Shakespeare’s Sexism: The Overly Feminine and Weak Depiction of Lady Macbeth

Shakespeare’s Sexism: The Overly Feminine and Weak Depiction of Lady Macbeth
By Dr. Amanda Johnson

The pen, ever so phallic in nature, has been for most of history, exclusively wielded by men, and even the most masterful of male wordsmiths to wave that ink-staining instrument have come up well short of penning a satisfying depiction of the depths and intricacies inherent to the female psyche. Shakespeare, in particular, though revered as one of the greatest to ever hold a pen, is often dreadfully inadequate in respect to his female characters. From his stereotypical structuring of Cordelia as “Daddy’s little girl” in King Lear, to his utterly subservient scripting of Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare fails to avoid the unrealistic male generated female ideals. Nowhere else is this failure more apparent than in his overly feminine character of Lady Macbeth.

From the very beginning, Shakespeare makes Lady Macbeth out to be an indecisive, male dependent, and un-influential character. Her first lines of the play, in fact, are not her own, but are words she reads aloud from her husbands letter. The reader, of course, infers from this structuring that Shakespeare is suggesting that women should not speak unless it is of the man’s will. Later in that same scene, Shakespeare gives Lady Macbeth an aside, clearly placing her alone to show how she can not stand on an equal stage with men, having her ever so effeminately say:

Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe topfull / Of direct cruelty. Make thick my blood; / Stop up th’access and passage to remorse, / That no compunctious visitings of nature / Shake my fell purpose nor keep peace between / Th’effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts / And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers, / Wherever your sightless substances / You wait on nature’s mischief. Come thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, / That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, / Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark / to cry “Hold, hold” (I. v. 39-53).

Lady Macbeth’s initial request to be “unsex[ed]” in this passage is, first of all, her own direct affirmation of her frailty as a woman, and secondly, is a blatantly helpless invocation of otherworldly “spirits” (spirit being of male etymological origin) to aid in her actions since a woman can’t, in Shakespeare’s chauvinist mind, possibly do anything on her own. Shakespeare also, in this discourse, gives Lady Macbeth incredibly weak diction. For example, instead of invoking the fires of hell, Lady Macbeth only asks for the smoke, which is, without a doubt, a representation of Shakespeare’s belief that women can’t handle the same extremities as men.

Shakespeare also attributes an unfounded phallic obsession to Lady Macbeth based on the outdated presupposition that women are seemingly programmed for appeasing men. In the afore-quoted passage, she mentions a knife, which being long and pointy, represents a penis, and in act II. scene 2, she says to her husband,

Infirm of purpose! / Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead / Are but as pictures. ‘Tis the eye of childhood / That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed, / I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal, / For it must seem their guilt (55-60).

Her want of the daggers, being the main emphasis of the quote, of course, is yet another example of Lady Macbeth’s weak-hearted phallic lust. Shakespeare obviously intended that because of that phallic lust, Lady Macbeth was willing to carry out this crafty plan to frame the men, referred to as “grooms” for the prior murder of King Duncan. The impetus for her to act, in no way being a strong spirited and powerful thought process, is a poorly penned interpretation of female strength on Shakespeare’s part.

Lastly, to avoid evoking any further nausea from Shakespeare’s sickening depiction of female weakness embodied by Lady Macbeth, no more direct textual examples need be supplied, but it is obvious, and if not, it should be, that Shakespeare had no idea about how to craft a strong female character. The simple act of naming her “Lady Macbeth” entails a title of prestige derived from an association with a man, and her eventual madness and suicide is a clear indication of Shakespeare’s misconception that women can’t handle the same mental taxations as men. Furthermore, the very fact that she’s married at all means that she was willing to surrender to a man’s will. Shakespeare could have even titled the play, Lady Macbeth, and made her the conquering protagonist, but instead he writes her as a powerless, un-ambitious, and thoughtless wallflower. Nowhere in the play does Lady Macbeth demonstrate any sort of female empowerment like isolating herself from men, demonstrating male shortcomings, lamenting against men, overcoming male enforced social obstacles, or anything of the sort that separates women from men to show how women don’t need to define feminine strength and achievement based on relationships with men.



Reference:
Shakespeare, William. “Macbeth,” The Complete Pelican Shakespeare. Ed.
Stephen Orgel, A.R. Braunmuller, Penguin Books, 2002 New York