Lady Macbeth Manipulation Essay

Tragedy: “a branch of drama that treats in a serious and dignified style the sorrowful or terrible events encountered or caused by a heroic individual” (Conversi). This theme classifies ten of William Shakespeare’s plays, including Macbeth. Although the true tragic hero is Macbeth, Lady Macbeth’s manipulation places her into a position of power, making her the heroine of the play. Lady Macbeth’s ambitious actions ignite a course of events, which then commences calamities of tragedy and catastrophe. She is only able to assert power when she masks her femininity and she is only powerful when she can play puppet master with her husband. However, she loses that power when Macbeth regains power. By definition, feminism is the advocacy of women's

Lady Macbeth rejects her femininity and thought of belonging to any gender at all in order obtain power to end Duncan’s life. After receiving a letter from Macbeth, Lady Macbeth senses that Macbeth has to murder Duncan to attain power and she is immediately skeptical of his abilities to commit murder. She tells Macbeth, “What thou art promised: yet I do fear thy nature;/ It is too full o' the milk of human kindness/ To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;/ Art not without ambition, but without/ The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly,” (Shakespeare I.v.14-18). Lady Macbeth is expressing her concern that Macbeth has too much kindness, or womanliness, to kill Duncan. However, she is also aware that she cannot commit the murder herself because as a woman, she is too kind, too weak, and too womanly. In order for her husband to become the King of Scotland, she becomes the initiator. To cast aside her kindness in an attempt to make her worthy of murder, she calls upon the spirits: “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,” (Shakespeare I.v.38-42). Lady Macbeth asks spirits to unsex her, implying that she cannot be powerful because she is a female. She wants to be stripped of her gender so that she has room for only evil. This

When Macbeth starts having second thoughts about murdering Duncan, Lady Macbeth intervenes and threatens his masculinity by saying, "When you durst do it, then you were a man" (Shakespeare I.vii.54). In other words, Lady Macbeth is saying that he has lost his manhood. But in a society where a man's title means everything to him, men will do anything to protect it. Macbeth is programmed by the patriarchal system to respond with action because "only way to be a man is to be a patriarchal man" (Tyson 86). Thus, towards the end of the play, Lady Macbeth's control over her husband slowly dwindles away as Macbeth's power rapidly increases. According to Lois Tyson,"Patriarchy continually exerts forces that undermine women's self-confidence and assertiveness, then points to the absence of these qualities as proof that women are naturally, and therefore correctly self-effacing and submissive"(Tyson 86). This states that Lady Macbeth's power is completely dependent on her husband's. The only way Lady Macbeth can gain power is through her husband. Without a name and title of her own, she has no pathway to power. Additionally, soon after Macbeth becomes the King of Scotland, Lady Macbeth slowly disappears from the story. Macbeth is no longer vulnerable as he once was, therefore, Lady Macbeth holds no more power because Macbeth becoming king overrides her words of manipulation.