thinking activity: The MACBETH

1 : Feminist reading of  lady Macbeth

Rebecca Pancoast

Macbeth is a play that seeks to understand morality, especially how it relates to healthy and unhealthy expression of gender.  Feminism is a movement that seeks equality for all people, and an elimination of classical ideas of gender (male intelligence versus female inferiority; male strength versus female emotional weakness) as gender is a social construct rather than something that a person is born into.  Many feminist interpreters of literature have examined Macbeth for its presentation of characters displaying their unconventional thoughts on gender.  I will present three different feminist interpretations of Macbeth, and discuss how the ideas they offer may  help to clarify the motives of the complex characters of this play.

In Comic Women, Tragic Men, Linda Bamber presents the idea of the feminine Other in relation to the male Self.  A feminine Other is one who exists within the world of women, exemplifying the socially accepted qualities of love, fertility, family, and a sense of the body.  She also serves as a figure who presents a challenge to the male self when necessary.  Bamber believes that a character, Lady Macbeth’s problem lies in that she has an unhealthy focus on the world of men, valuing it above all other things (Bamber 91).

Lady Macbeth presents herself as her husband’s collaborator, rather than as a being with her own self-interests.  Because her identity is based upon her conceptions of manliness, she serves to block Macbeth’s exits from the world of men, when she should be offering alternatives to it.  The character of Lady Macduff is, however, able to fulfill this role for her partner.  She is hostile towards her husband’s public life when it takes him away from his family, being first concerned with his obligation to the home.  In this way, she can appear to be a demanding and critical wife.  However, by being the Other to Macduff’s Self, her death invokes a paralyzing disbelief in her husband, and he seeks revenge for her death.  Contrarily, Macbeth simply shrugs off the suicide of a woman whom he had only weeks before called his “dearest partner of greatness” .  Lady Macbeth was an empty figure, offering no feminine balance for Macbeth, and hence he has lost nothing in her death (Bamber 93).
By the end of the play, Macbeth’s fantasies completely eliminate women from the birthing process.  Lady Macbeth is pushed to the background and almost forgotten, and Macbeth becomes obsessed with the prophecy that no man born of a woman shall be able to threaten his new position.  Adelman argues that Macbeth comes to believe that not only is he infallible because all those around him were born of women, but he is infallible because he was not.  Macduff’s destruction of Macbeth proves him wrong, yet enforces the idea that the mark of the successful man is a violent separation from his mother.  Adelman sees the lesson as being, “heroic manhood is exemption from the female” (Adelman 120-123).

Adelman’s reading of Macbeth was not as obvious to me as the other two that I’ve presented.  The image of the heroic Macduff not needing women contradicts Linda Bamber’s argument for the Other, however, both readings appear legitimate.  As Adelman suggests, Macduff does not need women to exert his power.  Although he loves his wife, she was not necessary for him to make his choices nor to fall the tyrant Macbeth had become.  At the end, the stage is dominated by men.  Lady Macduff might be there to be Macduff’s Other, or, she might be there to create a more heroic Macduff--a man a with a family, with a nurturing wife (rather than a “malevolent mother” as in Lady Macbeth), who is strong even in his separation from them.

Questions of gender and morality run through this play, and there are many legitimate ways of interpreting the characters and their relationships.  There is no one answer as to what is means to be a man or a woman, just as there’s no way to definitively draw the line between right and wrong--we can only know it when we get there.

3: the politics of aloofness in Macbeth?

Macbeth reflects James' aloof style of kingship, above all by presenting the pattern of ideal kingship as independent from various orders of sequential articulation, including biological succession and history itself. The three masculine and human counterparts to the witches—Malcolm, Banquo, and Macduff—all appear to be positioned outside successions of various kinds. Although the play appears to answer the question, "How to succeed in kingship?" in a Jacobean manner, by valuing "aloofness" it also challenges the Jacobean formula for royal success through its equivocations about the shapes of history. By playing against one another patterns of doubling and trebling, suggestive of cyclical and linear models of history respectively, the play subtly challenges the Jacobean "line" on kingship and history.

Journal Information
Current issues are available on the Chicago Journals website: Read the latest issue. English Literary Renaissance is a journal devoted to current criticism and scholarship of Tudor and early Stuart English literature, 1485-1665, including Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, and Milton. It is unique in featuring the publication of rare texts and newly discovered manuscripts of the period and current annotated bibliographies of work in the field. It is illustrated with contemporary woodcuts and engravings of Renaissance England and Europe.

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