Lady Macbeth Literary Analysis

Macbeth Literary Analysis Paper

Lady Macbeth, a hard and cruel women, is the one who urges Macbeth to smear the servants with blood and lay the daggers by them in order to avoid raising any suspicions to be directed towards him after the murder was completed. In Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth not only pressures Macbeth to commit horrific murder to nab power from King Duncan, but also to frame others for the bloody crimes. Lady Macbeth corrupts Macbeth's purity by pressuring him into committing the crimes he was unsure about committing. Today, peers pressure teens to partake in risky and dangerous behavior, such as drugs and street races, while they also indirectly pressure, or influence, the way each other dress and act. Lady

Peer influence is not as force full as peer pressure, but a good example would be “I want these shoes because I am the only kid at school who doesn’t have them.” In a scholastic article, it is written that some peer pressure is more accurately described as, “It is probably more accurate to refer to this as peer influence, or social influence to adopt a particular type of behavior, dress, or attitude in order to be accepted as part of a group of your equals”(Peer Pressure: It’s…). This is a form of corruption because it warps the ability for teens to decide things for themselves and think on their own. Teens are influenced in a lot of ways, such as “dress, behavior and attitude”. Such ideals can be seen when instances of a friend group disliking somebody leads to the teen in the group to also start to dislike the person,without spoken reason. Peers influence can be just as strong as peer pressure in the way it makes teens feel left out if they don’t join fads or group opinions. Lady Macbeth uses peer influence when she doesn’t directly tell Macbeth what he should do but by telling him what she would do. When Macbeth has doubts about killing King Duncan, she tells him, “What beast was't, then, That made you break this enterprise to me?...And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this”(1.7.54-55 and 66-67). Lady

This ultimately leads him to plan several more murders. She uses both peer pressure and peer influence to make him commit the murder. In the same fashion, teens use peer pressure to bend someone’s innocence towards the direction of potentially dangerous actions . When teens pressure their peers into doing dishonest things (stealing, cutting class, ect.) their innocence is taken away. Lady Macbeth pressures Macbeth in his decisions in a similar way to the way teens use peer pressure against each