Macbeth - Lady Macbeth: A Woman Before Her Time
During the Elizabethan era, the great chain of being reigned. Women were low on this chain of power, and men were on top. In fact, women were below horses; you couldn’t live without a good horse, but, you could live without a wife. Lady Macbeth was a woman before her time, she was caught between being today’s ambitious, powerful modern woman and a fragile creature of the Elizabethan era.
In the first four acts of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is vicious, overly ambitious, without conscience, and willing to do whatever it takes to get what she wants. In this case, she wants to become Queen of Scotland. "Whiles I stood rapt in the/ wonder of it, came missives from the king, who all-/ hailed me, ...
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Therefore, she calls upon the aid of the supernatural to give her male powers, so that she may have the gall to go through with the plan to murder the King, and allow Macbeth to obtain the throne. "The raven himself is hoarse/ That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan/ Under my battlements. 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! Make thick my blood,/ Stop up the access and passage to remorse,/ That no compunctious visitings of nature/ Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between/ The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,/ And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,/ Wherever in your sightless substances/ You wait on natures’s mischief! 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!’" (I v, 41-57)
"Man: a human male, or human kind. Women ...
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breakdown as a result of this guilt. She is emotionally exhausted and becomes the typical "fragile flower".
We first see this side of her when she states that she cannot kill Duncan because "had he not resembled/ My father as he slept, I had done’t" (II ii, 16-7). After Duncan’s murder, the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are reversed, previously, she was the main motivator in the plan to overthrow the kingdom. Following Duncan’s death, she breaks down and Macbeth becomes powerful and tyranical. Macbeth gets all the inclination and she gets the guilt. "The germs of fear which break out in Macbeth on the night of the murder do not develop further in him, but in her. It is he who ...
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"Macbeth - Lady Macbeth: A Woman Before Her Time." Essayworld.com. October 31, 2004. Accessed April 24, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Macbeth-Lady-Macbeth-Woman-Before-Her/16782.
"Macbeth - Lady Macbeth: A Woman Before Her Time." Essayworld.com. October 31, 2004. Accessed April 24, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Macbeth-Lady-Macbeth-Woman-Before-Her/16782.
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