The Female Characters in An Inspector Calls and Macbeth

Macbeth and An Inspector calls were plays written in different time periods. The central female character in An Inspector Calls is Sheila and the central female character in Macbeth is Lady Macbeth. Sheila Birling comes from a well-known, wealthy factory owner and Lady Macbeth is wife of a thane, named Macbeth. Both of the plays show a certainty of evil, but the central female characters in Macbeth and An Inspector Calls differ but are rarely shown as similar.

In the beginning of Macbeth in Act 1 Scene 5, Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth as a ravenous person for power, ‘unsex me here And fill me from the crown to the toe topfull Of direst cruelty’. Focusing on the word ‘unsex’, we can infer within context how she is requesting evil to get all her femininity away and make her a cruel queen. We can also see that Lady Macbeth is a personification and her power of evil as she seeks for power. I find this interesting because her aggression on removing her feminine behaviour is seen by her asking evil spirits. As well as this, the way she seeks for evil is interesting because linking to another piece of evidence in the same scene she says, ‘And take my milk for gall’. Focusing on the word ‘gall’, we can see how she wants to have a very bold behaviour when she becomes crowned.

In the beginning of An Inspector Calls in Act 1, Priestley presents Sheila as a forceful person, ‘(cutting in) Why should you? He’s finished with you. He says it’s one of us now.’ Analysing the words ‘us now’, we can see how Sheila talks about responsibility, however, by looking at the stage directions we can see how Sheila changes her character from being questionable to targeting her father and saying, ‘He’s finished with you.’ I find this interesting beca...

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...t engaged. I find this interesting because at the beginning of the play Sheila didn’t like Gerald as much as she does now due to the fact that Gerald never saw her in the summer holidays. It is also interesting how their relationship develops throughout the play.

To conclude, the difference between Sheila and Lady Macbeth is that Sheila accepts her guilt whereas Lady Macbeth tends to put the guilt on innocent lives. What’s similar about the central female characters in An Inspector Calls and Macbeth is they are both perceptive but Sheila’s perception isn’t as evil as Lady Macbeth’s perception, where she tends to insult Macbeth quite often. Generally I found Lady Macbeth more interesting than Sheila because I like the way Lady Macbeth remembers her past while she sleep walks and Macbeth hallucinating over the blood of King Duncan that he was responsible for.