CC - IV: Macbeth: Character of Lady Macbeth

 

            Like Macbeth, Lady Macbeth in the said tragedy is a controversial character. To Malcolm, she is " fiend- like", to many she is the Aeschylean Clytemnestra and to Goe the she is the super witch". All these reading undoubtedly owe their origin to Lady Macbeth's heroics before the murder of Duncan, here Shakespeare highlights her unwomanly nature. She appeals to the powers of darkness to come to her and "take milk for gall". She speaks even of being ready to pluck the nipple from the boneless gums of her smiling infant and dash the brains out had she sworn to do so. She shows no weakness, no irresolution; she holds her husband's vacillation in fierce contempt. But a close reading of the play would suggest that she is not driven by the crime by a cold calculating energy; she is not inspired by a relentless hate for her victim; she is not  the remorseless criminal who reveals in not bloodshed; not an unsexed woman of fiendish cruelty and passion.

     It is undeniable that till the murder scene she asumes the role of a hardened criminal to perfection. She welcomes Duncan with murder in her heart but smiles on her lips. She is absolutely self-controlled and self-possessed. She counsels Macbeth to " put this night's great business into her dispatch", and she plans the details of the murder without the least wavering. When Macbeth is lost in a labyrinth of doubts and scruples and fears, she "chastises him with the valour of her tongue" and plays the part of an imperious instigator. In this Lady Macbeth a far cry from the Lady Macbeth of the sleep-walking scene, the pale crest-fallen lady creeping from bed to bed mumbling feebly? Is the latter Lady a shadow of her former self or she is a split- personality? One doubts. A Critical reading of the text would amply suggest that  there are not two but one Lady Macbeth.

              To begin with, what nerves Lady Macbeth to her unnatural course is her Passionate love for her husband, her complete identification with his interests. As a true wife she does not find in undesirable to be happy in the fulfillment of her husband's ambition. And  finding him weak-willed, she in led to support him and strengthen his hands.

        If Lady Macbeth is a wife ,she represents an essential mother as well. Interestingly, the very speech in which she means to put herself at her sternest, at her cruelest, " I have given suck, and know/ How tender it's to love the babe that milks me"-she reveals her weakness as a mother. Unlike Goneril and Regan who have never known the tenderness of a mother's affection, she is here not just as ruthless as a mother. She is, on the other hand, a mother, mother potential as well as the actual and frustrated. She had a child and the " sweet dove died". We find the mother in her is latent and for a short while at least it becomes patent.

       If Lady Macbeth has a mother buried within her, she has an incipient daughter behind her hard exterior. Who can forget her tender words in the murder scene.-" Had he not resembled/my father as slept ,I had done it". One wonders how such a Lady accused Macbeth of " too full of the milk of human kindness". It is not for nothing that Lady  Macbeth remains , self-composed as long as she regards murder in the abstract. She can never bring herself to utter the word 'murder' - it is always "this night's great dispatch" or  a bare, impersonal, non-descriptive 'it'. But the sight of blood band her having to feel the touch and the smell of the blood is an outrage on her feminine delicacy, as beautifully underscored on her "demonical somnambulism".

               Thus ,Lady Macbeth's transition from dauntless courage to delirium and distracted despair is not just  sudden and abrupt .It is a natural follow-up from the harrowing of the hell. To begin with, she invokes some mystic powers and prays for being unsexed to commit the cruel deed. Had she really been cruel, did she at all need such external aid? Secondly, before she sets about the bloody business, she takes wine because she knows that unless she is artificially excited/stimulated, it is not possible for her to execute a cruel deed. In the porter scene, we find she behaves in a nervous way amidst the din and bustle of the castle. Through she tries to keep her appearances by her hypocritical words-"what's the business/That such a hideous trumpet calls to parley/ The sleepers of the house?". When the noise grows louder and confusion deepens, she collapse-" Help me, hence, ho!". In the banquet scene also, she appears to be highly exhaust and listless, and that is why she request Macbeth to receive the guests on her behalf. True it is that when she finds Macbeth to make a mess of the ceremonial feast, she makes a desperate bid  to manage the situation by shaking off her remorse and anguish, but in due course it proves to be nothing but the last flickering of a dying bird. It is her swan- song before the sleep-walking, in which we share the doctor's concern- she needs "more divine than the physician". One who could be appalled at her initial ferocity cannot now but be moved to pity and fear in her untold misery and torment.

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