Lady Macbeth is constantly ridiculing Macbeth because he is too afraid to kill Duncan, and she even tells him that he might as well be a woman. This is ironic because in this quote, Lady Macbeth says “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” (5.1.39), which lets the readers know that she feels guilty. This guilt is what would eventually drive her to madness. Mental madness all due to an attempt to gain and maintain power; power both over their own selves and a run for
Lady Macbeth is not satisfied with power, as soon as there is an additional opportunity for abundant power Lady Macbeth is committed to getting that power by any means necessary, moral or immoral. She desires for her husband to gutlessly murder King Duncan and expects him to be mentally stable after the murder. However, she is the one who is driven to complete insanity because of all the killing that Macbeth is doing and all the bloodshed that the pair has caused. This is essentially Lady Macbeths fault as she bestowed her corrupt morals onto Macbeth. She shaped the mindset that it was necessary to murder someone who trusts you for more power and accordingly she changed Macbeth’s way of thinking.
She fears the dark, meaning she is afraid of evil and what has become of it. Lady Macbeth was plagued with guilt and this eventually led to her taking her own life. By deceiving Macbeth into killing Duncan, Lady Macbeth created her own
She also refers to the murder of Banquo and Lady Macduff while in her somnambulistic state. Lady Macbeth’s motivation for going insane is ultimately to be free of guilt. Once the sense of guilt becomes to overwhelming, Lady Macbeth’s sensitivity becomes a weakness, and she is unable to cope. Lady Macbeth faces mental obstacles as she tries to overcome her guilt because her conscious mind is telling her to keep her secrets suppressed but her unconscious mind reveals her secrets to the Gentlewomen and the Doctor because it is doing herself no good keeping the secrets to herself. Once Lady Macbeth confronts these obstacles, she apparently kills herself, signaling her inability to deal with the legacy and the power of the crown.
Lady Macbeth simply tells him to 'man up.' She is well aware of Macbeth's weak character and realizes that if he loses it, so will she, literally. She will lose all prestige, power and position she has manipulated into existence. But even Lady Macbeth cannot withstand the pressure of her own guilty conscience. She begins to believe her hands were permanently bloodstained.
Lady Macbeth also plays and evil role beside him. She mocks him, if he frets over her instructions, saying that he will be less of a man if he does not follow the plan. She gives Macbeth a lecture of deceptiveness when planning the murder of King Ducan. She had also prepared a dagger for Macbeth to kill the King in advance. Though Macbeth still had doubts, she was ready to do this blood thickening job, herself.
This would make some readers feel pity for Mayella as she is lamenting due to horrific flashbacks she may encounter, others may think that this is a cover up as she knows what she is doing is wrong, and she is trying to get the judge and the jury to side with her. This technique is used by Lee to make the ruler think and engage the readers. This view shared with Jem: “she’s got enough sense to get the judge sorry for her, but she might just be just – oh, I don’t know”. Here Harper Lee shows the mental controversy of the characters as that the trial has brought on
In Jacobean times women were seen as inferior and even in the Victoria era, thus she required external forces to crush her conscience to allow her to fulfil her ambition. Yet she is afraid her feminine qualities will prevent her from achieving the murder of King Duncan. Which would gradually lead to her mental breakdown. Regicide was considered a mortal sin in Jacobean times, one God couldn't forgive. Whereas Browning’s protagonist in The Laboratory sustains her feminine qualities this is reflected in the line “The colours too grim” in which she is referring to her dislike of the colour of poison and that it needs to be 'brightened' up in order to convince her victim to drink it.
said Lady Macbeth (V, I, Lines 53-55). Lady Macbeth is basically sleepwalking and dreaming of her guilt. She is fearful of the guilt still on her hands in her dreams. So, Lady Macbeth's character changes a whole lot from the beginning of the play to the end of
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”. Euripedes’ Medea embodies this quote from William Cosgrove’s play. Medea is a play that symbolizes feminism and the overturned of fate from a woman grieving in sorrow over the loss of her husband to another wife, to a man grieving in sorrow over the loss of his bride and children to Medea. The one thing about Euripedes’ play is there was a lot of word play to describe the situations and actions of one person, almost never giving a suspense of what is to come next. We knew ahead of time that Medea was bound to murder her children, which I thought should build a nice suspense to the play had it not been mentioned.