Detecting Feminine Patterns in Shakespearean Tragedy: Macbeth (c.1606)

By: M. S. Zarei

Echoic Feminine Language


A tragic resonance reverberated throughout the Shakespearean plays has been long relegated to Greek physis [nature] that (to use Alice Jardine’s terminology) speaks almost in all the Shakespearean tragedies. This obscure vocality in the play, according to Martin Heidegger, reveals the alternating play of presence and absence within poetry. In the same respect, Jacques Derrida, having assumed a kind of materiality for the very poetic interplay of sounds, believes that these phon(em)ic resonances within the literary text are frequently personified as female. The idea of female-gendered resonances within the literary text along with the polysemy of the poetic language was later claimed by Julia Kristeva, too. Upon arguing the philosophical concept of chora, Kristeva acknowledges the continuing influence, within language (the symbolic), of a pre-oedipal stage (the semiotic) when the child is still dependant upon the mother’s body. Philappa Berry in her famous essay on Echoic Language argues that the “dynamic properties of language associated with the semiotic chora are manifested most notably in moments when sound takes precedence over sense.” And this phenomenon happens when we have a poetic recombining of language with musicality; the example of which can be found in Shakespearean plays- the tragedies in particular. Therefore, the feminine chora almost bases the Shakespearean plays in one way or another. Kristeva also compares chora to the chorus of Greek drama that reveals its connection with bodily expression and gesture. Below is an account taken from the play Macbeth



that at best shows the smooth and flowing rhythm of speech betraying the feminine tonality of the utterance.

All our service, In every point twice done and then done double,Were poor and single business to contendAgainst those honors deep and broad wherewithYour Majesty loads our house. For those of old,And the late dignities heaped upon them,We rest your hermits (I.vi 18-24).


Feminine Fate and Fortune

The belief in the existence and supernatural power of witches was widely claimed in the Shakespeare’s plays. The witches had supernatural dark influences over their subjects, including the capability to foretell the future events and to read the minds of the mortals with whom they could come into contact.

Likewise here in Macbeth, witches are presented as powerful figures who can exercise a great power over the hero Macbeth. Witches’ initial prophecies address him with titles, encouraging Macbeth’s ambition and craving for the crown. Besides, Lady Macbeth’s desire to see her husband crowned the king speeds up the tragic downfall of Macbeth and it thus effectively reveals Macbeth’s true side of evil. According to Berry, “In Shakespeare’s tragedies, the discovery of an identity with and in death is enforced by a feminine-gendered Fate or Fortune.” As mentioned before, the feminine trinity of the sisters (the witches), whose constant predictions of Macbeth’s future are made true in the course of the play, reveals in part a feminine driving force that is attributed to the


Fortune. Thus she takes Macbeth’s life in her hands, molds it in whatever shapes possible as though playing a puppet onstage with some invisible rods and strings. The personification of Fortune as three witches may almost reinforce this idea. Therefore, just as Seneca maintained that ‘Thou canst not wander from thy Fortune, she will besiege thee, and whether thou goest a great traine will follow thee’, so Macbeth is plagued with the tricky plays of Fortune.

The curious parallelism of the first and final acts also seems to draw on the very opposing forces of Fortune that reveal the mysterious affinity between Macbeth and the traitorous Cawdor. According to Berry, “Just as Macbeth had fought Macdonwald to secure Duncan’s throne, so Macduff is now fighting against Macbeth on behalf of Duncan’s son Malcolm.” And thus Macbeth’s head is fixed upon the battlement like the head of Macdonwald in the earlier act, at least to reveal this parallel structure more vividly. This parallelism and repetition of time, according to Kristeva, hint at a feminine temporality which is running throughout the play. Kristeva in her essay ‘Woman’s Time’, “explicitly associates woman with a differing of conventional temporality, arguing that she has a close connection both with cyclical time or temporal repetition (presumably because of the periodicity of her bodily cycles)…” (qtd. in Berry 106).

Thus the Fortune’s partial embodiment as three witches along with the idea of parallelism and feminine temporality may at best establish a feminine foundation for the overall structure of the play.

Feminine Temptation: Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth plays a major role in influencing her husband to fulfill the prophecies. The reader first meets Lady Macbeth as she reads the news of the witches’ salutations


and prophecies. She determines to make the promises of the black sisters come true but her concern is clearly her husband’s hesitant nature. She says:

Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be
What thou art promised: _You do I fear thy nature:
It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way.
(1,5,17)

Lack of imagination helps Lady Macbeth to be strong for taking immediate action. She does not feel the cruelty of Duncan’s murder because she hardly imagines the deed .Her plan to kill Duncan and to put the dagger on the guards’ hand while they are asleep show that she can not even foresee the outcome of her own deed; If the guardians are murderers, then why are they sleeping after the murder with a bloody dagger? Lady Macbeth seems to be the agent of those witches; perhaps the fourth sister, who eventually fulfills and accomplishes their prophecies.

The greatness of Lady Macbeth lies almost wholly in courage and force of will; to her there is no separation between will and deed. Cleanth Brooks says, “She knows what she wants; and she is ruthless in her consideration of means. She will always ‘catch the nearest way’….” She never wavers about what she is about to do, and so stoically undergoes any difficulty that might stop her. When Macbeth hesitates to kill Duncan she cries out that she is willing to crush her own child in order to gain the crown:


I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me;
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums


And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this. (1.5, 24)

Besides, she knows about her husband‘s weakness. So, first of all she encourages him by picturing the deed as heroic, recalling the murder as “this night’s great business” or
“our great quell”, while she disregards its cruelty and falseness. Then she questions Macbeth’s masculinity and manliness to convince him to murder Duncan. Bradley maintains that she destroys his weak resistance by showing him a prepared plan which may remove from him the terror and danger of consideration. She excites him with the word “coward” which no man and at least of all a soldier can bear. Lady Macbeth touches directly upon these issues in her attack on Macbeth’s manhood when he hesitates to kill Duncan.

After all, the entire play offers a formidable feminine foundation that finely sketches different feminine patterns in the play, including the echoic language, the personified Fortune, and finally the feminine temptation.




Sources:

Berry, Philippa. Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings. London: Routledge, 1999.
Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear Macbeth. New York: Macmillan, 1905.
Brooks, Cleanth. "The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness." In The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947.
Moore, R. "Macbeth: Introduction." eNotes: Macbeth. Ed. Penny Satoris. Seattle: Enotes.com LLC, October 2002. 29 May 2007.

A Marxist Reading of James Joyce's Clay and Gordimer's Charmed Lives

By: M. S. Zarei

Political Reading: Marxist Criticism

Marxist literary theory emerged firstly in the writings of the German critic and philosopher Karl Heinrich Marx (1818–1883). Marx grounded his theoretical assumptions on the notion of ‘determinants’ that has a fundamental role in any Marxist type of interpretation (Bressler 192). Marx tried to articulate a version of reality that could be defined and understood. In this respect, he believed that “social and economic realities were the ultimate determinants of culture and human consciousness.” Marx simply opposed the Hegelian theory of history which argued that ‘consciousness determines life’ and maintained instead that ‘life (social existence) determines consciousness.’ This, in part, entails that our social circumstances determine our lives. Likewise, Traditional Marxism claims that thought is also subservient to the material conditions under which it develops. (82) The clash between the capitalism and the labourers in society, according to Marxism, inevitably, brings about alienation on the part of the labourers. They become alienated from themselves; being constantly seen as production units, as objects rather than human beings. In fact, capitalism reifies them while they remain blind to their own condition because of the effect of what Marxism calls ideology. (Bertens 84)

Definition of Ideology

Ideology, in Marxist view, is what makes us misrepresent the world to ourselves. According to Marxists, “ideology is not so much a set of beliefs or assumptions that we are aware of, but it is that which makes us experience our life in a certain way and makes us believe that the way of seeing ourselves and the world is natural” (Bertens 84). In so doing, the reality one takes for granted is in fact distorted and thus falsely represented as natural. To succumb to ideology, therefore, means to live in an illusory world. The French Marxist Louise Althusser also defines ideology as “the imaginary ways in which people represent to themselves their real relationship to the world” (qtd. in Selden 153). Althusser believes that “Ideology is like the air we breathe and is the seemingly natural discourse which makes possible our sense of existence as human subjects” (Selden 153). Althusser’s views appear different from earlier Marxists who simply took ideology for a kind of ‘false consciousness’ produced by capitalism. Rather, to give a more accurate reason for the existence of ideology, Althusser shares the ideas held by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who believes that due to the processes we go through while growing up, we are left incomplete. Therefore, having been aware of ‘that deep lack’, that makes us yearn for completion, we inevitably turn to ideology to fill up the lack (Bertens 86). We constantly delude ourselves as ideology–to which we have already consigned our free will– addresses us as ‘complete subjects.’

Ideological State Apparatuses and Interpellation

The driving forces behind ideology are the so-called State Apparatuses (religious, cultural, educational, judicial, etc.) that help sustain the dominant ideology at work. All subjects are greeted by the discourse of a particular State Apparatuses. In the same respect, Althusser defines a process called ‘interpellation’ (hailing) whereby ideology works through interpellating (addressing) us in different social roles (subject positions) that we play or occupy, so that we falsely appear to ourselves as complete subjects (Bertens 87). In fact, ideology tries to convince us that we are whole and real, filling up the crack we have all inherited in our fragmented identities.

The Blindfolded Narrative in James Joyce’s Clay

Pierre Macherey in his A Theory of Literary Production (1966) introduces an idea that literary form is capable of transforming ideology into fiction and thereby of showing us its internal incoherences and contradictions. In fact, the writer [here James Joyce], by producing an ideology in the form of a fiction, makes us feel the gaps, silences and absences which in their purely ideological form are less apparent (Selden 155).

Likewise, Clay describes a deceptively simple story whose narrative self-deception attempts, and fails, to mislead the reader. The blind protagonist Maria simply fails to blind even the less attentive reader of the blind spots in her story. Having been portrayed as a product of the Irish Ideology, the “old maid” Maria appears as a figure who “seems to lack everything and therefore embodies total desire, a desire for the recognition and prestige that would let a poor old woman without family, wealth, or social standing maintain her human status in paralytic Dublin…” (Norris 206). It seems that Maria, endowed with an ideological awareness, unconsciously tries to fulfill a Lacanian lack–if not the social and personal shortcomings– of her own life. The story seemingly unfolds by means of the contrasts between the narrator's view of Maria and her own emotionally limited self-awareness.

Maria’s job in the kitchen of a laundry established for the reform of prostitutes obviously does not secure her a proper social standing, yet her self-esteem as an important figure seems to stem from an ideological consciousness that has obscured her vision of reality. Maria has been “hailed” (interpellated) in the place of an important person in the society while in reality she is nothing more than a common dishwasher.

In fact, it is Maria’s social standing, affected largely by the Ideological State Apparatuses (attending the ritual ceremony, for example), that determines her consciousness. Her isolated consciousness thus feeds upon the ideological self-awareness she has been entrapped in.

Halloween

Halloween (October 31) is “the Celtic New Year's Eve and Feast of the Dead, Christianized as the Feasts of the Blessed Virgin and All Saints (November 1) and All Souls (November 2). In Irish folk custom, it is a night of remembrance of dead ancestors and anticipation of the future through various fortune-telling games.” Halloween as a ritual ceremony serves two important purposes in the story. Firstly, it is one of those Ideological State Apparatuses that almost controls Maria’s life. Secondly, it emphasizes the notion of past and ancient values that are embodied in Joyce’s stories. In fact, Maria as an allegorical representation of Mother Ireland is paralyzed by circumstances beyond her control or awareness. She can be taken as a version of the ancient symbolic representation of Mother Ireland dominated by imperial England.

The Charmed Lives of the Other(s)

Gordimer’s Charmed Lives seemingly probes the static and equally pathetic condition of “two harmless and handicapped people” whose mechanical and unchanging lives in the story mirror the very dull lives of the native habitants of the South Africa. These two harmless people were brought out to the country, as two imported ideological models, before Kate Shand was born. The little Kate grows up as her mother subconsciously injects a potion of a false ideology into Kate’s fragmented character, so that the watchmaker’s and the doctor’s faces become “bracketed for ever” in Kate’s own face. The watchmaker Simon Datnow, as introduced earlier in the story, becomes an Other into which Kate looks up and builds her identity. In this respect, the glass cage, where the watchmaker works seemingly for no end, may also embody the Mirror Stage (also called looking-glass stage) where Kate’s own image mirrored as a whole and complete being (as that of the Watchmaker) is but an ideal. The little Kate used to “stand for a long time with her face close to the glass cage [of the watchmaker]” who has been constructed as an ideal by Mrs. Shand. Upon trying “to get her husband to stand up to her” in vain, Mrs. Shand continuously champions the watchmaker against his timid husband’s will to seemingly fulfill her marital lack: “Datnow, she gave her children to understand, was a natural gentleman, a kind of freak incidence among the immigrant relations.” She subconsciously deludes her children to turn to the idealized watchmaker who is now and then symbolized almost as a Father figure for Kate.

The narrative structure, again like that of Clay, develops by the means of contrasts between what the mother (Mrs. Shand) strongly idealizes for Kate and what she herself comes to experience in the characters of the watchmaker and the doctor. This almost brings about a kind of disillusionment on the part of Kate who finally leaves the town where she finds the mechanical, charmed lives of the other(s) hardly accommodating of her expectation. The grown-up Kate finds no glamour in the empty lives of the watchmaker and the doctor, whom her mother still regards with high respect. Likewise, Kate becomes disgusted with the way the two men live; they are blind to their own state of affairs abused by an unknown power. The notion of survival is thus drawn as its most pitiful sense in the story. The watchmaker and the doctor both simply want to survive, regardless of what is happening around them. The whole story seems to be an allegory of an ideologically plagued town whose members including both the native Africans and the immigrants are paralyzed with an unknown power. They are constantly hailed in the roles they play blindly. Yet Kate never tells the reason for her leaving the town, the reason that “had taken shape for her, slowly, out of all her childhood, in the persons of those two men whom she had known…”




Works Cited

Bertens, Hans. Literary Theory: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2001.

Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 4th ed. New Jersey: Pearson, 2007.

Norris, Margot. Narration under a Blindfold: Reading Joyce's "Clay”
PMLA, Vol. 102, No. 2 (Mar., 1987), pp. 206-215


Selden, Raman. Peter Widdowson. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literature Theory. Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993.

Krapp’s last Tape by Samuel Beckett

By: M. S. Zarei

Krapp’s Last Tape stages in part the incessant plays of human foibles and regret. Upon sketching an intimate portrait of the individual alone, Beckett seems to offer a worldview of an empty, cyclic nature of human life overshadowed by almost infinite regressions into a painful past. The 69-year old Krapp is almost at a trial to assess his younger self (the 39-year old Krapp) through his taped memories on the “awful occasion” of his birthday, yet he realizes that how strange his former self appears to battle with his current self, hence “brief laugh in which Krapp joins” that emerges as a result of a realization of his own futile and ambitious desires in his younger self.

The blankness of Krapp’s cyclic life, as representative of human life in general, is marked by his empty and futile documented past whose paling fire is still burning deep down inside him, yet inadequate to prod him yearning back for them.
'Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.'– Krapp's Last Tape
Krapp’s reflection on his past self, fraught with his double sense of mockery and regret, appears to draw on significance as merely “separating [of] the grain from the husk.” The aging Krapp is assessing his accomplishment, if any, as any human being might do in that very age, however it seems to be to no avail for Beckett’s worldview affirms the undeniable futility of human life.
The techniques and methods Beckett uses to achieve and create this worldview are notable. The language of the play with its precise functionality hardly seems to convey any meaning. Thus the plot seemingly emerges as being devoid of meaning and meaning if there is such a thing may reside in stage directions. Moreover, the brevity of Beckett language is aptly highlighted here which in large scale marks the division of the whole play into a one-act play as to stage the shortness and emptiness of Krapp’s life whose pathetic ending is paralleled with recoding his last tape. Repetition also plays an important role as another method to achieve that worldview. Krapp’s life is plagued with jaded repetition as is the dead language of the play in its limited functionality. After all, Beckett seems to aim at representing Krapp’s blank life as a support for his absurd view about human life in general, and in so doing he uses different techniques and method to achieve that goal.

Back Again!

Long time’s passed after publishing my last post in this, and there was time I reveled in googling my blog in net, thrilling all the day long reading my rhythmical pieces out aloud. And now all are passed in a very brutal sweep of time. I am not going to lament the old days, nor am I attending the blank future, just here I am again, blogging.

Decided to change the nature of posts from now on, sending a few term-papers along with some reaction-papers that are mostly dedicated to English Literature. The nickname, however, is still the same Alex as I found it needless to adopt a new one. A reminder of bygones!