How I Learned to Stop Slut Shaming
The Great, the Russian Empress Catherine (Elle Fanning) addresses her court at a wedding celebration. (There are some light spoilers ahead, so if you’re not caught up on The Great, perhaps pause here.)“I have carried a romantic idea of people all my life, perhaps too romantic,” she says. “That has changed quite a bit recently.
I saw a great love as a kind of perfect love. Maybe it’s not. Maybe a great love, like a great country, or a great leader even, is a flawed one.
Maybe what makes it great is its embrace of our failings, our scars, our fucked-up-edness, as long as we are questing always for better, knowing that we will bring ourselves down as often as we set ourselves free.
Maybe a great marriage is simply the ability to hold all that in one tender, yearning heart.”In this speech, Catherine, a fictionalized version of the 18th-century noblewoman Catherine the Great, alludes to forgiving her husband, Peter (Nicholas Hoult), whom she deposed last season.
