She is, in this scene, trying to control events with the meagre tools available to her, a theme of her character from her first scene. We know Lady Macbeth would hardly be ‘murdered’ by the naming of the deed that she, no “gentle lady,” had just taken part in. When Macduff says to her “O gentle lady, ‘Tis not for you to hear what I can speak: the repetition, in a woman’s ear, would murder as it fell” (2.3.85), there is no small amount of deliberate dramatic irony at work here which makes the scene incredibly effective in its brevity. This “performance for men” manipulates them and uses their sexism against them. To whatever extent Lady Macbeth “performs for men,” as she does in Act 2, Scene 3 when she faints, it is a decidedly expected, high feminine behaviour, except that it can be strongly argued that Lady Macbeth-fully seized of and aware of what she has done, and hardly in a position to be given the vapours by the mere mention of blood she had already dipped her hands in-deliberately faked her faint so as to distract attention from her husband’s flailing excuses. If this sounds nothing like Lady Macbeth, there is very good reason for that. It is the impetus to be a “good girl” in relation to men, and suppress any women who interpret femininity differently. Crucially, however, this is a femininity that seeks the marginalisation of its rivals. Sociologist Raewyn Connell calls compliant, male-oriented femininity (that most enfeebling and degrading kind) ‘emphasised femininity,’ arguing that it is “organised as an adaptation to men’s power… emphasising compliance, nurturance, and empathy as womanly virtues” and that it is “performed, and performed especially to men” (Connell 186-188). This is to give Lady Macbeth far too little credit for both the depth and truth of her struggles, and to neglect the fact that she actually does not act “particularly feminine” in any way that is actually sincere. She portrays Lady Macbeth as not only doomed from the start, but utterly benighted from her first line, a bumbling infirm who serves as little more than a misogynist object lesson. Klein even attributes Lady Macbeth’s feint of a faint in Act II to “weakness” (174-175). Lady Macbeth is “enfeebled” by this punishment, the “awareness of her sin” (a particularly passive kind of awareness) driving her to madness (171). Joan Larsen Klein argues that Lady Macbeth’s “particularly feminine” anguish represents a kind of punishment for her abjuration of women’s purportedly proper role (169). Hardly Infirm of Purposeįirst it will be necessary to dispense with the idea that Lady Macbeth is simply a “help mate” or other purely misogynist diminution. What is in the play itself matters most, and they point to an interpretation of Lady Macbeth’s character that is a good deal more favourable to her. It is certainly possible that Shakespeare’s intentions with Lady Macbeth were less than egalitarian in spirit and that he meant for her to be seen as a villain these things are irrelevant to textual analysis, however (Wimsatt and Beardsley 469). Such a view stands athwart not only popular notions of Lady Macbeth as an unalloyed villain, but also against some feminist interpretations that regard her simply as a failure, or as little more than a shadowed reflection of unadulterated sexism (Klein 169). Yet from the start we are given a number of textual glimpses of Lady Macbeth’s empathy and restraint “compunctious visitings of nature” would not shake her “fell purpose,” but in the end her own morality did. But unique amongst such Shakespearean figures is that Lady Macbeth is undone by patriarchy as well it was misogyny that had so cribbed her in that using a male surrogate to gain power became an ineluctable necessity, creating a monster that would run out of control. Lady Macbeth might be better understood as a tragic hero, in the mould of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, whose fatal flaw is her vaulting ambition like Caesar she flew too close to the sun and paid the ultimate price. As Macbeth’s better angels flee his increasingly sickened spirit, they seem to spread their wings ever more around Lady Macbeth. Yet, on close reading of the text we see that Lady Macbeth has an urgent and bright moral centre, one that ultimately refuses to let her live she shows regret and repeatedly evinces a morality that her husband is increasingly bereft of. It would seem impossible to regard Lady Macbeth as anything other than an out and out villain she seems at best incompetent in her malevolence, and at worst an almost demonic manifestation among humans who spreads her sickness to a far more powerful husband.
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