Lady Macbeth Character Analysis

In the play Macbeth, Macbeth might be the main protagonist. However, the most interesting character analysis or study in the play is of Lady Macbeth. She goes from enthusiastic and emasculating femme fatale, encouraging her husband to commit murder, regicide, and house-guest killing to gain the Scottish throne to repentant sinner racked with shame and guilt for her crime. 

So what can explain this dramatic transformation? A lot of it has to do with gender. Some of it has to do with naivete. There is also the question of what role Lady Macbeth plays in turning Macbeth into a monster? Was Macbeth a supremely moral man who was led to transgression by an evil wife or is there another explanation?

In this article, I argue that Macbeth’s decision to murder Duncan was largely his own. It is true that he is encouraged by Lady Macbeth after showing reluctance and trepidation. However, Macbeth’s hesitation and the accompanying sense of guilt and anguish, which are acted out in the beginning of the play, although genuine, are a kind of performance.

It is the performance of a man who knows the bargain that he is entering into. A man who knows that he is sacrificing his soul for power and who understands the outcome and consequences of this deal. Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, is naive and has no idea the moral cost of the decision that she makes. This is partly explained by the fact that she is a woman with no combat or military experience, whereas Macbeth is a seasoned soldier and general used to death and killing. 

Lady Macbeth sleepwalking by Johann Heinrich Füssli. 1781-1784.

Lady Macbeth as femme fatale

Lady Macbeth has gained a reputation as satisfying the trope of the femme fatale. This is typically a female character who seduces a man into evil. She persuades Macbeth to murder King Duncan by questioning his manhood and whether he even deserves her love at his hesitation. Macbeth before murdering Duncan hesitates. He rightfully surmises that killing Duncan would both be immoral and lead to consequences that may well consume him: 

                                         But in these cases

We still have judgment here, that we but teach

Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return

To plague th’ inventor. This even-handed justice

Commends th’ ingredience of our poisoned chalice

To our own lips. He’s here in double trust:

First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,

Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,

Who should against his murderer shut the door,

Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan

Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been

So clear in his great office, that his virtues

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against

The deep damnation of his taking-off;

And pity, like a naked newborn babe

Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin horsed

Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intent, but only

Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself

And falls on th’ other. (Act 1, Scene 7)

This is a soliloquy where Macbeth clearly weighs the choice of murdering Duncan and decides against it. He is ambitious, which he admits at the end of the soliloquy. However, he considers that the punishments of heaven aside, he would have to contend with “even-handed justice” on earth. The kinsmen and subjects of Duncan would have the right and obligation to bring justice to Macbeth if he kills the king, forces that he would have to face. 

Secondly, there are the customs and norms of his country or rather basic human decency. Killing a king who is your kinsman, subject, and host would violate every Christian concept of human decency. If anything, he reasons that he should be the one protecting King Duncan, “Not bear the knife myself.” Lastly, there is the virtue of King Duncan himself.

The king is noble and righteous, and his murder would lead to such a piteous outcry of public grief “that tears shall drown the wind.” Macbeth here is taking into account and valuing here even the general mood of the public at Duncan’s death. However, as he thus reasons, he is cut short by the entrance of Lady Macbeth. She uses his love for him to overturn his resolve not to murder King Duncan: 

                                        Was the hope drunk

Wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since?

And wakes it now, to look so green and pale

At what it did so freely? From this time

Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard

To be the same in thine own act and valor

As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that

Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life

And live a coward in thine own esteem,

Letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would,”

Like the poor cat i’ th’ adage? (Act 1, Scene 7)

Unlike Macbeth’s previous line of reason, which is rooted in logic, Lady Macbeth is making a rhetorical appeal that relies almost entirely on emotion that is expressed in suggestive language or a mild double entendre. Sexual suggestiveness is obvious when she questions Macbeth whether he’s afraid to “be the same in thine own act and valor / As thought art in desire?” 

She then goes as far as calling him a coward if he doesn’t act upon his nascent desire to become king. However even more significantly, before that she links his willingness and ability to act upon his desires to the love between the two. She first compares Macbeth’s reluctance to act upon his ambitions to a drunkard who brags about his intentions, only to fall asleep, wake up with a hangover (or rather “green and pale”), and fail to act. Then she says “From this time / Such I account thy love.” In short, if Macbeth fails to do the deed, then she will consider him an impotent man who boasts about his performance in bed only to disappoint when it’s time to do the deed. 

Such a threat can only have an effect on a man who is deeply in love with and respects his wife and who respects her position as lady of the house. However, this is only the first stage of her seduction of Macbeth to evil. Shakespeare has her go so far as obliterating the tragic image of “the new-born babe” of pity that Macbeth evoked earlier in his soliloquy: 

                               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.

In short, Lady Macbeth is enacting linguistic violence against the compassion and human decency that restrain Macbeth from murdering his own king. She’s saying implicitly “if a woman such as myself can do away with compassion and pity, why would a man of your valor hesitate to do the same?” The deep-rooted love that Macbeth has for his wife means that she succeeds in overturning his resolve not to kill King Duncan because of the moral consequences and instead focus on fulfilling his manly ambitions at whatever cost. 

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Lady Macbeth’s fatal flaw

The tragedy of Lady Macbeth lies in the wilful and even naive suppression of her compassionate human nature in playing the role of accomplice to her husband's ambitions. This leads to an internal conflict, where she is trapped between acknowledging her innate intuition to show compassion and kindness and her willingness to violate her humanity to ensure that her husband gains the throne. Her willingness to deny her femininity and human nature can be described as her fatal flaw.

Just as Lady Macbeth believes that her husband can will himself into doing what needs to be done to gain the throne, she also feels that she can will herself into being unnatural and annihilating her sense of guilt and human compassion. This has already been shown where she boasts about her preparedness to bash in the head of her suckling babe in the name of ambition.

Before that, she delivers a famous aside appealing to demons to steel her for the enterprise of killing Duncan: 

                        The raven himself is hoarse

That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

Under my battlements. Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.

Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between

Th’ effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts

And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,

Wherever 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!”  (Act 1, Scene 5)

Lady Macbeth, in this speech, equates human compassion and goodness with femininity and weakness, while asking for her feminine nature to be cancelled out. Her language becomes quite vivid in the process. She goes so far as asking to be unsexed and “stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,” an image with grimly violent sexual undertones. 

Lastly, she asks for milk in her breasts to be turned into gall. This is significant because earlier in that same scene, she worries that Macbeth doesn’t have the stomach to kill Duncan, for he is too full of "the milk of human kindness." Later, as we have already discussed, she resorts to the awful and horror image of bashing in the head of her suckling child. In short, Lady Macbeth is fully committed to the enterprise of dehumanizing herself and her husband. 

The negative references to babies and motherhood belong to a broader theme or motifs of unnaturalness in Macbeth. However, Lady Macbeth’s strong sense of conviction hides her own innate sense of morality. While chastising Macbeth for his reluctance and weakness, she ponders out loud at her own reluctance to kill Duncan: 

                    Had he not resembled

My father as he slept, I had done ’t. (Act 2, Scene 2)

The milk of human kindness that she mocks in Macbeth also prevents her from killing an innocent man who resembles her father. We can go so far as to say that the face that Lady Macbeth puts up is nothing but bravado and even hyperbole. She adopts vigorously the role of the attendant wife pushing her husband toward his ambition without considering the consequences of this action. Lady Macbeth's ambition is not for herself. After the murder of Duncan, we see her slip into the background and watch the once-reluctant Macbeth take on the grim role of evil tyrant with absolute enthusiasm all by himself.

Macbeth, who is a seasoned soldier and who understands the meaning of death and killing, is full of trepidation just before and after the murder of Duncan, while Lady Macbeth makes light of it. He understands that killing his king means sacrificing his soul for ambition. As he says after the murder of Duncan, “To know my deed ’twere best not know myself” (Act 2, Scene 2). 

While Macbeth claims that his guilt and bloody hands will stain the whole sea red, Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, claims, “A little water clears us of this deed” (Act 2, Scene 2). Later, in the play, the humanity that Lady Macbeth attempted so hard to suppress emerges in the form of her sleepwalking, where she confesses to her crime and expresses guilt and remorse. As Macbeth slowly gains his sanity after the murder, Lady Macbeth slowly begins to lose her own. It's as if Macbeth is able to predict the insanity that he will be punished with for his evil crimes and attempts to outrun it successfully with his intense show of remorse and grief just after murdering Duncan.

Lady Macbeth does the opposite. She resorts to hyperbole and playing the hollow part of a callous man, ignoring any appeal to compassion and pushing down any sense of guilt or humane feelings. The reference to a sleeping Duncan was a hint to her suppressed conscience, which eventually leads to her madness. It can be said that Lady Macbeth had a premonition of  such a thing when she warns Macbeth, “These deeds must not be thought / After these ways; so, it will make us mad.” 

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Cite this EminentEdit article

Antoine, M. (2025, August 29). Lady Macbeth Character Analysis?  EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/lady-macbeth-character-analysis