In Shakespeare's classic play Macbeth, the tragic rise and fall of the fatally-flawed Thane of Glamis, Macbeth, the descent into madness by his wife, the Lady Macbeth, and the prophetic androgynous witches, are all examples of gender -- including one's self-identification, the roles of each sex, as well as the actual physical expression of gender in the body -- as conceived by Shakespeare. Specifically, in Macbeth, Shakespeare treats gender as a continuum, along which individuals fall, and not simply as a bi-polar example of male-vs-female, with each gender filling one specific template. Macbeth's characters can move along the continuum, and are not frozen in place at one point. Certain positions on the continuum are, however, favored; when various characters depart from them, the result is turmoil and death, and the reader is expected to consider them villainous.
This continuum that Shakespeare uses to define gender in Macbeth can be considered to resemble the number line. At the zero point lies the gender-neutral position, or androgyny -- the example of in the text is that of the Weird Sisters. To either side of this point lie the male and female genders, stretched out on the line. The further one gets from the center point, the more strongly-gender-typed one becomes. At some point along the line, a character fulfills their gender role perfectly, neither straying into error like Macbeth, who becomes overly-masculine and dangerous, or like Lady Macbeth, who, even before her "unsex[ing]" (1.5.48), does not entirely fulfill her gender role either, especially when compared to Lady Macduff.
Lady Macbeth gives the strongest example of the gender-continuum in Macbeth. From the start, Lady Macbeth is presented as lacking some aspect of her full female utility; as Liston observes:
As Macbeth's wife, Lady Macbeth is perceived and judged according to the roles and functions that a proper wife fulfills and performs. Given her station, there are two: to provide heirs to her lord, and to be his hostess. It is in the latter capacity that Duncan regards her as he arrives at Inverness: "See, see, our honor'd hostess!" (1.6.10). Surely it is no accident that Duncan's exclamation completes a speech of Banquo's that alludes to the child-bearing role. (Liston 234)
Lady Macbeth conspicuously is lacking in fulfilling the second part of her role -- that of being mother to her husband's children -- with her barrenness. There are other references to this apparently unfulfilled duty in the first act: "Come to my woman's breasts / And take my milk for gall" (1.5.54-55); "I have given suck, and know / How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me" (1.7.63-64). Although she claims to have "given suck" to a child, there is no child ever present within the text itself, and the contradiction is never resolved; however, it is safe to say that if there ever was a child, it is no longer present, and Macbeth's future lineage is not secure; the prophesy by the witches as to the impermanence of Macbeth's time as king and Banquo's line's eventual ascendency reinforces this. This places Lady Macbeth somewhat closer to the null point on the continuum than the feminine ideal would be situated.
She also has her failings at the first part of the traditional female role, that of hostess. She voided that role most egregiously when she has her guest, King Duncan, murdered as he slept under her roof, but she also fulfills her role in Act 3, Scene 4, as she attempts to keep the feast together as Macbeth's mental state destroys it. "Sit, worthy friends. My Lord is often thus / And hath been from his youth. [...] Are you a man?" (3.4.64-65,70) Her questioning of Macbeth's manhood, however, is integral to his own dissolution.
Even with these failings, however, Lady Macbeth is still recognizably "female" both in body and mind. She does not wish this to be the case, however, and the pivotal moment for the understanding of the character comes early in the play:
Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / of direst 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. (1.5.47-54)
Lady Macbeth's understanding of sexual natures is not simply that she wants to be taken to an androgynous state, as might be implied by "unsex"; in fact, she wishes to completely invert herself on the continuum, moving from the female end of the spectrum to the equivalent spot on the male side, in the hopes that this will allow her to help Macbeth, whom she considers unmanly, commit what she considers manly deeds. The issue here is twofold: for one thing, she fails in her attempt -- Asp notes that "Yet, in spite of her dire invocations, her conscious desire to take on a male psyche, her fundamental, even unconscious femininity breaks through the surface" (Asp 203). Secondly, Lady Macbeth misunderstands what the full meaning of manliness is, especially the type of full manliness that characters like Macduff display.
Contrast Lady Macbeth's failings as a traditional with the actions and example of Lady Macduff. Lady Macduff is both more passive than Lady Macbeth and has managed to produce heirs for her husband. Although she is murdered by Macbeth's henchmen, her death serves to further incite Macduff's will to destroy Macbeth's reign in Scotland. She dies a good woman, fulfilling her duty to her husband to the last; she is the noble example in the text, of the correct position of the feminine on the continuum.
This failure on Lady Macbeth's part contributes directly to her eventual madness and death. "A great perturbation in nature, to receive at once the benefit of sleep and do the effects of watching" notes the Doctor (5.1.10-12), expressing what would be the popular view that attempting to transition one's gender from male to female would be horrific and unnatural. "Unnatural deeds / Do breed unnatural troubles" (5.1.75-76); the unnatural mind will lead to its own destruction.
Another group of unnatural beings are the witches, which occupy an odd space in Macbeth due to their ambiguous gender role. As Banquo states upon first seeing them, "You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so" (1.3.47-49). They show all the signs of taking action and affecting the world through their prophesy-telling -- after all, it is their initial appearing that sets Macbeth's bloody trajectory on its course -- but, at the same time, they do not act in any concrete way, content to let the chaos of Macbeth's regicide play out by his own hands. Farnham puts it this way: "They can tempt Macbeth to do evil, and tempt him with great subtlety. They cannot force him to act" (61).
The witches occupy the null space -- the zero point -- on the gender continuum, straddling the divide between the male and female worlds. This two-in-one aspect of them is mirrored in the text, again through Banquo's examination of them: "What are these / So withered, and so wild in their attire, / That look not like th' inhabitants o' th' earth / And yet are on 't?" (1.3.40-43). Because they take in aspects of both the male and the female, they are rejected by mainstream society, as symbolized by their inhabitation of the wilderness wasteland of rural Scotland. Just like Lady Macbeth's attempt to change her own gender is met with failure and madness, that the witches are suspended between genders consigns them to villains in the play, foul beings leading the manly Macbeth astray.
Macbeth's own movements on the continuum are, of course, at the heart of the play. The second scene of the play opens with a recounting of Macbeth's heroic deeds on the battlefield, an integral part of manliness within the society. King Duncan hails Macbeth's deeds as that of a "worthy gentleman!" (1.2.26), and Macbeth is held up as a shining example of correct manliness as the King bestows the further title of Thane of Cawdor upon him. Macbeth maintains his position by maintaining his manly aggression at certain times, and against certain enemies; the society cannot condone this manly aggression turned inward. Waith notes: "Macbeth is a soldier whose valor we hear praised throughout the play [...] In all these comments there is implied one ideal -- the soldier's or, as Plutarch says, the Roman's ideal -- of what is is to be a man" (63).
The undercurrent here is that this manliness can turn destructive if misapplied; the manly male is a dangerous weapon that might be turned against its master, as Macbeth does against his king. The true worth of a man is not just his strength on the battlefield but in his moral earnestness as well, as exemplified in Macbeth's struggles with the morality of his actions as he waits outside Duncan's room.
"He's here in double trust: / First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, / Strong both against the deed; then as his host, / Who should against his murderer shut the door, / not bear the knife myself" (1.7.12-16).
Macbeth's sense of this moral code that the correctly-placed male on the gender-continuum must have is attacked by Lady Macbeth, however, who does not understand the consequences of moving further away from the center of the continuum, toward the overly-manly, highly-aggressive outer reaches of the spectrum, but only that, in order for Macbeth to fulfill his ambitions, he must do so. This dangerous conflation of manliness and strength, while at the same time discounting that "milk of human kindness" (1.5.17) that she believes that Macbeth is held back by, pushes Macbeth over the edge and into the far realms of the continuum.
It is not, of course, entirely the fault of Lady Macbeth, and it would be misplacing the blame of Macbeth's slide down the continuum on her shoulders. Macbeth himself states that the witches' prophesy sets loose in his mind a "horrid image" that makes his "seated heart knock at my ribs / Against the use of nature?" (1.3.148-150). The use of the words "against nature" when contemplating the image of his murdering the king to gain the throne supports the idea that it is the natural order for the correct place on the male end of the continuum is not the furthest end, as a man who rests out there would have no qualms about regicide, but instead resides closer to the center point and the more emotional, empathetic female side of the continuum.
Near the end of Macbeth's madness, he has tossed aside everything that might be considered unmanly, including nearly all emotion and practically all thought. "The mind I sway by and the heart I bear / Shall never sag with doubt nor shake with fear" (5.3.10-11), he says, and then later, after hearing of the death of Lady Macbeth, he does not mourn her, but merely says "She should have died hereafter. / There would have been a time for such a word" (5.5.20). He cannot allow himself to mourn her passing, because he must be the epitome of manly behavior in order to survive in the world that his regicide has created. "From this moment / The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand" (4.1.166-168), and with that exhortation, Macbeth finally fully abandons the constraints set upon his manly behavior in the old society, where unbridled manliness was encouraged only in the context of the battlefield, to his new realm, where the destructive abilities of the male are unleashed without moral qualifications, without forethought to the consequences.
The correct sort of manly behavior is shown when Macduff says, in response to the exhortation from Malcolm to "dispute it like a man" with regards to the murder of his wife and children, Macduff responds "I shall do so, / But I must also feel it like a man" (4.3.259-261). The correct location on the continuum of maleness is not the very extreme, where the womanly attributes such as feelings and emotion vanish, but closer to the center, where they still find expression alongside the more traditional manly attributes of rage and aggression. One of the ironies of the play is that Lady Macduff questions her husband's own manliness by wondering if he lacked what Lady Macbeth scorned as weakness: The evils of Macbeth's epoch are dramatized in a peculiarly poignant way, for example, in IV.ii., when Lady Macduff denounces her virtuous husband to their son for what seems to her to be Macduff's unmanly, even inhuman abandonment of his family. It is a strange twisted version of Lady Macbeth's harangue and her husband's responses earlier; there is the inevitable appeal to an assumed human nature, and even the by-now familiar comparison of man and beast (Ramsey 293).
In the end, Macbeth's death is the result of his breaking with the traditional, accepted gender role for men and swinging further away from the feminine graces of morality and emotion, acting instead as a figure of pure, unfettered manly aggression, which the society could neither condone nor continue to function with him unpunished. Society depends on individuals hewing close to the established points on the continuum, and not swinging wildly away from them in either direction; the results must always be the destruction of the individual for the good of the rest of society.
Gender and proper gender roles are at the heart of Shakespeare's Macbeth. The play presents gender as a continuum that individuals can move along with some difficulty, but society cannot condone shifts too far away from the traditional points of agreement for each gender. Lady Macbeth's attempts to deny her own femininity in the service of both manly power and her own failures as a traditional woman end up driving her mad and committing an implied suicide. The witches are portrayed as villains, and occupy the null space on the continuum, straddling the male and female worlds the same way the straddle the physical and magical realms with their sorcery. Macbeth's attempts to negate the feminine qualities in the traditional conception of proper manliness result in manliness gone rampant and destructive, leading to the breakdown of society and his eventual death at the hands of Macduff, who is a complete man in the more traditional understanding of manliness. In the end, Macbeth is a strong argument against ambiguity in gender, and against movement away from traditional gender roles to other locations on the continuum.
Works Cited
- Asp, Carolyn. "Tragic Action and Sexual Stereotyping in Macbeth." Major Literary Characters: Macbeth. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1991. Print.
- Farnham, Willard. "The Witches." Twentieth Century Interpretations of Macbeth. Ed. Terence Hawkes. Prentice Hall, Inc.: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1977. Print.
- Liston, William T. "'Male and Female Created He Them': Sex and Gender in 'Macbeth'." College Literature (1989). JSTOR. Web.<http://www.jstor.org/stable/25111824>.
- Ramsey, Jarold. "The Perversion of Manliness in Macbeth." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 (1973). JSTOR. Web.<http://www.jstor.org/stable/449740>.
- Waith, Eugene M. "Manhood and Valor in Macbeth." Twentieth Century Interpretations of Macbeth. Ed. Terence Hawkes. Prentice Hall, Inc.: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1977. Print.