The attendant then comes in, informing her that King Duncan will be staying at their castle with them. Immediately, she shows a savage side, as her thoughts turn to killing the king to get what she wants. She is a woman with high goals; she wont settle for being Lady Macbeth, she wants to be Queen, even if it means killing Duncan.
Her speech also shows us that in this relationship, she seems to be the tougher of the two. She fears that Macbeth is ‘too full o’th’milk of human nature’, and, even though he is ambitious, she doesn’t think he would kill the king to get what she wants. Lady Macbeth also talks about how she wants to be ‘unsexed’; she wants her breasts filled with poison instead of milk. The fact that she focuses on her breasts is significant; she wants to rid herself of the most feminine part of her, the part that represents being a woman. By wishing away the milk in her breasts she is wishing away the feelings of love, gentleness and tenderness that goes with being a mother.
However, though she is wishing away her femininity, she uses a female method of getting her way; she manipulates Macbeth into agreeing to kill the king when he refuses later in the play. She repeatedly attacks him and wears down his defence, first questioning his love for her, and then criticising him as a man. Finally, the last blow is the ultimate blackmail; she says that she knows what it feels like to feed a baby and yet she would rather kill the baby than break a promise like he has. Since elsewhere in the play, it is mentioned that Macbeth doesn’t have any children, and so Lady Macbeth mentioning this indicates that maybe they did have a child and it passed away. This shows how cold-hearted Lady Macbeth is; she brings up something that would hurt Macbeth more than anything, even though it is completely irrelevant, just to make sure she gets what she wants.
In Act V, Scene I though, Lady Macbeth’s character has changed completely. In this scene she is sleepwalking through the castle, saying and doing strange things. This has been going on for a while, and so her gentlewoman calls a doctor to watch what she is doing to try and help her. They hear her admit, in her sleep, that she and Macbeth killed Duncan, Banquo, and Mcduff’s family. She is also scrubbing her hands and saying to herself ‘will these hands ne’er be clean?’. When they first killed the king, she told Macbeth that ‘a little water will clear us of this deed’, and though there is no more blood there physically, she can now see it in her mind, and to her it is very real, and it represents her guilty conscience.
Lady Macbeth is a very good actress, because she seems quite calm and composed when around company, when she is really going mad. Though the scene is short, it shows that in the same way as ambition affected her more strongly than it did Macbeth before the crimes, guilt plagues her more strongly afterwards. She is unable to cope with this, but obviously cannot admit it to anyone, and so her mind deals with it when she is sleeping instead.
There is a common theme of power and control in both scenes; in the first scene when Lady Macbeth is trying to convince Macbeth that they should murder Duncan, she is powerful and controlling, but in the second scene where Lady Macbeth has completely lost control.
