MACBETH .CRITICA, GENERO Y TRAGEDIA DEL SER HUMANO, 2007..pdf

539Macbeth: Criticism, Gender and the Tragedy of the Human

Textus XX (2007), pp. 539-554.

Anna Maria Cimitile

Macbeth: Criticism, Gender and the Tragedy of the Human

Tragedy, knowledge, ethics shall be the space of my investigationof Macbeth.

Macbeth is a play about the human. To the extent that all trag-edies are about men’s deviations from “humanity” (in the classical,Aristotelian definition, in tragedy it is the main characters’ “error”that makes them fall into a condition of unhappiness), Macbeth toois a text where “the human” is introduced and defined by negation:all that the protagonists put aside or spurn in their pursuit of power– loyalty, truth, hospitality, friendship, motherly love – is what de-fines the human in absentia. The space of Macbeth is tragic to theextent that the “humane statute” has been removed from it. It istragic because its world is characterized by a crisis in those two ma-jor areas to which human agency is related, knowledge and ethics.The two are contiguous spaces in the text, where one line runs fromthe ambiguity of the knowable, marked by the witches’ speeches butalso by the “equivocation” of all the language of the play, to theabandonment of the ethical. In Macbeth the critical dimension – in-tended in the double sense of passively being in crisis and, at thesame time, proving actively critical of certain cultural conventions –of the tragic, the knowable and the ethical, is underlain by that mostambivalent feature that characterizes the play: the man-woman dif-ference that looms large throughout the text and is to be found eve-rywhere in its language. To what extent is the latter imbricated in

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the crisis of the human addressed by the text? This essay aims at anexploration of that relation.

The question of gender difference constantly crosses boundariesin Macbeth: from the sexual and gender difference proper it spreadsto the rhetorical and figurative level of language, going as far as toinduce the iterated, well-known slippage between the manly and thehuman. In all its passages, it truly remains a question, for every timethe difference between man and woman, masculine and feminine isfixed, invoked, relied upon, each term of the binary crosses the in-ternal boundary, proving ambiguity its own realm as well as theeminent feature of this text. Looking at the way the question of gen-der in Macbeth relates or interferes with definitions of the “human”and the “tragic” means an investigation of the way the ambiguity ofthe gender difference and its crossing of boundaries affect the spaceof the “human”, “knowledge” and “ethics”.

Tragedy and Gender

By way of an introduction, let us consider the question of sexualdifference in tragedy. We can agree with Linda Bamber, who wrotethat Shakespeare “is consistently an author whose response to thefeminine is central to the general significance of his work” (Bamber1982: 4). But is there any tragic female character in Shakespeare? Ininvestigating the Shakespearean tragic, Bradley’s character-basedcriticism left the woman’s part out of its space; Bradley acknowl-edged that female characters could be “heroines” in Shakespeare’stragedies, but it was “only in the love-tragedies […] that the heroineis as much the centre of the action as the hero. The rest, includingMacbeth, are single stars” (Bradley 1981: 2-3). For Bradley tragedywas obviously a male prerogative. In Comic Women, Tragic MenBamber somehow repeated this thesis, although she argued it in afeminist perspective, and stated that Shakespearean tragedy is thespace of “the absence of a significant feminine Other” (Bamber1982: 105). Writing about Macbeth and Coriolanus, she argued thatin those plays woman is not Other to man, being rather “identified


with the masculine-historical project in general and the heroes’ owncareers in particular” (ibid.: 92). For Bamber this effacement of thefeminine difference, which, when depicted as “evil” is rather a pro-jection of male fears about it, has a radical effect on both genderdefinitions and the genre itself. Since woman is as it were absorbedin the masculine Self that permeates the space of tragedy, she repre-sents a real threat to the necessary independence from the (feminine)Other on the part of the (masculine) Self, with the consequence of:“unmanliness in the heroes and an alteration in the structure of thetragedy” (ibid.: 20). It is the absence of the woman’s difference fromthe tragic space of Macbeth, where she is but the male projection ofotherness and not actual Other to the male hero, that subtracts gen-eral significance from Macbeth’s death (ibid.: 96). The lack of dia-lectic between man and the feminine Other makes his death incon-clusive: if the death of the erring hero at the end of tragedy usually“reaffirm[s] us in our humanism, our sense of the value of our livesto us” (ibid.), Macbeth’s end fails to do so, as he has simply repeatedhis mode and exhausted its possibilities until the time of death.Bamber reads this as the sign that there is some recognition, someconsciousness on the part of the text, that the misogyny that creates“evil” women characters can only lead to “a radical failure of manli-ness” (ibid.: 20). The absence of the feminine Other is catastrophicfor both “man” and “tragedy”.

Bamber’s has become a classic study of gender and genre inShakespeare by now, but her analysis is in good company. Over thelast forty years feminist studies have produced a reassessment ofShakespeare which aims at reconsidering “the woman’s part” in histexts; the variety of interpretations, even within feminist criticism –which for obvious reasons is the most relevant here – testifies to theambiguity of Shakespearean tragedy and in particular of Macbeth onthe topic. The insightful psychoanalytic analysis of anxieties inducedby maternal power, as carried out by Janet Adelman in SuffocatingMothers (1992), reads Macbeth, for instance, as “a representation ofprimitive fears about male identity and autonomy itself” (Adelman1992: 131). Woman and femininity are also discussed in their rela-tion with spaces that have been the cultural prerogative of the indi-


vidual male. Thus Mary Beth Rose (2002) proposes a redefinition ofthe all-male “heroism” which appears in early modern English litera-ture as being nuanced by questions of gender difference. Writingabout Macbeth as an investigation of aristocratic male heroism,which is in her opinion exposed by the play as being criminal, shestates that in the text “the critique of masculinity […] destroys theheroic ideal while at the same time mourning its destruction in the[…] moving portrait of the hero’s courage” (ibid.: 25). Although sheacknowledges Macbeth to be “one male hero who succeeds in ex-cluding the female from his identity” (ibid.: xx), she neverthelessstates that, in its “exposure of male heroism as criminal violence”,the play “gestures toward the future trajectory of the heroic”, whichshe sees as an increasing feminization of heroism (ibid.: 25).1

There is another perspective on gender and tragedy I would liketo briefly mention at this point, as one more instance of the varietyof approaches to the topic. Cristina León Alfar’s Fantasies of FemaleEvil (2003) argues for the existence of a female tragic subject inShakespeare’s tragedy. She writes that Shakespearean tragedy doeshave a space for the female subject as well as the male. Her readingfocuses on evil female characters such as Goneril and Regan in KingLear and Lady Macbeth in our play. In particular, about the lattershe writes that her evil character is not to be read as being outside ofor contrasting with the early modern, patriarchal conception of gen-der roles, but should rather be seen as intrinsic to patriarchy, whatcontributes to the maintaining in place of its hierarchies. She writesthat, in depicting Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare was in fact beinghighly critical of the patriarchal system:

… I read Lady Macbeth’s encouragement of her husband’s regicideas Shakespeare’s parodic depiction of wifely duty. Set within a struc-ture of power dependent on violence for stability, Lady Macbeth’s

1 “By the end of the seventeenth century […] all heroism becomes problematic andis constituted in terms that are gendered female” (Rose 2002: xxi). Rose’s argument isthat through “a sustained critique of physical strength as the basis of male privilege”, inearly modern English literature the “heroics of action” is gradually replaced by an alter-native “heroics of endurance”, which is significantly represented in female terms (ibid.:xxi-xxii).


behavior adheres to rather than transgresses her gender role. (Alfar2003: 113)

Alfar also writes that the difference between male and femalecharacters in Shakespeare’s tragedies, whereby the female desire toself-determination is qualified as “evil”, is not a reflection of theplaywright’s ideology, but rather a projection of “our own invest-ments in binaries of active/passive and good/evil, reiterated in that ofmale/female” (ibid.: 20), and states: “I reject the notion that wom-en’s acts of violence imply either Shakespeare’s dread of femalepower or that such acts are transgressions of proper femininity”(ibid.: 21). She then concludes: “I argue that the process by whichwomen become evil is exposed in Shakespeare’s plays as a construct,a strategy deployed both for the preservation of masculinist powerand as a way to mask the patrilineal structure’s own ruthlessness andviolence” (ibid.: 24).

Alfar therefore posits a distance between the text’s ideology andthe patriarchal system it exposes, and offers a compelling version ofLady Macbeth’s “evil” as rather being a criticizing parody of thewifely obedience patriarchy required of all women. In this light,even Lady Macbeth’s madness acquires a different meaning, onethat is also important for a reflection on the feminine redefinition ofthe tragic in Macbeth. For Alfar Lady Macbeth’s madness does nothappen because she cannot sustain anymore the burden of guilt.Nor does it happen because at a certain point she is relegated to themore feminine space of silence, ignorance and passivity by her hus-band, although this fact could be seen as the initiator of her distrac-tion. In 3.2, before the killing of Banquo is performed but when ithas already been planned by Macbeth, the latter discourages hiswife’s implication in this “deed of dreadful note” (Macbeth 3.2.44)and urges her to “Be innocent of the knowledge, […] Till thou ap-plaud the deed” (3.2.45-46). Alfar contends that this request doesnot change her “phallic role” as a reflection of his desires, nor does itlimit her independence any more than before. It only imposes apassive mode on her, but her role as “feminine guarantor of her hus-band’s power” (Alfar 2003: 129) is still required of her. And it is thisthat induces her madness. As Alfar writes:


Lady Macbeth’s insanity, then, must be read not as an inherent femi-nine response but as produced by gender prescriptions. […] The tra-jectory of her descent from sanity to insanity suggests that in Shake-speare’s play feminine madness is a response to being only for another. Lady Macbeth’s insanity and suicide, therefore, interrogatepolarized gender structures, revealing them to be destructive of fe-male subjectivity. (Ibid.: 130)

Of the diverse voices mentioned above, Alfar’s is the only one topositively invoke a feminine tragic agency in Macbeth. (Even Rose’sanalysis, which is quite interesting in its definition of a feminineheroic, stops short of admitting the existence of a feminine tragicheroine in the text and only says that the play “gestures towards” thefeminine form of heroic identity.) For Alfar, Lady Macbeth’s cor-ruption displays the ruthlessness of state power and the character’stragic aspect lies in her being subordinated to that system. This ishow she humanizes her evil, and lets it enter the realm of tragedy.For we need to remember that tragedy is what pertains to the hu-man. By insisting on her “evil”, on the gender difference as mon-strous, the critics of Macbeth – or the Shakespearean text itself, de-pending on whether you are persuaded or not by Alfar’s analysis –leave Lady Macbeth out of the tragic space. As long as all the violentfemale figures are thought of as monstrous evil, they are cut out ofthe realm of tragedy. One thing is to be involved with the super-natural forces, as happens in Macbeth’s relation with the witches,another is to be the supernatural. The “weird sisters” are not tragiccharacters, because they are from the outset identified as entitiesother than human (besides, they retain a comic quality about themthat could not fit the realm of the tragic). They question the male-female difference in other ways; they “exist to be interpreted”(Garber 2004: 699), yet nonetheless they equivocate in order to con-found Macbeth and defy interpretation in general; in their physicalappearance they epitomize the border crossing that is a feature of thetext (“you should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me tointerpret / That you are so” 1.3.45-7). They are subjects of tragedyto the extent that they, as evil agents, in an almost voodoo-like fash-ion (as Orson Welles’s 1948 filmic Macbeth rendered), keep control


over the events and the male protagonist of the tragedy, but they arenot affected by those events and by the tragic in general. The hu-man protagonists, on the contrary, are both subjects and object oftragedy.

Bradley (the male voice), Bamber, Aldelman, Rose, Alfar: not-withstanding their diversity, one common vision seems to runthrough their readings of the play. All acknowledge an absence of the“feminine other” from the space of tragedy, and read Lady Macbethas what a potential, autonomous otherness has been reduced to un-der the realm of the same – be the latter the psychological Self as inBamber, the heroic male stereotype as in Rose, or Alfar’s patriarchalsystem. Alfar is the only one to step out from this vision, which isher starting point as well. When it comes to an analysis of gender intragedy, the woman is seen as irredeemably out. But this “out”means in fact “in” (as assimilation to male desires or projection ofmale anxieties). “There is no sexual difference”, we could say aboutthe tragedy of Macbeth as read by these critics. That this remains aquestion, and an irresolvable one, for definitions of both gender andgenre in the play, is evident when we turn to the other space it dis-seminates there, the ethical space of tragedy.

Ethics and Gender

The knot in which woman, the feminine, the human and trag-edy come together in the play has relevance for another, importantissue in the play, which I would also like to take into account: theethical question. Can we talk about a gendered figuration of ethicsand ethical thinking in the text? If so, this would make yet anotherrealm that is underlain by the male/female binary in the play. Andbecause that binary seems to be in place only to reiterate its owndisruption, would it be the case that ethics too is affected by theobliteration that characterizes the gender differentiation? If so, towhat effect?

The evolution undergone by the Macbeths’ criminal minds in


the play has fascinated scholars and philosophers, who have oftenturned to Macbeth to reflect upon the question of conscience. In 1916Sigmund Freud wrote about the play:

Shakespeare often splits a character up into two personages, which,taken separately, are not completely understandable and do not be-come so until they are brought together once more into a unity. Thismight be so with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. […] what he feared inhis pangs of conscience is fulfilled in her; she becomes all remorseand he all defiance. Together they exhaust the possibilities of reactionto the crime, like two disunited parts of a single psychical individual-ity […]. (Freud 1916)

Drawing on Freud, Ned Lukacher (1994) suggests that in Mac-beth the complicity between the two characters be read as an allegoryof conscience whose cypher is “the linguistic and psychological cling-ing together of the Macbeths”. As they are “at once outside and in-side one another” (they know each other’s intentions even before theother utters them), the two can be said to present conscience as thespace of a reversibility between inside and outside (Lukacher 1994:185). Lukacher makes much of their “clinging”: insisting on the lin-guistic dimension of the fusion between the two characters, he statesthat it is in the singular, repeated idiom of cl-words (“cling”, “clat-ter”, “clean”) that the “wreck” of conscience is brought to presence:“The cl- is Shakespeare’s idiom for the persistence of the rub of con-science” (ibid.: 188).

Lukacher does not stress it, but it is once more the transgression-elision of the boundary between man and woman implied by hisanalysis that takes place in the allegorization of conscience. Theobliteration of gender difference happens in the emergence of con-science as language’s clamour. In the clinging of language Lukacherreads the fact that the latter, like the conscience that clatters in itand that seems to have no human origin, cannot be manipulated,but will always have control over (be the “rub” for) those who be-lieve they have a hold on it, regardless of gender. In this dimensionof the human as always underlain, even hindranced by, conscience,man and woman disappear as gendered subjectivities, to be indeed“a single psychical individuality”.


The question of the moral complicity of the couple, factuallyevident in the exchange of the bloody daggers in 2.2, is similarlyevoked in language. Katherine Rowe is among the critics who havedrawn attention to the stichomythic dialogue in 2.2, as what, com-ing a few lines before the daggers episode, anticipates its display oftheir criminal complicity. The brief dialogue Rowe refers to, “a se-quence of interlaced lines in which Lady Macbeth and Macbeth fin-ish each other’s fractured thoughts” (Rowe 2004: 130), is the fol-lowing:

Macb. I have done the deed. – Didst thou not hear a noise?Lady M. I heard the owl scream, and the crickets cry.

Did not you speak?Macb. When?Lady M. Now.Macb. As I descended?Lady M. Ay.Macb. Hark!

(2.2.14-18)

In this form of dialogue, rarely used by Shakespeare before thisplay (Rowe: 130), there is a rendering of the complementarity of thetwo as murderers. It tacitly counterbalances Lady Macbeth’s affirma-tion that: “My hands are of your colour; but I shame / To wear aheart so white” (2.2.63-64), where she, immediately after the mur-der of Duncan, still looks for terms of differentiation between herhusband and herself. If her attempt is supported by the play’s moregeneral strategy of keeping woman and the female evil apart fromhumanity and of making her “not of the earth”, it is in the sticho-mythic articulation of language that the separation is undermined.

As a play concerned with murder, Macbeth does not stop atshowing the many assassinations to make its point about the king’sbloody and tyrannical reign, but it has its protagonist carry out asustained reflection on the meaning of murder, on what killing an-other human being can mean for the one who kills. Lady Macbethhas often been considered the instigator of her husband’s crimes: shetoo is “in blood / Stepp’d in […] far” (3.5.135-6). Yet the ethical


thinking is Macbeth’s alone.For Aristotle ethical reasoning is the human activity that, when

practised, would always lead to good action. In Macbeth it is gender-inflected. It is J. Gregory Keller who has recently argued for thepresence of ethical reasoning in the text. Yet ethical thinking, whichalways motivates to good acting, fails to produce the expected effect(good action) in the play, and Keller offers an investigation of thereasons for its failure. At the outset of his examination he asks:“Does thinking make an ethical difference or does it fall short, atleast in the case of Macbeth, of motivating to the good, even when,as Arendt would say, the chips are down?” (Keller 2005: 42) Hetakes his cue from Hannah Arendt’s definition of evil as thoughtlessaction, to which he opposes his view of evil action as that inducednot (or possibly not only) when thinking is absent, but rather whenit is overcome by the emotional and the volitional.

Keller reads Macbeth’s long reflection in 1.7 (“If it were done,when ’tis done…”) as the ethical reasoning that makes him give upthe idea of killing the king. In that scene, as he lingers between thethought of the murder and the murder itself, Macbeth considers theconsequences of the deed, and two more elements which are againstthe act: the law of hospitality (“He’s here in double trust”, 1.7.12)and the worth of the king, which would be lost with his death (“hisvirtues … plead[ing] like angels”, 1.7.18-9). These all make strongreasons not to act; stronger, in fact, than the reasons to act (ambi-tion and the gaining of power). Yet, when in that same scene Mac-beth meets his wife, immediately after the solitary reflection, he isovercome by her counter-argument and persuaded again to accom-plish the deed. Macbeth’s ethical reasoning is overcome by LadyMacbeth’s incitation to evil desire and ambition. His ruin or tragedyis a “feminine ending” to male ethical thinking.

Keller sees in Macbeth’s reasoning in 1.7, when he is alone, theintellectual quality of man, the ability to think that leads to the justdecision against the assassination of Duncan. So why is it that suchresolution is won out by Lady Macbeth? Keller accounts for Mac-beth’s intellectual capitulation in these terms:


Ethical thinking that appeals only to intellect – what most thinkingamounts to – falls quickly before the power of feeling, desiring, will-ing, hoping, and fearing. The intellectual argument of Macbeth withhimself proved strong only during the inner dialogue that isolatedintellect from feeling and willing. The actual and effective “spur forhis intent” appears in the emotional appeal of the counter-argumentsof Lady Macbeth. (Keller 2005: 48)

Keller does not make gender an issue in his argument, but in thelight of his analysis I want to investigate the gender inflection thatethical thinking takes on in Macbeth. For here it is evidently themasculine ability for ethical reasoning that submits to the feminine“evil conscience” (Keller’s definition) Lady Macbeth stands for, tothe feminine emotionality she appeals to. His ethical thinking isovercome by her appeal to the emotional and the volitional which,under the lens of gender, are therefore also connoted as feminine. Ifwe are persuaded by Keller’s argument (and I am persuaded by it),of the two protagonists it is Macbeth alone who is capable of ethicalreasoning. But his ethical thought is incomplete, as it were, andLady Macbeth’s counter-arguments, more than just an evil instiga-tion to crime, are rather the touchstone and even “test-bed” tomeasure his ethical strength. Against her rock Macbeth’s ethicsfounders.

Keller’s is the first analysis of Macbeth, among those cited here, toimply a differentiation rather than assimilation between the maleand female subject positions. He does not produce an analysis oflanguage in this sense. What would we find if we approached thetext with his examination in mind? Would Shakespeare’s textualitysupport the differentiation? Keller acknowledges that Macbeth’sthinking is opposed to his desire to kill Duncan, to his “vaultingambition” (ibid.: 47). According to Philippa Berry, “vaulting” is a“feminine” quality of ambition; it is one among the many rhetorical“turns” of the play she reads as feminine (Berry 1999). In otherwords, the text gives a gender inflection to ambition; but it isMacbeth, the male hero, who acknowledges its feminine and ruin-ous course. Yet he cannot resist it: the feminine enters the space ofmanliness and masculinity, takes on its values (ambition) and de-


stroys the masculine reason. When it comes to ethics, the minglingof the feminine and the masculine (as in the “vaulting ambition”)only leads to destruction.

Knowledge and Gender

In 1.7 Macbeth’s ethical thinking shows us that he knows what isright and what is not. Knowledge is an issue in Macbeth. It is afterhis first encounter with the witches that Macbeth “[turns] from be-ing an active soldier […] to being a man of reflection” (Kinney2004: 24). With Macbeth, knowledge is a matter of spying (ibid.:12), as he confides to his wife: “There’s not a one of them, but inhis house / I keep a servant fee’d” (3.4.130-1). Arthur F. Kinney hasdiscussed the question of “Macbeth’s knowledge”. He reads in thatapparently offhanded statement a resonance with the Jacobean cul-tural context and the necessity of surveillance as a strategy of rule, ata time of conspiracies against the monarchic rule of James I. What isespecially relevant about his historicist analysis, for me, is the consid-eration that

Macbeth deals not so much with ‘How do you know?’ but ‘What doyou do with the knowledge you have?’ and how do you prevent thelure of the imagination when reason seems to fail. (Ibid.: 25-6)

Lady Macbeth is resolute in planning action after reading the let-ter where the witches’ prophecy is disclosed to her. On the contrary,Banquo does nothing with the knowledge he has received first-handfrom the witches: he does not say a word about the prophecy, noteven after the murder of Duncan. The nurse instead turns to thedoctor to share the knowledge that the murderous and already irre-deemably distracted Lady Macbeth has unwillingly disclosed to her.As for Macbeth, he is the character for whom knowledge is more aquestion of the knowable; all he learns in his ruinous course is neverdefinite and it always requires interpretation. His knowledge comesfrom the witches’ equivocal speeches, which are doubly ambiguous:because structurally so and because they are from a different realm,


beyond the human.2

Kinney distinguishes between a knowledge that comes from thefaculty of reason and the hallucinations induced by imagination. InMacbeth, the main character is deluded when he thinks he has theintelligence of, we may say, one who is “acquaint[ed] with the per-fect spy o’th’time” (3.1.129) no less than when he overtly acknowl-edges he is prey of a mind “full of scorpions” (3.2.36). In this re-spect Kinney writes: “When the basis of Macbeth’s knowledge –observation, reason, logic, surveillance – turns to image-making,surrenders its powers of comprehension to the imagination, he losesdirection” (Kinney 2004: 26). The question is that in Macbeth eve-rything that happens is unknowable, in the sense of being too hor-rific to be known (“Look on’t it again I dare not” 2.2.51). This iswhy its knowledge leads the all-too-human Lady Macbeth to mad-ness. Stanley Cavell defines Macbeth as “one haunted by knowledgewhose authority he cannot impeach” (Cavell 1987: 96). Of course,tragedy is the question of knowledge. For Cavell:

[…] Shakespeare’s plays interpret and reinterpret the skeptical prob-lematic – the question whether I know with certainty of the existenceof the external world and of myself and others in it […] [and] findno stable solution to skepticism […]. (Cavell 1987: 3)

The in-human element in Macbeth turns scepticism into a mad-ness for the human mind. This is more evident in the woman char-acter, who, when she finally acknowledges her knowledge of thedeed, finding it unbearable seeks a way out in her distracted sleep-walking. Macbeth will instead test his sufferance of the unknowable:he will deliberately go back to the witches to get more of theirtruths. The ambiguity he gets is the epistemological space he de-serves as one who has defied the “humane statute”.

2 Interestingly, the word “Hecate” is a form of “Heqit”, the name of one of the old-est goddesses of predynastic Egypt, which is supposedly derived from the Egyptian wordfor “intelligence”. See Addison Roberts (1991: 172).


The Feminine Endings of Tragedy

By way of conclusion. In “Of Ambition” (1625), Francis Baconrefers to ambition using the masculine possessive adjective “his”(Bacon 1996: 414); characteristically, and unsurprisingly, in thesame essay Bacon also sees ambition as being a quality of “men”. InNo Passport (2006), a theatrical performance directed by Fabio Acca,the Italian actress Vanda Monaco recites the “Tomorrow, and to-morrow” speech from Macbeth attired as a hooker, androgynous inher appearance, almost evoking a transvestite, and concludes thespeech by adding, as she performs a somersault: “Sono un capovolgi-mento, sono un’attrice” (“I am a capsizing, I am an actress”). In hersophisticated analysis of the “feminine endings” of Shakespeareantragedy, Philippa Berry reads the “vaulting ambition” in Macbeth asone of the many feminine rhetorical “turns” she detects in Shake-speare’s language.

The imbrications of a discussion of the human with definitionsof gender difference are a well-known feature of Macbeth. The tex-tual space of tragedy is ultimately dis-figured by the constant confu-sion between manliness and humanity that the extensive wordplayhelps to produce. One exemplary exchange will suffice to remind usof the insistence with which a slippage from the difference between“man” and “woman” to that between “human” and “inhuman” oc-curs in the play:

Lady M. … Are you a man?M. Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on thatWhich might appal the Devil.

(3.4.57-8)

Here Macbeth has just seen the ghost of Banquo. Lady Macbethinsists on the sense of “man” as a gender category; here as elsewhere,she repeats the construction of manliness and masculinity as a hier-archy between man and woman. Macbeth, on the contrary, uses theword “man” in its wider sense of “human” – and “humane”. (Else-where, the invocation to “unsex” her, because it is to the spirits, i.e.


to in-human entities, is the one moment when Lady Macbethconflates the two meanings of being “human” and a “woman” andasks to be rid of both.)

It is the work of, among others, some acute readers of thefigurality of Shakespeare’s language, namely Patricia Parker,Marjorie Garber, Susan Zimmerman and Philippa Berry, which hasgiven an important contribution to the exploration of the textualquestion of gender in Macbeth. In a deconstructive reading thatcombines attention to the historical and cultural dimensions of atext with an even more attentive ear to its figural dimension, Berrypersuasively proves her thesis about a dis-figuring of tragedy thattakes place by way of a tropic “feminine” in Shakespeare. As shesums up,

Shakespearean tragedy performs […] [an] extensive interrogation oftragic sensibility, as countless puns and other tropes that emphasizethe open bodily ‘ends’ of women (and sometimes, those of men)enunciate a subtle differing – a disfiguring – both of tragic discourseand of concepts of death as bodily extinction. […] [In Shakespear-ean tragedy] a repetitive pattern of feminine or feminized tropes per-forms an allusive reweaving both of tragic teleology and of orthodoxconceptions of death. (Ibid.: 3)

The textuality of Macbeth offers a constant transgressing of theborders between male and female, masculine and feminine:Duncan’s corpse is the “new Gorgon” which petrifies those whodare look on it, functioning besides as “a composite image for therepresentation of gender indeterminacy in both Macbeth and LadyMacbeth” (Zimmerman 2001: 320); the witches are women withbeards; the “vaulting ambition” (1.7.27) is a feminine rhetorical“turn”. The feminine ending in Macbeth’s tragedy is ultimately thiscrossing of borders, a general undecidability of gender difference.

Freud found it difficult to deal with the play and admitted hisinability to find a solution for it (quoted in Lukacher 1994: 169). Iargue that it is the question of gender and its slippages (man-woman-inhuman) as the underlying motif of Macbeth which con-found and resist reading. In contemporary criticism that deals withgender, knowledge and ethics in the play it is possible to see alterna-


tively an argument for the text’s own obliteration of the femininedifference and a critical approach that is itself less inclined to makesense of that difference. There cannot be any unifying narrative onthe topic. But it seems to me that Macbeth’s success in rejecting adefinitive perspective has everything to do with its play on gender –character-wise, linguistic, figurative.

REFERENCES

Adelman J., 1992, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’sPlays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest”, Routledge, New York and London.

Addison Roberts J., 1991, The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender,University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London.

Alfar C.L., 2003, Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power inShakespearean Tragedy, Associated University Presses, Newark and London.

Bacon F., 1996, Francis Bacon. A Critical Edition of the Major Works, (ed.) B.Vickers, Oxford U.P., Oxford.

Bamber L., 1982, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre inShakespeare, Stanford U.P., Stanford.

Berry P., 1999, Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies,Routledge, London and New York.

Bradley A.C., [1904] 1981, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on “Hamlet”, “Othello”,“King Lear”, “Macbeth”, Macmillan, London.

Cavell S., 1987, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare, Cambridge U.P.,Cambridge.

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Documents

MACBETH .CRITICA, GENERO Y TRAGEDIA DEL SER HUMANO, 2007..pdf