LADY MACBETH
What beast was't, then, That made you break this enterprise to me? 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. Nor time nor place Did then adhere, and yet you would make both: They have made themselves, and that their fitness now Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this. |
This is the point at which the audience realises Lady Macbeth has lost her innocence and femininity, her explicit imagery too rough to fit into the classic gender role of a lady.
Again she twists his words and takes the literal definition of 'man', reversing it, asking him what kind of animal agreed to her proposition before (when in reality he never agreed in the first place). She aligns masculinity with cruelty and daring violence, claiming that he was more of a man then than now. This statement that he would be more of a man for going ahead with the murder is ironic in the fact that once he does kill Duncan, he is reduced to a nervous mess, and later becomes such a 'man' in her eyes that he destroys their relationship. The motif of time is used throughout the play as a symbol for the finality of death and also as a way of the characters expressing their emotion in response to events. Lady Macbeth uses it to tell Macbeth that he was more of a man in the past, and that the time and place is right, so he should become a man again now. The image of the child, classically used to represent innocence and naivety, is perverted throughout Macbeth, with the witches using 'finger of a birth-strangled babe' in their cauldron, and his hallucination of a bloody child. Macbeth hearing his wife so graphically describe what she would rather do than betray her word to him shocks him into submission, as at this point in the storyline, he still finds the idea of murdering a child wrong and monstrous. As the play progresses and the number of people killed at his hand increases, he loses this inhibition and is willing to murder anyone in his way. In this passage Lady Macbeth displays the extent of her ambition for power by persuading her husband that she is more of a man than him, through the use of violent imagery and words of passion. |