreams of northern and southern worlds at war: “[o]ut of the North / All ill comes forth.” (Such a motto might have been muttered by murderous Iago.) Emilia is killed for her cold blood. Ideas of the “north,” in this performative case, both gauge and maintain male authority over wintry women and their unruly remonstrations.
Impelled by Emilia’s example, I will speak a bit more about this blustery line: not only for what it tells us about the relationship between gender, race, and “north[ern]” environments centuries ago, but also for it what it can tell us about similar subarctic-arctic relations today and how we might address — and “liberal[ly],” at that — imperiled communities on the upper horizon.
Speaking “as” the north could be a physiological action in addition to an elaborate metaphor; as scholars of the premodern passions have pointed out, environment and embodiment coalesced when inhaled air (such as “the north”) literally became one’s breath. (Humans are miniature meteorological systems, that is, in constant dis/array.) As England further pursued a passage north-by-northwest to Cathay in the early seventeenth century, its writers struggled to demonstrate the greatness of their northern nation to their continental counterparts (as just southerly enough to avoid negative associations with the baleful “north”), but they also worried about maintaining the English body’s supposed integrity abroad. Far-northern latitudes, as a result, accrued racial and racist overtones: if the tender traveler’s body could be ontologically altered by entering (or being entered by) cold environments, its whiteness was likewise was stake.
George Best (1578), for example, could only explain the Inuit’s darker skin on Baffin Island (modern-day Nunavut) in etiological terms: “this blacknesse proceedeth of some naturall infection of the first inhabitants of that countrey, and so all the whole progenie of them descended are still poluted with the same blot of infection.” For Best, speaking “as” the north meant being infected by it, effectively transforming one’s skin color (“blacknesse”), nationality (“countrey”), and even species in the process (he elsewhere describes the Inuit as “seals”). Despite attempts to preserve and protect the porous body and its vanishing white hues, however, “the north” refused to remain distant.
Strong winds carried penetrating cold as well as Inuit visitors southeastward to European shores — James Wallace sighted Inuit kayakers in Orkney two separate times (1682/4) — while others were forced to make the transatlantic journey. “Liberal” for some proved far from liberating. The first captives, a woman and child from Labrador, were brought to the Netherlands in 1567. Kidnapped peoples of “the north” spoke out, only to be enlisted in southern spectacles of the “Indian.” Regardless of its association with shimmering ice fields and the sublime imagination, the Arctic was (and has never been) “white;” instead, investigating the fraught impingements that “the north” historically created helps to challenge spatial-racial segregations built upon logics of superiorly pure (un-“poluted”) whiteness.
That said, I think there remains something powerful in the “[n]o” that Emelia declares; it lingers, still, in the air. Might “speak[ing]” her “[n]o” resist the chronically racist, nationalist, and androcentric ideologies at present that would claim “the north” for industrialized countries causing “ill” to multispecies societies atop the melting world?
The south, in an inversion of Best’s logic, leaves the north “poluted” with little risk of reprimand. And yet, it is significantly against this state of cryopolitics that environmentalist women of color “liberal[ly]” speak Emilia’s “[n]o.” Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s argument for “the right to be cold” incorporates the dramatic “will” into her advocacy for climate justice, translates a trenchant outspokenness (“’twill”) into ecofeminist practice. In refusing to hold their “peace,” voices like Watt-Cloutier’s hold up possibilities for brokering it.
Emilia, after all, demands justice. Troublingly, the play fails to deliver a judicious outcome even after the crimes are “out.” “The object poisons sight,” Lodovico remarks, so “[l]et it be hid” (5.2.362–3). But the Venetian state’s official response is a reminder that it always takes more than a single look to recognize, let alone redress, the world’s revealed “poisons.”
Early modern authors spoke of “the north” as both wind and place: in one breath, they conveyed the precarity of Arctic interrelations that remain pressing to this day. Returning to these polar pasts, I suggest, fosters an ongoing commitment — in our classrooms and communities — to what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson calls a “radically resurgent present,” one in which “speak[ing]” up for “the north” can also mean speaking “as,” for, and with its garrulous residents.
Lowell Duckert is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware, where he specializes in early modern drama, travel literature, and the various “new materialisms.” His 2017 book from the University of Minnesota Press is titled For All Waters: Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Wetscapes. With Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, he is the editor of Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire and Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking (nominated for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’s Ecocriticism Book Award). He’s currently working on a book project about the early modern cryosphere and its potential intersections with contemporary climate change activism.
Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Leah Newsom and Ayanna Thompson for kindly inviting me to contribute to The Sundial’s inaugural issue.
