Role Reversal between The Macbeth's #7

For this week’s blog post I would like to discuss the idea that Shakespeare shows the Macbeths’ humanity through the last acts of this play. In the beginning of the novel, I feel Shakespeare portrayed Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as almost demonic. This can be demonstrated through Lady Macbeth’s famous, “Unsex me here” quote, she states she wants her breast milk to be poisonous acid. Quotes like this create an image of evil that is unlike anything a normal human being could be like. Macbeth becomes so evil and consumed that with each kill he feels the want for more blood. But by the end of the novel I feel Shakespeare’s thought was to bring back their humanity as everything is crumbling around them.  For example, In Act 5 Scene I, Lady Macbeth says, “Come out, damned spot! ..Hell is murky!” My interpretation of this quote is that Lady Macbeth is expressing her guilt through the invisible blood on her hands. Her humanity is shown because she is losing her mind. She is expressing the guilt of the murders through the blood that she imagines on her hands.


Finally, I would like to discuss the complete role reversal that took place between Lady Macbeth and Macbeth. As discussed in my last blog post, early in the novel, Lady Macbeth exerted power or Macbeth. Also, she manipulated him to kill. I find it very interesting that by the end of the novel, Lady Macbeth becomes the ‘weaker’ one in the relationship. Macbeth becomes crazy and craves ‘the kill’. He got a taste for power and ran with it. At the beginning of the novel if you would’ve asked me who would commit suicide, my confident guess would have been Macbeth. But in the end the role reversals are clearly exemplified in the two ways in which they choose to end their fate.

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 13, 2017 at 11:34 AM

    I think that role reversal is very interesting, because I agree that in the beginning, I definitely would have expected it to be Macbeth to die by suicide rather than Lady Macbeth. I think your assessment of Lady Macbeth’s humanity being shown later is very true. I’m curious about Macbeth, though. As you said, he later seems to crave the kill. To me, it seems like he has less humanity in the end than Lady Macbeth. I wonder what, if anything, that might have to do with gender. It is almost like their gender roles were reversed in the beginning, and through their role reversal, they ended up back in more traditional gender roles, with the woman being distressed over blood and murder and ending her life, and the man being cocky and murderous, enjoying violence and participating in war. Macbeth seemed more human in the beginning, but it seems odd that when these characters have more humanity, they also seem more feminine.

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