The Routledge Guide to William Shakespeare by Shaughnessy Robert;

Author:Shaughnessy, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

The milk of human kindness

Macbeth's babe is a sibling of a kind to the other significant infant that is mentioned later in the same scene: the child whom Lady Macbeth deploys as an example in the course of her assertion of her murderous determination:

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 plucked my nipple from his boneless gums

And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn

As you have done to this.

(1.7.54–58)

The passage has notoriously provoked speculation about the Macbeths’ back story (and has been mined by actors for motivation and clues to their relationship); what concerns us here, however, is its significance as a marker of the gender values of a play in which interpenetrations of masculinity, power, violence and sexuality are insistent. In the context of a world in which to be a man is to be a killer, in which extreme violence is deemed perfectly acceptable as long as it is sanctioned by the state, and in which advancement and advantage routinely secured the violation of one's own and others’ bodily and moral integrity, ‘it is hard to see why … bloodthirsty talk of dashing out babies’ brains is any more “unnatural” than skewering an enemy soldier's guts’ (Eagleton 1986: 6).

Nonetheless, perhaps for the author of this scene, and certainly for many of its commentators, the Lady's subjunctive commitment to infanticide epitomises the unnaturalness of a character who on her first appearance calls upon the spirit world to ‘unsex’ her (1.5.39) in order to ready her for murder, and who, as a steely secularist who scornfully dismisses ‘the eye of childhood/ That fears a painted devil’ (2.2.52–53), successfully overrides the scruples of her conscience-stricken spouse to complete the act of slaughter in Duncan's bedchamber. Such behaviour is ‘unnatural’ because, according to the patriarchal script that the play in some respects appears to follow, it is unwomanly: traditionally associated with the production, preservation and nurturing of life rather than its destruction, women are simply not meant to murder (least of all to murder men who resemble their fathers).

To say that Macbeth is schematic in its representation of women is to put it mildly: on the one side, there is Lady Macduff, appearing in one scene only as an exemplar of good motherhood; on the other, Macbeth's Lady and the witches, opponents all of patriarchal order and authority, and all associated with the demonic and with uncontrolled, deviant sexuality. Just as the power of the witches resides in part in their morbid eroticism (‘I'll drain him dry as hay’, threatens the First Witch; ‘Sleep shall neither night nor day/ Hang upon his penthouse lid’ [1.3.17–19]), so too does the Lady's dominion over her husband stem from her capacity for sexual manipulation (‘Art thou afeard/ To be the same in thine own act and valour/ As thou art in desire?’ [1.7.39–41]). When it comes, the Lady's disintegration is, according to the play's system of poetic justice,

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