An often overlooked character in Macbeth is Macduff's wife. She can be viewed as a foil to Lady Macbeth. While Lady Macbeth shirks the role of meek and dutiful wife and seeks power through demonic means, Macduff's wife embodies the stereotype of a docile, passive woman. For this, she pays the ultimate price, but through her character we can see the limited agency available to women in the play and in the culture it is a part of.
Notably, Macduff's wife does not have a name. Similar to Lady Macbeth, she is known by her husband's name only, but in the case of Macduff's wife she does not even have a title. In Act 4 Scene 2, after Macbeth learned that Macduff has fled to England and has ordered the murder of his family, Macduff's wife laments her abandonment: "To leave his wife, to leave his babes... He loves us not." She is afraid that, whether guilty or not, Macduff's fleeing to England makes him appear guilty, and puts her family at risk for retaliation. To her, he left them behind, unguarded and vulnerable. As a woman, she has very little power to protect herself.
Even her son is aware that she is vulnerable without a man's protection, asking her, "Nay, how will you do for a husband?" Even as young as he is, the boy recognizes that his mother alone is in a dangerous position.
Shortly after, a messenger arrives to warn her that a murderer is approaching her household. Macduff's wife has no time to act and no protection--first her husband has left, then Ross, and then the messenger. She is alone, with no where to go. She knows she is innocent, but that bad things still happen to innocent people, while evil people are often rewarded. At the very end, she questions the virtue of being a meek and virtuous woman: "I am in this earthly world, where to do harm is often laudable, to do good sometime accounted dangerous folly. Why, then, alas, do I put up that womanly defense, to say I have done no harm?"
Macbeth might be read through a lens that questions the female stereotype of docility and obedience. Both Lady Macbeth and Macduff's wife meet untimely ends. One is a victim of power, the other abuses power. But both women demonstrate the limited ability of women to access power, and suggest that, in a patriarchal society, it might only be attained for women through demonic means.
One of the best examples in Macbeth of gender stereotypes, specifically the way in which women were expected to behave, comes when Lady Macbeth receives the message that Macbeth is returning home in act 1, scene 5. It is evident from Lady Macbeth's speech here that she—and, by analogy, the Shakespearean audience—believe that the cruel and ambitious parts of her nature are unwomanly and not to be expected in a woman. So strongly does she feel this that she calls upon the "spirits" to "unsex me here," or divorce her from her feminine nature so that she might have the strength to shore up Macbeth's ambition. She feels that her husband will not, alone, have the will to pursue his goals, and therefore she is determined to "pour [her] spirits in [his] ear."
In order to do this, then, Lady Macbeth must become something crueler and more lacking in compunction than any woman should be, according to the gender stereotyping of the time. She calls to the spirits to fill her with "direst cruelty," stemming any "passage to remorse." The direct connection between this and the removal of femininity is made evident in her demand that the "murdering ministers" take the milk "for gall" from her "woman's breasts."
Later, this idea is revisited when Lady Macbeth is encouraging her husband to "screw [his] courage to the sticking-place" by questioning his masculinity. When he dared kill Duncan, she says, "then you were a man." If he hesitates in this pursuit, his weakness makes him less of a man. Lady Macbeth demonstrates her own fixedness of purpose by stating that had she believed Macbeth would be so hesitant she would have "pluck'd [her] nipple from" the "boneless gums" of her own child. Maternal love, one of the key tenets of femininity, is presented in this image: Lady Macbeth is suggesting that for Macbeth to turn away from his purpose is as unmanly as it would be unwomanly for Lady Macbeth to have killed her own child.
Ambition and even cruelty are very clearly identified as masculine traits in this play, with Lady Macbeth becoming "unwomanly" in the characteristics she embodies, while women are believed to be softer, sweeter, and less resolute.
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