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The *fiend-like Queen': rewriting Lady Macbeth My paper grows out of a sense of dissatisfaction with a number of tendencies in critical approaches to Shakespearean tragedy. It takes as its starting-point writing about Lady Macbeth and views which have hardened into monolithic orthodoxies. Tradition has tended to take up a chastizing stance towards the character, implicitly indicting her for failing to conform to established notions of womanhood. A dreadful and sublime woman who nevertheless shows traces of feminine weakness, a woman who becomes less than a woman and who offers an affront to our sensibility—these, claim A. C. Bradley, Inga-Stina Ewbank, and W . Moelwyn Merchant, are among Lady Macbeth's characteristics.1 Implicit in such opinions is the assumption that Lady Macbeth can only be a 'woman' if she obeys the laws of convention, that she shocks because she deviates from norms of conduct, and that she is redeemed when she shows herself as 'feminine' in the final scenes.2 These troubling ideas are perhaps excusable in a generation of critics used to concepts of 'naturalistic' character and unused to questioning representations of sexuality, but it is striking that they have persisted with a stubborn obdurateness and continue to be expressed, albeit in less obvious forms. Even more recent psychoanalytic commentators such as Norman Holland endorse the suggestion that Lady 1 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on 'Hamlet', 'Othello', 'King Lear', 'Macbeth', Foreword by John Bayley, Harmondsworth, 1991, pp. 321, 339; Inga-Stina Ewbank, "The Fiend-Like Queen: A Note on Macbeth and Seneca's Medea', Shakespeare Survey, 19 (1966), 82-94 (p. 92); W . Moelwyn Merchant, 'His "FiendLike Queen",' Shakespeare Survey, 19 (1966), 75-81 (p. 75). It might be possible to trace the critical neglect of Lady Macbeth to Freud's influential but judgemental comments, which attempt to normalize and reify, in 'The Character of Lady Macbeth' (1916): I believe Lady Macbeth's illness, the transformation of her callousness into penitence, could be explained directly as a reaction to her childlessness, by which she is convinced of her impotence against the decrees of nature, and at the same time reminded that it is through her own fault if her crime has been robbed of the better part of its fruit. From Sigmund Freud, "The Character of Lady Macbeth' (1916), in New Casebooks: 'Macbeth', ed. Alan Sinfield, Houndmills, Basingstoke, London, 1992, pp. 39-45 (p. 42). 2 A feminist-inflected critique would want to guard against seeing as the same 'masculine' and 'male', and 'feminine' and 'female'. Although these terms appear in m y essay, I use them to refer to culturally determined representations of gender and not to a sexuality which is biologically defined. For careful distinctions between these terms, see Cheris Kramarae and Paula A. Treichler, A Feminist Dictionary, Boston, 1985, pp. 173-74; Sally McConnell-Ginet, 'Linguistics and the Feminist Challenge', in Women and Language in Literature and Society, ed. Sally McConnellGinet , N e w York, 1980, pp. 3-25 (p. 16). P A R E R G O N ns 11.1, June 1993 2 M. T. Burnett Macbeth is a 'demon woman'.3 Others see her in contrasting, but no less conservative, terms as a housekeeper or as an ordinary woman in need of her husband's support.4 A still vocal group of scholars seems appalled and finally reassured by the repression and the resurfacing of the 'woman' in Lady Macbeth: she is 'not as tough as she thought', and she traduces but then recuperates female 'areas of feeling'.5 Marilyn French goes even further and asserts that this 'devaluing' of the 'feminine principle' leads to its being 'wiped out' altogether.6 It is also possible to argue, however, that the 'feminine principle' is not 'devalued' in Macbeth, but, rather, that it contests the 'male principle' and is at times even celebrated and privileged. Lady Macbeth, I will suggest, shocks because she challenges modes of thinking that are only now beginning to be interrogated. Explored in Macbeth are the attempts of a woman to realize herself by using the dominant discourses of patriarchy as she lacks an effectively powerful counter-language. She does not destroy herself but is...

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