Is She a Fiend?: Lady Macbeth’s Part in Macbeth

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Is She a Fiend? : Lady Macbeth’s Part in Macbeth
Kang Kim (Honam University)
This paper aims to reconsider Lady Macbeth's part in Macbeth as the woman who solely devotes herself in the quest for power for her husband, not for manliness. The traditional Shakespearean scholarships of criticism toward Lady Macbeth have seen her as a fiend-like figure, a devil, or a scapegoat in the male-dominated society, or a symbol of the feminine subjectivity against all conventional prejudice surrounding the women.
However, we can grasp in the play that Lady Macbeth's sense of selfhood depends on a traditional pattern of femininity-both wife and helpmate. Wishing to yield her womanhood, she wants to be close to Macbeth. She offers the best she has to her husband. Even she takes on his unethical will to power.
So, her tragic flaws can be interpreted in terms of conventional virtues women had to possess. Although her greatest mistake is that she is too much obsessed with her duty to husband without any discrimination of conscience and morality, her consistent affection and sacrificial or oftentimes irrational support for her man, even if the results are proved wrong, should be understood and acknowledged in the name of love.
We are virtually living in the world where men and women depend on each other. Shakespeare seems to describe the patterns of our lives more broadly and accurately through his two protagonists, Lady Macbeth and Macbeth in the play.

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