The scene shifts to Inverness and Macbeth’s castle. The language of Macbeth’s letter which Lady Macbeth reads may adjust the way in which we think of his meeting with the witches: he writes that he “burned in desire to question them further” and “stood rapt in the wonder” of their promises of “greatness.” The letter also establishes the closeness of the Macbeths, “partner[s] of greatness” and partners-to-be in crime.
Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies (13-28 and 36-52) are the play’s most terrifying and dynamic projections of the “illness” of ambition. Her scorn for Macbeth’s “milk of human kindness” (15), her eagerness to exchange her own maternal milk for bitter gall (associated with Christ’s torment on the cross), and her willingness to receive “murd’ring ministers” into her body are all horrifying testimonies to her desire to eradicate all that is feminine and maternal and conscience-directed and to transform herself into an agent of destruction: “Make thick my blood | Stop up th’access and passage to remorse, | That no compunctious visitings of nature | shake my fell purpose. . .” (41-44). (Say these lines out loud, if you dare, to hear their terrifying, guttural impact.) Lady Macbeth initiates a downward spiral of moral decline: to do evil she must divest herself of moral scruples and her very gender, and, in turn, her evil doings make her less and less human.
But in his analysis of the causes and effects of evil, Shakespeare goes, I think, further and gets more specific (and more X-rated). Lady Macbeth identifies gender – maleness and femaleness – with certain simplistic characteristics: maleness for her seems to mean seizing and killing; femaleness seems to mean weakness and dispiritedness, its only means of access to power in sexual blackmail, in scorning or enticing. Since her lord, in spite of his military valor, “is too full o’th’milk of human kindness,” she must alternately seduce and shame him into “manly” action, while she herself becomes a super-male, a terminator, unsexed and ravening: “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!” (38-41). Notice in her first soliloquy how Shakespeare has the virago lady invert male and female imagery:
Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear,
And chastise with the valor of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round
Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crowned withal. (23-28)
She becomes the sword and phallus, the pourer of “spirits,” while Macbeth becomes the receptacle, the passive ear, the promised possessor of the “golden round.” Another Adam resigns his manhood to another Eve. And Lady Macbeth calls on the spirits of inversion (and in Shakespeare’s dramatic and sacramental world spirits who “wait on nature’s mischief” come when called) to give her engorgement (“Make thick my blood”) and knife-like power: “Come, thick night, | And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, | That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, | Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, | To cry ‘Hold, hold!’” (48-52). And during these exchanges, Shakespeare can certainly count on his audience’s familiarity with the standard Elizabethan pun on “death” as orgasm, “le petit mort,” the “little death,” which intricately connects masculinity, sexuality, and mortality.
This exploration of masculinity and femininity, or, rather, of the moral and social constructions of the notions of maleness and femaleness, is dramatized throughout the play in language, character, and action, beginning with the appearance of the witches, who, says the plain-speaking Banquo, “should be women, | And yet your beards forbid me to interpret | That you are so” (1.3.43-45). Is the issue here post-menopausal glandular irregularity, or the convention of male actors playing women’s roles, or, as I think, the basic moral notion that our very imagining, and therefore our sense of morality, is related to gender (and to class) and to a sense of empowerment (or disenfranchisement). Both the witches and Lady Macbeth seem to have a sense of blockage from direct expression of power and therefore (angrily) attempt to work through Macbeth, making him their accomplice, their operative, and their victim: in the words of the Malleus Maleficarum, “when [women] are governed by an evil spirit, they indulge the worst possible vices. . . All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman. . .” and therefore “they find an easy and secret manner of vindicating themselves.” Women are obstructed and emotional and therefore manipulative and manipulatable. In rebelling against this nasty, perdurable stereotype, Lady Macbeth enacts and confirms it. And in doing so she likewise hardens and simplifies the corresponding stereotype for the male. The 20th-century anthropologist Margaret Mead concluded that “The central problem of every society is to define appropriate roles for the men”; Lady Macbeth seems not only dissatisfied by her femininity but also entrapped by a particularly lethal definition of the male role. And she is determined to enforce the stereotype of man as killer for her own purposes of power.
In the last third of the scene, Lady Macbeth expresses a love for her husband that is, paradoxically, both intense and exploitative. She expresses the principle of hypocrisy under which they must operate – “look like th’ innocent flower, | But be the serpent under ’t” – which drives an inexorable wedge between seeming and being (always the subject of serious theatre and of serious moral questioning) and connects their crime indirectly to the collusion of Eve and Adam with the Serpent in the story of the fall to sin of “our first parents.” Significantly, Macbeth – enthralled or overwhelmed – by her bold proposal speaks only four cryptic words in ambiguous reply. Indeed, Lady Macbeth dominates the scene: from Macbeth’s entrance at line 52, she speaks some 134 words and he only 15! The Macbeths’ final exchange of dialogue in the scene serves precisely to contrast their different personalities and the differing rates of their moral decline: he still wishes to consider and to “speak further of this business”; she is for hypocrisy and immediate action: “Only look up clear. | To alter favor ever is to fear. | Leave all the rest to me” (69-71). . Voyager ¶Palex ¶ßVoyager ßgPalex ghVoyager h$Palex $,Palex ,ËPalex ËÈVoyager ÈÍPalex ÍÙVoyager Ù Palex Voyager Palex "Palex " &Palex & /Palex / 1Palex 1 3Voyager 3 RPalex R [Palex [ \Palex \ ^Voyager ^ }Palex } âPalex â äPalex ä åVoyager å ∂Palex ∂ ∏Voyager ∏ ’Palex ’ ÷Voyager ÷ fiPalex fi flVoyager fl ‡Palex ‡ ·Voyager · ıPalex ı
