Close Reading: Lady Macbeth's Sleepwalking

For this close reading, I looked at Act 5, Scene 1, lines 37-47 of Macbeth.

LADY MACBETH
Out, damned spot! Out, I say! —One, two. Why, then, ’tis time to do ’t. Hell is murky! —Fie, my lord, fie! A soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? —Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

DOCTOR
Do you mark that?

LADY MACBETH
The thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now? —What, will these hands ne'er be clean? —No more o' that, my lord, no more o' that. You mar all with this starting.

During this scene, a doctor and one of the Macbeth’s housemaids are watching Lady Macbeth while she is sleep walking and talking. In the lines that I chose to focus on, Lady Macbeth is doing most of the speaking and it is all while she is asleep, alluding to the fact that it is her subconscious speaking. I would like to start with the repetition in the passage.
Above, I have highlighted all the words that struck me as repeating themselves in yellow. As I was reading it for the first time, it seemed like I was reading the same words over and over. I think that it may be been written this way to mimic how Lady Macbeth feels her life was going. She wanted to kill Duncan and pushed Macbeth to do it but maybe she didn’t expect the murdering to continue to happen repeatedly. While she is talking, she is also motioning with her hands as though she is washing them. Hand washing can be a very repetitive process, especially if you are trying to get a hard stain off, such as blood stains.
            The next thing I noticed was the abundance of questions. In this short passage, Lady Macbeth asks 5 questions, to no one in particular, just into the night air. I think this may represent how she is questioning her decisions that she has recently made, such as pushing her husband to kill Duncan and not stopping him even when he intends to murder children and innocent people.  
            In green, you will see I have highlighted words such as lord, thane, and soldier. These words all seem to have a theme around power and status. She is fixated on these words because none of the things that have taken place would have happened had her and Macbeth not been power hungry.
            Finally, I have highlighted the words murky, blood, clean, and mar. These words all center around the theme if cleanliness or clarity, and why would Lady Macbeth be concerned about those things? Maybe when she said the ‘unsex’ me line, something took ahold of her, changed her, and now she is not sure who she is. Her self-perception is unclear.

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