The “Un”-Sexed Women of Macbeth

Lady Macbeth: so heartless, brutal, and viciously cruel. Anyone who could, even in jest, talk about dashing in the brains of a smiling infant must be deranged.  And, yet, I wonder whether she is all talk, and the only power that she has is in beguiling and manipulating Macbeth.  Why, I wonder, is it so important to her that Macbeth secure the throne?  Everyone wants some semblance of power, and this basic human drive easily turns into pathology.  Perhaps, Lady Macbeth’s desire to be the Queen is sourced in her own sense of disempowerment as a woman in the hierarchy of Scottish society during the Elizabethan era; as far as society is concerned, she is nothing but a pawn of her father and husband.   In order to embody evil, she must call to supernatural forces to fill her with the “direst cruelty”(I.v.50).   While Lady Macbeth criticizes Macbeth for being cowardly and “unmanly,” she reveals her weakness when she admits that she would have done the deed of killing Duncan had he not resembled her father.  I think this admittance does suggest the inescapably of her paternalistic servitude. Lady Macbeth bolsters that she is "man" enough to go back to Duncan's

crime scene, and that only children are afraid of the dead, but it is Lady Macbeth who falls apart in the end, and eventually takes her own life (we are led to assume), because she is so riddled with guilt.  While Macbeth lives in torment, he also comes to embrace the tyrannous monster that he has become.  When Malcolm and Macduff have laid siege on his homestead, Macbeth comes face to face with Siward, whom he violently slays.  After the young man is slain, Macbeth scorns him in saying, “Thou wast born of woman./But swords I smile at, weapons laugh to scorn,/Branished by man that’s of a woman born (V.vii.15-18).  Being a woman is Lady Macbeth’s weakness.  Having any link to the nurturance of a yielding woman is the downfall of all.  Macduff, who was ripped from his mother’s womb too early, is the only one who is able to bring peace to the kingdom. 

Ultimately, it is the witches, the “Weird Sisters” who haunt Macbeth, and who are the ones who instigate the whole chain of events that lead to Macbeth’s downfall.  Lady Macbeth aligns with their supernatural powers, becoming as like the incarnate of an evil womanhood.  The “women” enact their destruction through the manipulation of the powers of Hecate, the goodness of darkness.  The witches personify the grotesqueness of a woman more powerful than her place, one who calls upon the sinister to do her “unnatural” bidding.