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.