Macbeth Gender Roles

Shakespeare makes his audience question traditional gender roles in Macbeth by Lady Macbeth’s character taking on the more dominate manly role in the marriage while Macbeth’s character is portrayed as submissive, therefore portraying the womanly role. Hence, even from the beginning of the play, the Macbeths’ characters reflected the inverse of the societal constructions of gender roles. As the play proceeds, however, in order to keep the balance that Shakespeare strived for in his work, the roles of these characters reversed. These character traits associated with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in the beginning of the play can be seen through their expressions of guilt. Initially, Lady Macbeth is completely impassive about the act of murder, and

Macbeth’s guilt can be seen when he says, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red” (2.3 59-62). In this instance Macbeth appears so guilt stricken that it seems he cannot remove the color of red from his mind, all of the blood on his hands, exaggeratingly could fill an entire sea and turn the water from blue to

He begins to take on the role that Lady Macbeth had played in the beginning of the play. Her character exhibited unemotional and impassive feelings where she told Macbeth that her heart was white, meaning she didn’t feel guilt towards the murder. Macbeth says, “Cure her of that. / Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased… / Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart” (5.3 39-44). In this instance, he reacts in almost the same way that Lady Macbeth reacted when Macbeth had his meltdown at the beginning of the play. He essentially tells the doctor to simply cure her of her guilt, or in other words, she needs to just get over