Lady Macbeth How Guilt Affects The Mind Essay

Lady Macbeth is a superior option to Macbeth when it comes to showing how guilt affects the mind. She has gone through a tremendous quantity of horrendous things and has committed some despicable crimes. One of the most important factors is that she is a witness to death and an accomplice of murder. All of these actions have been weighing down her mind and causing her guilt. Several of these actions have caused her to experience insomnia. She does not want to go to bed because she does not want to have to process what she has done. However, when she does acquire restless sleep she tends to sleepwalk. While she is sleepwalking she recounts her previous actions and she expresses her guilt. She verbally talks about her bad deeds and this leads

She struggles with the notion that she had a hand in King Duncan's murder. She did not want to murder King Duncan herself because she saw her father in him. This caused her to force Macbeth to do the deed himself. When he failed to plant the weapons on the guards, Lady Macbeth had no other option but to go and do it herself. This caused her to see King Duncan dead in his bed and get her hands dirty with his blood. Even though she was a power-hungry woman who would do anything to get her husband on the throne, she is still a human who saw her father in the king. This would later cause her even more guilt that she would have to deal with. She would rather not deal with all of her emotional trauma so she would pretend that everything is okay. This would in turn cause her to struggle with insomnia even more because it is known that “ both urgency and… processing were related to insomnia severity and that the effect of urgency on insomnia was mediated by… processing” (Schmidt, et al.). Lady Macbeth knows that if something were to go wrong she and her husband's lives would be ruined. This could even go worse for her and her husband because they could be sentenced to death. The likely hood of that happing is high and she has an urgency to not let that happen. If Macbeth were to find out she is feeling awful about King Duncan's murder then he himself would start to spiral out of control. This would increase their likely

Even in sleep her mind is filled with guilt and she is ill at ease. This causes her to sleepwalk and this is “an expression of Lady Macbeth’s internal anguish over the grave sins she has already committed” (Umanath, et al.). Her sleepwalking shows her true inner feelings and thoughts toward what she has done. Even in sleep, she cannot escape her guilt. It follows her around like a dark cloud. While she sleepwalks she talks about her sins. Lady Macbeth once said “Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand” (Shakespeare, act 5, scene 1). Her guilt makes her smell the blood of King Duncan and see his blood staining her hand. If she were to have no guilt then she would not be thinking about what she has done and she would not be projecting her guilt through sleepwalking. She would have no connections to what she has done while she is asleep if she lacks the guilt of her actions. Her guilt is the underlying cause of her