Role Reversal In Lady Macbeth

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Macbeth Essay (7) English Literature 3/26/12 Piper Peterson Lady Macbeth was no lady. She has to be the most vile, corrupt, deceitful person in Macbeth and the wickedest woman in literature. The Weird Sister witches are mere harpies in contrast. In greed and lust Lady Macbeth inspires her husband to kill Duncan and be King and precipitate a cascade of murders at his own hand and others’: the guards by Duncan’s bed, the soldiers, Banquo, and Lady Macduff and her children. But it isn’t just a role reversal in her behaving as a man might. Lady Macbeth is more indecent and conniving because she has maintained her manipulative feminisms which ironically diminish her husband, making him appear weak and without resolve. In the end when she finally confronts her own conscience to know how horrible she has been, the Lady collapses, disintegrates and disappears. How awful. Over and over and over again Lady Macbeth challenges her husband’s manhood and his will to kill and seize Duncan’s throne in Act I:…show more content…
Lady Macbeth scolds him again and likens him to a woman: “O proper stuff? This is the very painting of your fear. / A woman’s story at a winter’s fire. / Why do you make such faces? When all is done you look but on a stool.” And then “What, quite unmanned in folly?” Her final shot at Macbeth: “You have displaced the mirth, broke the good meeting with most admired disorder” or you have ruined the party. The party is over for Lady Macbeth, too. The Lady beast disappears in Act IV and resurfaces in Act V a puddle of a

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