That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Whatever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, hold, hold! “
Lady Macbeth 'acts' against herself here. She wants the death of such things as her conscience, compassion, kindness, love, and remorse. This is nothing less than the attempted murder of her humanity. Even the images suggest this killing. "Make thick my blood" suggests the congealment of that living liquid; "stop up the access and passage to remorse" is reminiscent of suffocation. She demands her milk be taken as she fears it is of the same "milk of human kindness" which she worries will destroy her husband. Like Macbeth says "stars hide your fires!," she calls for the cover of darkness. She wields the "keen knife," not Macbeth. Whether or not she is truly calling on the supernatural, whether or not there even is a supernatural, Lady Macbeth is going to great lengths to stress what she must cut away to get rid of the nature of a merciless killer.
If Lady Macbeth was truly as cold and terrible as some people claim, she would not need her invocation, nor would she need to encourage Macbeth in the deed. If she was truly ruthless, she would have readied the dagger herself, marched into the bedroom, and killed Duncan herself. She does not do this. Instead, she frantically accuses her husband of the cowardice and lack of purpose she fears in herself. True enough, the imagery of her words is shocking:
”I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it is smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I do sworn as you
Have done to this.”
The image of the nursing mother viciously slaughtering the innocent child is shocking. How can it be otherwise? What can be more unnatural than this? However, when it comes to action, Lady Macbeth kills no one. It is Macbeth who kills, and he does go so far as to kill children.
Lady Macbeth has imbibed with a bit of liquid courage because she claims "that which hath made them drunk hath made me bold" Is she bold? She fails to commit the murder herself but reasons that "had he not resembled - My father as he slept, I had done't" It seems her purpose was shaken by one of those "compunctious visitings of nature" she spoke so severely against earlier. Her sleepwalking scene truly shows the power of her conscience. If she is cold and unfeeling, how can we explain this? Here we see her self-torment. The sights and smells of evil and blood are with her still though she had comforted Macbeth earlier that "a little water clears us of this deed" The darkness she once called for she is now desperate to drive away with light. We pity her plight. However, she talks not only of herself or her husband, she talks of his victims. There is horror, pity, and even sympathy, in her tone when she murmurs "who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" and "the Thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?". This is not a woman without feeling. This is a woman who subverted her emotions so well that only in sleep, when she could not resist, could they truly express themselves. Lady Macbeth did not manage her conversion to cruelty anymore than she managed Duncan's murder. Her nature, her conscience, in the end were like Banquo- they would not go down.
