Lady Macbeth first appears in Act One Scene Five and interestingly disappears in Act Five Scene One. This is a strange symmetry and also reminds the audience that for much of the play after Act One, Lady Macbeth disappears. Her influence is confined to specific scenes. Her female authority is very much of the moment and does not endure, raising interesting questions about her characterisation and influence in a Jacobean, patriarchal world.
Lady Macbeth’s passionate marriage to Macbeth guarantees their voracious mutual dependence on each other, especially when they share a craving for power that unites them and goes beyond any moral limitation. Unfortunately, their uncontrolled ambition and fatal hamartia, unleashes mayhem on Scotland and destroys their intimacy and ultimately their lives too. Their dyadic union is destructive. Perhaps, Lady Macbeth’s childlessness is suggestive of some unresolved grief which becomes distorted into some malign consummation involving regicide to compensate.
When Macbeth writes to his wife informing her of the ‘joyful….approach’ of King Duncan, he also informs her of his fateful encounter with the witches. Significantly, Lady Macbeth is reading her husband’s letter on stage when we first encounter her. Thus Lady Macbeth is first speaking in her husband’s language before she begins to speak in her own words, illustrating the keen effect of the witches’ revelations and the conflict between the masculine/feminine in Lady Macbeth and the world of the play. He is filtered through her. Then she works on making him filter his actions through her advice and criteria The changing importance of Lady Macbeth’s words and authority, are also an indication of the way Lady Macbeth’s voice overwhelms the voice of her husband until Act Three when her role is marginalized and she seems progressively redundant in her husband’s new life as King. It is never clear why lady Macbeth becomes less important to Macbeth once they are King and Queen but the audience might surmise that Macbeth is consumed by his own authority once monarch and may at the same time view her interference as unnecessary. He may also resent her interference and blame her for his deepening sense of unease and paranoia.
In the letter scene, Macbeth pointedly ends his missive to his wife, ‘ lay it to they heart, and farewell.’ This tender command underlines his affection for his wife but also his desire for her counsel. She becomes a fourth witch. The reference to ‘ heart’ shows the need for secrecy and also passion. It might be surmised that the letter is sent to prepare Lady Macbeth for her husband’s imminent return before the advent of King Duncan. Such a preparation appears to ‘prime’ his wife, and is conniving as Macbeth evidently knows his wife well and therefore can rely on her to support his secret scheme to usurp Duncan. The audience is immediately aware of the breathless excitement wrought by the ecstatic recital of her husband’s promotions. ‘Glamis thou art and Cawdor.’ Yet she demonstrates discretion when she obliquely refers to ‘What thou art promised.’ This giddy discretion is shared by her husband when he returns home. Their conspiracy is dangerous and almost unspeakable underlining their mutual awareness of its profound immorality. Murder is an obsessive act. A bloody consummation uniting the Macbeth couple yet estranging them too. The gift of the witches is a bloody, defiling consummation.
Speaking independently, in her own voice, the audience recognises the depth of Lady Macbeth’s knowledge of her husband. Her intimate acquaintance with Macbeth’s ‘ milk of human kindness’ shocks us. For not only is such a kind side to Macbeth a contrast to the brutal warrior described by Ross and the Sergeant in Act One Scene Two, we are also aware that femininity and maternity as encapsulated by the reference to ‘milk’ are in the process of being expunged from the world of the Macbeth couple. This milk becomes ‘gall’ to Lady Macbeth shortly as she beseeches the evil ‘ spirits’ to ‘ unsex me here’ so her newly birthed masculinity can carry out the act of murder to gain the throne. Femininity is perceived as a weakness and an impediment to ambition. Humanity has been reduced to a version of behaviour that is all about aggression and violence. Compassion is absent. Lady Macbeth does not really want to be just Queen, she wants to be King in all but name through her influence on her husband.
The Jacobean audience would have been horrified at the dominance of Lady Macbeth and her predilection for evil as evidenced by the violence of her actions and her attitude towards her husband. This does seem ironic when one remembers that the Jacobean era had only been ushered in after the death of Elizabeth the First who was a very successful and dominant female monarch. The uneasy combination of the masculine and the feminine in Lady Macbeth emphasizes the conflict innate to any form of power in the play. Virtuous Duncan’s trust in Macbeth and his wife proves delusional. Macduff unknowingly abandons his wife and family to their bloody fate, in order to support Malcolm in England. Yet Macduff can destroy Macbeth because he is not born of a ‘woman’ thereby suggesting his masculinity is heightened and invincible because it is not linked to the conventional female birth.
Lady Macbeth’s predilection for the Gothic is evidenced through her dialogue with the ‘spirits’ of the supernatural and her reference to the ‘raven’ and to ‘ thick night’. It is as if she has no recognition of the contaminating effects of such mental landscapes and evil contracts with the supernatural. She lacks imagination. Thus her apparently strong nature will be compromised by her associations with evil. And perhaps the appearance of Banquo at the feast is invisible to her because her husband has acted without her knowledge, showing how quickly her importance is undermined, once Duncan is dead. Her ignorance becomes isolation and forces introspection upon her which destabilise her mental equilibrium.
The importance of Lady Macbeth to the unfolding of the murder plot is clear. She threatens the wavering Macbeth with emasculating words in order to humiliate him into being ‘ man’ enough to kill. Interestingly Macbeth never challenges the version of masculinity espoused by his wife. Her capacity for planning ‘ leave all the rest to me’ is evidently seductive to the battle-weary Macbeth and he is not appalled by his wife’s monstrous repudiation of maternity, ‘ dashed the brains out ‘ despite the acknowledgement that she is speaking of a’ babe that milks me.’ In fact, rhapsodising ‘ bring forth men-children only’ despite the clear evidence that she is an unfit mother. The culture of vicious masculinity suggested by the ironic first words of Duncan, ‘what bloody man is that?’ Continues through the play. The feminine represents a way of being that must be negated in order for ambition to be realised.
Once Duncan is dead, Lady Macbeth trivializes the shocking horror of Macbeth’s reaction to the obscenities of the King’s innocent blood on his hands.’ A little water clears us of this deed.’ Such an unimaginative, banal and unsympathetic reaction to her husband’s anguish reveals Lady Macbeth’s fatal dismissal of consequence. Her inability to kill the sleeping Duncan because he resembled ‘ My father as he slept’ reveals a more conscience ridden psyche than even she realises. Yet this awareness is pushed away and repressed until her last appearance in the at whereas a tormented, sleepwalking, lonely Queen she rants and raves about her malign actions, talking in unguarded fragments about her guilty deeds including her infamous inability to clean her hands of the hallucinatory spots of blood despite her anguished imperative ‘Out, damned spot: out, I say!’ Here the old dominance of the Queen is evidenced through the use of the commands, yet her mental turmoil is too strong to be denied. Her diminished company gives representation to her redundancy and may even seem pitiful to the audience despite themselves.
Her suicide guarantees her eternal damnation and her husband’s desperate predicament renders any grief superfluous. He literally has no time to mourn her. Their time is past. The utter bleakness and nihilistic awareness that ‘tomorrow and tomorrow’ will just bring in more nothingness communicate the fatal consequences of their malign untrammelled ambition. And who can they blame but themselves?
Fascinating reading of some of the implications of Lady Macbeth’s gender, and other aspects of her character, in the play – I love it when writing on a piece of literature makes me exited so much I want to go back and re-read the original – and this insightful reading definitely has that effect. Back to Macbeth! Thanks