Macbeth and Gender
John J. Armes, M.Ed.
Ashford University
June 4, 2018

Dominance; This theme occurs in so many of William Shakespeare’s plays because it is vital to the creation of conflict within a storyline. The Plot of Macbeth would have never advanced if the foresight given by the witches did not make Macbeth willing to take power away from Duncan and become king himself. Many of Shakespeare’s female characters have also been willing to obtain power; however, achieving power was not as easy as it was for men. Women were not put into leadership roles as easily as men were; they had to seek them out. Lady Macbeth from Macbeth is a the perfect example of a woman who took action to control her own life and the lives of those around …show more content…
She is envious that Macbeth is the one who gets to murder Duncan, when she does not think he is fit to. In an effort to make her worthy of murder, she asks spirits to “unsex me here,” suggesting that being a woman means she cannot be powerful. This is the first example of Lady Macbeth firmly rejecting her femaleness to gain power. She continues her soliloquy saying, “Come to my woman’s breasts, / And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,” (45-46). This statement refers to the “milk of human kindness” she spoke of before. Lady Macbeth is asking the spirits to take the milk, which she associates with human kindness, out of her breast. By replacing milk with poison in her breast, she is switching a form of nourishment and life to a cause of death. She thinks that the only thing holding her back from enacting such cruelty is being a woman. Janet Adelman takes a greater look at Lady Macbeth’s rejection of her femininity in her paper “Born of Woman: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth.” Adelman states, “perhaps Lady Macbeth is asking the spirits to take her milk as gall, to nurse from her breast and find in her milk their sustaining poison...In these lines Lady Macbeth focuses on the culture’s fear of maternal nursery” (Adelman, 40). Lady Macbeth needs to be rid of the connotation of nursing and being a woman. Since men cannot nurse, she is rejecting that fact that she can if she were to have a child, by filling her breasts with poison. Although she is not literally unsexed, after this soliloquy, Lady Macbeth feels the effects of her desired manliness. When she speaks with Macbeth about Duncan’s visit, she immediately starts telling him what to do so that they can make their strategy real. She states, “To beguile the time, /Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, /Your hand, your tongue; look like the innocent flower, /But be the serpent under’t” (61-64). Lady