The Question of Manhood

The play represents in very powerful from both the fantasy of a virtually absolute and destructive maternal
power and the fantasy of absolute escape from this power.
Maternal malevolence/ hegemony:
Lady Macbeth’s attack on Macbeth’s virility is the source of her strength over him and who acquires that
strength, partly because she can make him imagine himself as an infant vulnerable to her:

 Idealized for his nurturing paternity, Duncan is killed for his womanish softness who becomes an
emblem not of masculine authority, but of female vulnerability the abdication of protective
paternal power seems to release the destructive power of female chaos/maternal malevolence.

 Macbeth seems to wield the bloody axe to comply with, not to escape, the domination of women.
The play constructs Macbeth as terrifyingly pawn to female figures.

 Lady Macbeth attacks Macbeth’s manhood, making her love for him contingent on the murder that
she identifies as equivalent to his male potency “when you durst do it, then you were a man”

 Lady Macbeth expresses a deep fantasy of Macbeth’s utter vulnerability to her as she progresses
from questioning Macbeth’s masculinity to articulating a fantasy in which to be less than a man is to
become interchangeably a woman or a baby, terribly subject to the wife/mother’s destructive rage.
“have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,/And dash’d the brains out”

 Macbeth is subject to both the powers of the witches and Lady Macbeth (the disrupted image of
nurturance is the psychic equivalence of the witches’ poisonous cauldron  what the witches
suggest about the vulnerability of men to women on the cosmic plane, Lady Macbeth doubles in the
psychological plane= lady Macbeth brings the witches’ power home for while they get the cosmic
apparatus, she gets the psychic force + the fears of female coercion, female definition of the male,
that are initially located cosmically in the witches thus find their ultimate locus in the figure of Lady
Macbeth.)

Reconstruction of Manhood/escape:
Macbeth releases himself from the image of this vulnerability by sharing in the murder of Duncan+
imagining Lady Macbeth the mother to infants sharing her hardness, born in effect without vulnerability (he
imagines her as male and then reconstitutes himself as the invulnerable male child of such a mother):

 In committing the murder, Macbeth becomes like Richard III, using the bloody axe to free himself in
fantasy from the dominion of women, even while apparently carrying out their will

 Lady Macbeth becomes herself virtually male, composed of the hard metal of which the armored
male is made. Her children would necessarily be men, composed of her male mettle, armored by her
mettle, lacking female inheritance from the mother that would make them vulnerable. “Bring
forth men-children only! /for thy undaunted mettle should compose/Nothing but
males”

 The witches, themselves, invite Macbeth to make himself into the bloody and invulnerable man-
child he has created as a defense against maternal malevolence  the prophecy constructs
Macbeth’s invulnerability in effect from the vulnerability of all other men + grants Macbeth the
 exemption from the condition of all men, who bring with them the liabilities inherent in their
birth(exemption from the universal human condition) “Be bloody, bold, and resolute: laugh
to scorn/ the power of man, for none of woman born/ shall harm Macbeth”

 In the battle between Macbeth and Macdonwald, what initially looks like a battle between loyal and
disloyal sons to establish primacy in the father’s eyes is oddly transposed into a battle of male
against female: “For brave Macbeth” ”valor’s minion”” Disdaining Fortune”  Macbeth
can be distinguished from Macdonwald only by making him functionally female + Macbeth’s
identification as valor’s minion redefines the battle as a contest between the half female couple
Fortune/Macdonwald and the all-male couple Valor/Macbeth.

In the play, the problem of masculinity is solved by eliminating the female. Macbeth is a recuperative
consolidation of male power, a consolidation in the face of the threat unleashed in Hamlet and especially in
King Lear and never fully contained in those plays. In Macbeth, maternal power is given its most virulent
sway and the abolished at the end of the play in which we are purely in male realm.