Lady Macbeth does not once appear with any other woman in the play; whenever she was present she was with men and always the only woman. I think maybe lady Macbeth wants to be as powerful as the men are, she wears the trousers in her marriage to Macbeth. When Macbeth arrives home she tells him her plan to kill Duncan, and persuades him to do it.
“ . . . When Duncan is asleep-. . .
Soundly invite him-his two chamberlains
Will I with wine and wassail so convince
That memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbeck only. When is swinish sleep
Their drenched natures lies as in a death,
What cannot you and I perform upon
His spongy officers, who shall bear the guilt
Of our great quell?”
Lady Macbeth convinces Macbeth to kill Duncan and sets up the whole plan. She feels Macbeth might be too loyal and sensitive a character to do it, so she says in one of her soliloquies,
“He is too full of the milk of human kindness.”
She treats Macbeth roughly wanting him to do the dirty work so she can be queen. I think she loves him and is wanting his happiness too.
There is no way he would have done it without her convincing him. Without Lady Macbeth, Macbeth would have never killed Duncan. After Macbeth killed Duncan he went to his wife and she tells him to go back, put the dagger back and smear the grooms in blood. Macbeth refuses.
"I go no more.
I am afraid to think what I have done;
Look on't again, I dare not."
So Lady Macbeth scolds for not smearing the blood of Duncan on the chamberlains. She goes herself to cover it up so they don't get caught. This shows she is made off strong stuff and she goes in to suggest that the blood stains on Macbeth and herself can be easily washed away.
“Infirm of purpose!
Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures. ‘Tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed,
I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal,
For it must seem their guilt.”
Here Lady Macbeth is saying how Macbeth is as scared as a child is, and cannot even smear the grooms with blood. He has just returned from killing Duncan and is very upset and got scared, and ran to Lady Macbeth for comfort. She doesn’t comfort him. This shows she is evil and is obsessed with being queen.
Lady Macbeth has built up Macbeth's courage and his evil side. So after the murder of Duncan he feels more confident in himself and drifts away from his wife and towards the witches. The witches tricked him while Lady Macbeth used her own method of pushing him. She wanted Macbeth to be happy as king . The witches were just playing a wicked game and as they drag Macbeth deeper and deeper into their plot and towards his doom she breaks down.
There may be little heart left in Lady Macbeth. When she goes to kill Duncan herself she says she can’t do it because he looks like her father sleeping. Is she just saving herself In case they get caught? But if she thought she would get caught Lady Macbeth would have never planned to kill the king in the first place. Maybe she just doesn't have the strength to kill anyone with her own hands. This shows that she is not really as ruthless as she would like Macbeth to think or as Macbeth himself proves to be.
Lady Macbeth talks tough but as her break down shows she may not really be as strong as her husband.
“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 this,”
There is no talk during the play about Lady Macbeth having a child. Possibly she had one who had died. There seems to be something missing in her life. If she were a mother perhaps she would have not have been so self centred and so involved in the man’s world of power and politics.
She is nice to Macbeth to stay on his good side because she knows that you can’t be Queen unless your husband is King. She had to kill the grooms so she wouldn't leave any tracks. During the scene in which Lady Macbeth is sleepwalking she says:
“Here’s the smell of the blood still. All
the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
hand. O, O, O!”
This shows even in her sleep she is thinking of cleaning up after the murder so they don't get caught, although immediately after the murder she had told her husband off for being upset at the sight of blood saying,
“My hands are of your colour; but I shame
to wear a heart so white................................
A little water clears us of this deed.”
For all her toughness at the time of the murder she had by the sleepwalking scene shown herself to have weaknesses. She is feeling giluity and is unable to sleep because she connot forget the murder scene. Lady Macbeth is trying to clean herself and wash away the evil. Her husband is now the stronger character.
However, we have seen the evils that they have committed, and I think that Lady Macbeth knew they were about to be caught so she committed suicide.
I think I have shown that Lady Macbeth was a evil woman. She convinced Macbeth to murder Duncan, and would have killed her own child to have the power of Queen.
Or at least she said she would have done. Perhaps she was stronger with words than deeds, and once the deed was done (by her husband influenced by her) she could not live with it. She is in some ways a complicated character but in conclusion I think she is like alot of people pushed by ambition into an act of evil that then haunts them forever.
