Author’s Note: This essay was written during my British Literature class where I had to choose between several prompts to write about. Macbeth is now one of my favorite Shakespeare plays right after Hamlet, precisely because I find the characterization of Lady Macbeth so fascinating.
William Shakespeare’s tragedy, Macbeth, is considered to be a cursed play, with its very name thought to bestow bad luck when uttered in traditional theaters. It is said the curse began when the boy playing Lady Macbeth suddenly died backstage right before the opening night performance. As a result, it is often referred to simply as The Scottish Play.
Similar to his other tragedies featuring the downfall of its hero, Macbeth falls victim to his own fallibility when tempted by the unnaturally evil desire for power. His ambition to gain the crown by way of murder reflects a darker side of human nature. Lady Macbeth, the wife of Macbeth, also falls victim to this unnatural evil in tragic heroine fashion. In many ways the couple acts as a counterpart to the other, with one taking on the role of a paranoid, guilty conscience as the other embodies a brutal warrior ethos.
Lady Macbeth, however, is often perceived as pure evil compared to her husband as she pushes him towards committing murder when his guilty conscience arises. She begins as the warrior woman, whose ruthless ambition drives her to unnatural evil. This persona she embraces shockingly contradicts female gender roles of the time. Lady Macbeth illustrates the epitome of unnatural evil in the Jacobean woman, through rejecting her femininity and embracing her ambitious warrior spirit, she has effectively gone against the natural order and therefore drives herself insane to the point of suicide.
After receiving news from Macbeth about his prophesied rise to power, Lady Macbeth calls upon the spirits to “unsex” her, thereby rejecting femininity. Living vicariously through her husband she takes on his ambition as her own, embracing masculinity and purging her feminine weaknesses. This would have appalled the Jacobean audience, who viewed women as naturally compassionate and nurturing. Appealing to these unnatural evils, she calls out:
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty. (1.5, 45-48)
To Lady Macbeth, power cannot be attained while traditionally feminine traits are present, and therefore, must be eradicated in order to fulfill her desire. This further implies that, to her own mind at least, she is naturally compassionate as a woman. By asking the spirits to “unsex” and “fill” her from the “crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty”, she is rejecting what she considers to be her weaknesses. She continues by saying:
Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief. (1.5, 52-55)
Lady Macbeth asks evil demons to have the “milk” of her “woman’s breasts” made to “gall”, transforming the nurturing power of a mother’s milk into a corrosive acid. The compassionate nature of femininity is thus purged to make way for the cruelty of a warrior ethos. A Jacobean woman’s purpose in life amounts to motherhood, which is spurned by Lady Macbeth in favor of power. After Macbeth’s guilty conscience arises to dissuade him from murder, she bitterly says:
I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this. (1.7, 59-64)
The horrific image of a mother ripping a baby from her breast and killing them serves as an antithesis to what a Jacobean woman should be. Lady Macbeth emasculates her husband by telling him that if she had sworn to do something she would keep her word, even if it meant committing filicide. In order to attain power through Macbeth, she must do away with her naturally feminine capacity for compassion and nurturing.
Once Lady Macbeth has rejected her femininity, she fully embraces her ambitious warrior spirit, often mocking her husband by emasculating him. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are likened to the Roman God and Goddess of war, Mars and Bellona. At the start of the play, Ross describes Macbeth as “Bellona’s bridegroom”, foreshadowing the destructive warrior ethos they are to embody. For a woman, however, possessing this warrior spirit is intrinsically an unnatural evil. Lady Macbeth goads her husband into following through with their plan:
Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valor
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would,”
Like the poor cat i’ th’ adage? (1.7, 42-48)
She questions whether he will act on his desires, equating it to “valor”, reflecting the warrior mentality she has absorbed. By calling him a coward she attempts to provoke his masculine ego into action. Her definition of manhood demands cruelty, differing from a morally righteous perspective that dictates otherwise. To Lady Macbeth, her husband cannot be a real man until he acts on his desire to become King through brutal means.
Her plan to convince him this way works when Macbeth proclaims, “Bring forth men-children only, / For thy undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males” (1.7, 80-82). The “undaunted mettle” she exhibits can only give birth to “men-children” because of her ambitious warrior spirit. She has embraced masculinity to help aid her husband’s rise to power. '
The third act of the play marks the transition between rejecting her femininity and going insane when she loses control of Macbeth. Lady Macbeth tries to comfort her husband whose mind has been tormented with guilt and pushed towards murdering Banquo. After he has gone through with this murder, he becomes hysterical when he sees Banquo’s ghost at their banquet. In an attempt to snap him back into reality, she again provokes his masculine ego, “What, quite unmanned in folly?” (3.4, 86). She fails, however, having lost her connection to Macbeth as he falls deeper into his madness. Thereafter, the consequences of her unnatural evil take form. Lady Macbeth has rejected her femininity and embraced an ambitious warrior spirit, but in doing so has transgressed the natural order.
During the fifth act, Macbeth has taken the warrior spirit, leaving Lady Macbeth behind with a paranoid, guilty conscience. The counterparts have been separated, with Macbeth now embodying the warrior spirit to keep his crown, while Lady Macbeth must reckon with their evil actions. Due to the unnatural evils she has committed, Lady Macbeth spirals into insanity. She begins to have hallucinations as she sleepwalks at night, illustrating the repressed guilt she feels for her role in the murders. A gentlewoman and doctor both observe from afar as Lady Macbeth roams the dark hallways trying to wash out imagined blood spots from her hands:
Out, damned spot! Out, I say! —One, two. Why, then,
’tis time to do ’t. Hell is murky! —Fie, my lord, fie! A
soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it,
when none can call our power to account? (5.1, 31-34)
Lady Macbeth has fallen into madness, reliving the moment after her husband has murdered Duncan. She takes on both roles at once as she struggles to free herself of guilt by washing the “blood” off her hands. In rejecting her femininity and embracing cruelty, she has driven herself to the point of insanity. Such actions she has been complicit in cannot be made right, nor can they be undone. These unnatural evils are irreversible, which she reflects in saying, “Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes / of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. O, O, O!” (5.1, 44-45). Even “all the perfumes of Arabia” cannot “sweeten” her little hand from “the smell of the blood”. She can no longer hide from her wrongdoings, only able to confront her repressed, guilty conscience during sleep. The doctor comments on this phenomena:
Foul whisp’rings are abroad. Unnatural deeds
Do breed unnatural troubles. Infected minds
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.
More needs she the divine than the physician.
God, God forgive us all! (5.1, 63-67)
Her hallucinations confirm the rumors about Macbeth’s violent rise to power, with the doctor suggesting these “unnatural deeds” will breed “unnatural troubles”. Such “infected minds” shall “discharge their secrets” to “deaf pillows” when their evils have been repressed. Lady Macbeth’s actions have cursed her soul so much so that only a priest can cure her. But without any help from the divine, the only way her deeds can be corrected is through her suicide. In going against nature itself, Lady Macbeth is consumed and destroyed by the unnatural evil she has embraced.
The character of Lady Macbeth would have undoubtedly been horrifying to a Jacobean audience as she rejects femininity, embraces a warrior spirit, and is driven insane because of it. With such a narrow idea of what a woman ought to be, Lady Macbeth’s renunciation of womanhood renders her a figure of pure evil in the theatrical canon.
That being said, the warrior ethos in Macbeth is equally condemned as an unnatural evil, even if the audience does not share the same view. In today’s world, femininity is not seen as an inherent weakness, nor is masculinity defined by brutality. Rather, they exist within each person to varying degrees, allowing for a fluidity in both men and women.
Lady Macbeth’s lust for power has gone on to inspire morally complex women in modern media such as Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones and Claire Underwood in House of Cards. Yet, in spite of increasingly progressive attitudes, these women are still disproportionately demonized for their ambitions, even as men do exactly the same. While Lady Macbeth is subject to the limited gender roles of the Jacobean era, she remains as one of William Shakespeare’s most compelling female characters.
Works Cited
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles, Folger Shakespeare Library, https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/macbeth/read/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2025.
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Your a wonderful writer
I love this. However, I would still argue that lady Macbeth is still a feminist. She embodies proto-feminist transgression through her invocation of spirts. As occult practitioners were usually rich white men in Europe, so is she not feminist by taking on this male dominated role? Sorry if my comment makes no sense I’m really tired.