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Gender Roles In Macbeth

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Gender roles of Shakespeare.

In Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, a play about the efforts took for Macbeth to become king, there are many gender roles that took place.These roles are still pretty common, but are not as biased in current times. Some of these gender roles include characters such as Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, The Weird Sisters, and Macbeth himself. These roles make up this tragic play and set a theme. In the play Macbeth, Shakespeare uses irony and allusions to set up these roles.
The first sign of gender roles is in Macbeth's character. He is a weak and emotional character. During the 17th century emotionally unstable was thought to be of a woman’s trait. For example, in the play Macbeth, he has hallucinations and thoughts that harm others. He wants these to go away and looks to others such as Lady Macbeth for help. Macbeth is weak and wants to wash the blood stains of Duncan off of his hands and be strong, which is a more masculine trait during that time period. After the first murder, Duncan, Macbeth no longer looks to others for help. He becomes a man. Macbeth’s reaction to kill the chambermaids before killing the others is seen as something a …show more content…

She is asking the spirits to make her more cruel and like a man. She knows with the cruelty of a man that she could kill Duncan herself. However she is too weak because he looks like her father. Therefore Lady Macbeth wants the spirits to “unsex” her and she wants to be strong like the men of the story. During the end she becomes strong and takes the task upon herself to finish Macbeth’s job. Another major gender role in Macbeth is played by the witches. When Macbeth and Banquo come across them they seem as if they are disgusted by their manly character traits. One of these traits includes a beard. Women are not to have beards. They are thought to be fragile and small. They do not have facial hair and hats. The men were disgusted by this and to this day still

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She wishes to be freed from the shackles of gender, and to have the freedom to act on her masculine traits. She says “Come, you spirits / That tends on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty!”. In this quote, she is expressing that she wants to get rid of her feminine traits----specifically those traits that would prevent her from killing Duncan. Lady Macbeth is stating that she wants to be free of the idea that women are the lesser sex because of their bodies.

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