Gender Ambiguity in Shakespeare's Macbeth

As Marjorie Garber in her study Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers argues with much persuasion, Macbeth is about “transgression and dislocation”. 1 Without much effort, a paradigm of border

crossings could be put together as follows:

male - female

single - double life - death sleep - waking natural - supernatural existence - non-existence think - speak reality - play visible - invisible material - immaterial knowledge - conjecture

This list could be continued almost ad libitum but the qualities listed above may suffice as an illustration. For the purpose of this essay I would like to focus on the few issues mentioned above (gender identity, personal identity and integrity) as well as some related themes concerned with the dichotomy “natural - unnatural”.

Let us start with perhaps the most conspicuous and most intriguing of these antitheses, namely with the gender division male/female. It is a persistent theme in the play, broached in the very beginning with the appearance of the three weird sisters on the heath. Banquo in his lines (I, 3, 38-46) comments on their androgynous nature by not being able to decide whether they are women or not. Note that Banquo is not in the least surprised by the witches’ appearance and their supernatural capacities like foretelling the future do not puzzle him at all. He takes such creatures for granted, since their image is firmly wedged in the popular consciousness. But their bearded countenance runs against ingrained notions according to which witches should be of female sex. The gender indeterminacy is thus established, to be reinforced shortly by Lady Macbeth’s desire to be “unsexed” (I, 5, 39). It is significant that she does not express the wish to be free of the constraints of her existence as a woman; the verb suggests that not only is she discontented with her being a woman, but she apparently does not regard manhood/male existence as the desired alternative. This may be so because she finds her husband deficient in virile qualities like courage and valour. But on the other hand she seems to think highly of what she defines as manly behaviour when she constantly instigates her husband and tells him what to do so that he would be a real man. She seems to cherish an ideal/idealised picture of manhood; that she is in quest of some such archetypal 1 Marjorie Garber: Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, New York: Methuen 1987, p. 91.

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image could be surmised from her reluctance to kill the groom because he had resembled her father. Her exclamation “My husband!” (II, 2, 12) which follows immediately only stresses the affinity these two figures have for Lady Macbeth.

Lady Macbeth’s desire to be unsexed as well as the pattern of her behaviour throughout the play indicate that she does not strive to emulate the male. For her, neither sex can aspire to the highest (humane?) goals, whatever these may be. Terry Eagleton in his book William Shakespeare suggests that Lady Macbeth strives to escape from singular identity, since she perceives singleness as inadequate. 2 This highly interesting observation leaves us with the

question whether her want is to be divested of the bonds of gender in order to fulfil some human potential or whether humanity is to be discarded altogether so that a higher, more perfect form of existence can be achieved. The answer, if provided at all, is again by no means straightforward. Whatever Lady Macbeth’s concerns may be, she is not unduly worried about traditional humane ideals. The way she encourages Macbeth to live up to the witches’ predictions indicates that being a man is the desired state she wishes for her husband (at least) to attain.

“When you durst do it, then you were a man;

And to be more than what you were, you would Be so much more the man” (I, 7, 49)

Macbeth feels compelled to prove his manliness to his wife and boasts:

“I can do all that may become a man;

Who dares do more is none” (I, 7, 47-48)

However, for the Macbeth couple, the concept of manhood seems to oscillate between the masculine and the human aspects of the word. Macbeth takes up the matter of manhood and becomes preoccupied with the idea of being a man. Just what he and Lady Macbeth have precisely in mind when they use this word is something to speculate about. The question remains, however, whether either Macbeth or Lady Macbeth or both of them are aware of this oscillation and whether they mean the same thing at the same time. Though we have no access to the mind of either character, it can be surmised from the context that in the lines mentioned above Lady Macbeth associates manhood with courage or even violence. Her words appeal to Macbeth’s virility while they seem to suggest manhood has no limits, as it were. In contrast, Macbeth displays an awareness of the limits of manhood (masculinity?); transgressing these boundaries means to cease to be human. But such an interpretation of 2 Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, pp. 1-8.

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