Paper-101 Assignment: Feminist Reading of the 'Macbeth'
Name: Avani Jani
Batch: M.A. Sem.1 (2022-2024)
Enrollment N/o.: 4069206420220014
Roll N/o.: 04
Subject code & Paper N/o.: 22392- Paper 101: Literature of Elizabethan and Restoration periods
E-mail Address: avanijani.18@gmail.com
Submitted to: Smt. S.B. Gardi Department of English- M.K.B.U.
Date of submission: 7th November, 2022
“Stars, hide your fears
Let not light see my deep black desires.”
- Shakespeare, Macbeth
Shakespeare was a revolution in Drama and in the era of Queen Elizabeth as well. William Shakespeare, an English poet, dramatist, and actor often called the English national poet and is considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time.
Shakespeare occupies a position unique in world literature. Other poets, such as Homer and Dante, and novelists, such as Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens, have transcended national barriers, but no writer’s living reputation can compare to that of Shakespeare, whose plays, written in the late 16th and early 17th centuries for a small repertory theatre, are now performed and read more often and in more countries than ever before.
"Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time”
It may be audacious even to attempt a definition of his greatness, but it is not so difficult to describe the gifts that enabled him to create imaginative visions of pathos and mirth that, whether read or witnessed in the theatre, fill the mind and linger there. He is a writer of great intellectual rapidity, perceptiveness, and poetic power. Other writers have had these qualities, but with Shakespeare, the keenness of mind was applied not to abstruse or remote subjects but to human beings and their complete range of emotions and conflicts. Other writers have applied their keenness of mind in this way, but Shakespeare is astonishingly clever with words and images, so that his mental energy, when applied to intelligible human situations, finds full and memorable expression, convincing and imaginatively stimulating. As if this were not enough, the art form into which his creative energies went was not remote and bookish but involved the vivid stage impersonation of human beings, commanding sympathy and inviting vicarious participation. Thus, Shakespeare’s merits can survive translation into other languages and into cultures remote from that of Elizabethan England.
Macbeth:
Macbeth, a tragedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, was written sometime in 1606–07 and published in the First Folio of 1623 from a playbook or a transcript of one. Some portions of the original text are corrupted or missing from the published edition. The play is the shortest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, without diversions or subplots. It chronicles Macbeth’s seizing of power and subsequent destruction, both his rise, and his fall the result of blind ambition.
Here’s the summary of Macbeth in a nutshell :
* The king of Norway has been defeated by Duncan's captains, Macbeth and Banquo.
•three witches greet Macbeth as thane of Glamis, thane of Cawdor, and king-to-be.
•Lady Macbeth has fewer qualms than her husband and goes into near-ecstasy at the thought of taking the throne.
•She and Macbeth plot Duncan's death.
•Duncan's sons Malcolm and Donalbain flee to England and Ireland.
•He remembers the prediction of the witches: Banquo's son will reign, not his. He hires men to kill Banquo and his son Fleance, but Fleance escapes
•Macbeth sees the ghost of Banquo
•The witches call forth three apparitions, who tell Macbeth that he must beware Macduff, that "no one of woman born" can harm him, and that he will never be defeated until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane.
•He vents his fury by slaughtering everyone he can find in Macduff's castle - Macduff's wife, children, and servants.
•Lady Macbeth is restless in her mind. a doctor observes her sleepwalking, speaking of the murders and clearly disturbed.
•The death of Lady Macbeth seems to affect him
•movement of the Wood pours toward Dunsinane
•the prediction that no one born of a woman can harm him. But in the end, even this fails Macbeth.
A feminist reading of Macbeth :
1] Weird Sisters :
The play ‘Macbeth’ seems totally different from the general perspective when we see or study it from Feminist Perspective. The ‘Weird sisters’- three witches and Lady Macbeth are the most prominent characters of the play ‘Macbeth’. If I have to give the numbers to the characters for their importance, I will surely put Witches first, Lady Macbeth second, and third I’ll put the character of Macbeth.
The plot of this play starts developing with the prophecies of three witches-
“All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!”
-Second Witch.
Nobody now wants to cut the witches from Macbeth or to make them comic. But they are not necessary to the story: Macbeth could have gotten what he wanted in the world without their assistance. So why is it so right that the witches should begin the play? Why are they, in the beginning, so terrible? The first scene makes very clear the witchiness of the witches, with its sense of great but vague events, the hovering, the fog, the filth, and the famous statement " Faire is foul, and foul is fair ". But at the same time, the witches are having a very ordinary meeting. We join the committee at the moment when, having no doubt gone through the agenda in an orderly way, the sisters have got to the Time, Place, and Business of the Next Meeting. " When shall we three meet again? " is the opening line. This is a scene that makes its point much more effective if the lines are spoken without the haggish screeches favored by some actresses. It is the ordinariness, in the context of the witch - activities, that is obscurely shocking. There follows the scene with the Bleeding Captaine, which shows how disorganized the King is compared with the witches and how much further from the real world the court is. The shocking ordinariness of the witches comes out decisively in their second scene.
If you ignore the things they have done and are doing, the witches are the model in the early part of the play of a united and effectively functioning community. Comparing experiences in a friendly way they address each other as " Sister ", and as soon as one comes to a difficulty the others rally around in a way that permits the use of that very important word kind, which means something between natural, good, loving and helpful, as well as the modern kind.
The three weird sisters, Hecate, and Lady Macbeth have been condemned as villains in the play just because they do not abide by the patriarchal strictures of femininity. Toril Moi in her Essay, “Feminist, Female, Feminine” explains how feminine and female relate to a woman’s biological self and her adherence to culturally defined roles; while feminism is a political position. The fact that they cannot be categorized as female or feminine naturally categorizes them among feminists who are politically active by nature. The three weird sisters possessed beards, and Lady Macbeth and Hecate were unnaturally cruel. People often consider such features to be instances of their denial of womanhood. Actually, these women were not limited by patriarchal constraints. It naturally opens the scope for analysis of their character from a Feminist point of view. These women were politically aware and intelligent enough to know how to motivate powerful men to a particular action. In the era of Shakespeare, such women were ostracized by society and forced to live on the periphery. Despite being relegated to the margins, the witches do not accept defeat at the hands of the ‘civilized’ men. Even as they face such discrimination, they chose to stay united with each other. Their union helps them to gain greater significance since together they could better contrive the happenings of the masculine world.(Belsey and Moore #)
Women are often criticized for not bonding well with each other. Their weakness is attributed to the lack of unity among themselves. In fact, it is also said that this internal disunity develops their affinity to the patriarchal society that further renders them weak.
"The weird sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about Thrice to thine and thrice to mine
And thrice again, to make up nine.
peace! The charm’s wound up" (Shakespeare)
It is not only the witches who are united among themselves. Even some other women in Macbeth like Lady Macbeth and Hecate are more united with womankind than men. The class difference between them does not seem to matter as they continue to seek union and gain strength from each other. In the opening scene of Macbeth, lines 1-2, the witches utter- “When shall we three meet again/ In thunder, lightning or in rain” (Shakespeare ). For generations, readers and audiences have criticized these witches; and like Banquo have considered them to be “instruments of darkness” (Shakespeare). Such critics often ignore how fearless these witches are! In the next scene, everyone exalts Macbeth for displaying super-humanly skills and bravery on the battlefield. Perhaps such dualistic interpretation occurs because men have always been kept at the center of any power discourse. In the context of the play, the witches become natural invalids. Firstly, they are not men. Moreover, they are also old and haggard and live at the societal periphery. Naturally, they gain the status of invalids who are not paid any respect. Instead of applauding their bravery, people reprimand them for their darker pursuits. Being debunked by the larger society, they feel disgraced and find solace in the adaptation of Feminist principles. It helps them to exalt their own power that others fail to recognize-
Stands Macbeth thus amazedly? Come, sisters, cheer we up his sprites And show the best of our delights: I’ll charm the air to give a sound, While you perform your antic round: That this great king may kindly say, Our duties did his welcome pay. (Shakespeare)
However, in our view, such illness can also be studied as a source of strength. One should not overlook how the witches have gained power and dark knowledge from the caves in which they dwell. These caves are the places that function as “great antechambers of the mysteries of transformation”. It means that such caves are a source of dark knowledge and so promote the gradual evolution of women into powerful beings. Such women who have been ‘imprisoned’ for years in the caves possess the metaphorical potential to induce beneficial and mystical possibilities.
Another feministic attribute of the witches can be traced from their use of poetic language. In Macbeth, the language used by the witches is different from the language used by the other characters in the play. They speak mostly in rhyming couplets like -
“Double, double toil and trouble;
/ Fire burn and cauldron bubble” (Shakespeare).
Whereas, the other characters of the play use blank verse while speaking. These witches exploit the aspect of double meaning imbibed in the poetic language and confuse Macbeth by using the same. They create a facade of rituals to enthrall men like him who are unable to understand the hidden meaning. By doing so, they play with masculine identities and can reduce their own anxiety about having an unstable identity. Such games also help them to gain more significance in the patriarchal setup. In this regard, the position of the witches can be compared to the women writers of the contemporary generation who create their own language to not only voice their angst but also to establish their identity amidst the patriarchal set-up. For them, Gilbert and Gubar state “The women writers’ own anxieties about her equivocal position in a patriarchal literary culture which often seems to her to enact strange rituals and speak in unknown tongues” (“The Madwoman In The Attic” The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary imagination”)
Lady Macbeth :
Lady Macbeth is often portrayed as the ‘Fourth Witch’. Shakespeare's tragedy interrogates the tyranny of absolute monarchical practices that the playwright divorces from naturalized gender constructions by placing Lady Macbeth at the center of the play's violence. While she is often read as rup turning her designated gender function, I argue that she provides a parodic inversion of the ideal wife and allows Shakespeare to put pressure on masculinist and violent structures of relations that depend on women's abject confirmation for their unremitting self - perpetuation. - Lady Macbeth's " evil " is, in this regard, an ideologically inscribed notion that is often linked in our literary tradition to strong female characters who seek power, who reject filial loyalty as before self-loyalty, and who pursue desire in all its forms - romantic, adulterate, authoritarian, and even violent Evil, then, is a gender-linked concept that reifies constructions of action as definitive of masculinity. I want to suggest that Shakespeare's tragedy presents a complex vision of gender and power, which, rather than reinscribing binary oppositions of male/female, active/passive, and good/evil, exposes structures of violence and tyranny as dependent on naturalized definitions of femininity and masculinity. Macbeth explores a system of power relations that requires both men's glorification of violence and women's renunciation of desire for a phan traumatic stability. That women in power seem to behave like men suggests that binary oppositions are cultural fabrications. Thus Shakespeare uncovers the gender trouble behind the prescriptions that constitute femininity as compliance, masculinity as violence, and violence as power.
Lady Macbeth's place in critical history is one of almost peerless malevolence. Scholars argue that she violates the dictates of gender by conjuring the spirits to " unsex " her. When she encourages Macbeth's violence by questioning his manhood, she is perceived not just as shrewish but as the play's source for the definition of masculinity as violence. In her defense of Lady Macbeth, Despite the view of some critics that Lady Macbeth is the evil force behind Macbeth's unwilling villainy, she seems to epitomize the sixteenth-century belief that women are passive, men active . . . . Lady Macbeth's threats of violence, for all their force and cruelty, are empty fantasies.
Macbeth performs gender according to the fluctuating politics of power and violence staged by Macbeth. Just as the violent cultural context of the play provides competing discourses for Macbeth, it enables and, in part, encourages a shifting set of responses from Lady Macbeth that are simultaneously " masculine " brutality and " feminine " obedience. If she does indeed transgress her gender to become manly, therefore, it is because she must do so to reflect - - as conduct manuals demand the bloody desire of her husband. That tracts on women's conduct cannot be said, literally, to demand anything of the kind is less important than the submission they do demand, which can be misunderstood, is recognized as a constant and unquestioning feminine compliance with the desires of the masculine.
Lady Macduff, however, is subject to the same societal restrictions as Lady Macbeth. Both women are deserted by husbands driven by masculinist honor to participate in the play's violence. Lady Macduff, like Lady Macbeth, must remain at home as tyranny rages and await her husband's return. Whether through passivity or through active encouragement, then, both women must be read as parties to a structure of power dependent on violence for stability. While Lady Macduff critiques her culture's brutality when she is informed of the danger she and her children face, she is as powerless against it as Lady Macbeth :
"Whither should I fly? I have done no harm. But I remember now where to do harm I am in this earthly world Is often laudable, to do good sometime Accounted dangerous folly. Why then, alas, Do I put up that womanly defense, To say I have done no harm?"
Here I am attaching my presentation which will help to get the point better to understand.
Words - 2777
Images - 3
Works Cited
“"'Blood will have blood:' Power, Performance, and Lady Macbeth's Gender Trouble."” Humanities Commons, https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/mla:931/. Accessed 3 November 2022.
“The Madwoman In The Attic” The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary imagination.” Ricorso.net, http://www.ricorso.net/tx/Courses/LEM2014/Critics/Gilbert_Gubar/Madwoman_full.pdf. Accessed 2 November 2022.
Shakespeare, William. “The Project Gutenberg eBook of Macbeth, by William Shakespeare.” Project Gutenberg, 25 April 2021, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1533/1533-h/1533-h.htm. Accessed 3 November 2022.
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