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Societal Norms In Macbeth By William Shakespeare

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Narratives serve to explore societal norms by commenting and shaping ideas that reflect and challenge prevalent cultural and social values. By continuously reconceptualising narratives pertaining to power, authors are able to enlighten the anxieties and tensions of dominant historical paradigms. Narratives that explore power as an overarching concept, often display pompous characters seeking opportunities to extend their power and the impact of their unwarranted power on cultural values within society.Consequently, narratives are able to delve deeper into the complexities of gender roles within the social values of that era. Shakespeare’s text, ‘Macbeth’, constantly conveys the Jacobean era’s values of the Great Chain of being and how its defiance led to inevitable turmoil. Similarly, Gillard’s speech confronts the idea of presumed gender roles …show more content…

Through the intricate construction of characters, Shakespeare elucidates the social anxieties and tension surrounding Tudor England. Lady Macbeth, an ambitious character whose actions challenge the societal norms of the Jacobean era, in the end, led her to be consumed by her own psychological trauma. The unraveling of Lady Macbeth’s descent into her mental state is evident in how her mindset shifts throughout the play. At the beginning Lady Macbeth’s unchecked ambition was growing rapidly, however she was bound by her gender, thus she plead, “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty!”. Through the utilization of a metaphor, Shakespeare is able to vividly display Lady Macbeth’s profound desire to shed her feminine qualities, which she associates with weakness, for the perceived strength and cruelty of masculinity. The phrase, “unsex me here”, Lady Macbeth is directly rejecting the traditional attributes of womanhood that are set by society to seek a metaphorical transformation that strips away her humanity. By

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Lady Macbeth asks for supernatural help to “unsex” her but through the use of the imperative adverb “here” we learn that this is a demand. This highlights her misconception of power as her speech radiates control despite being the one who is asking for the “spirits” to help her. By asking to be “unsex(ed)” Lady Macbeth acknowledges the limitations of her gender which raises the question of why she would want to deviate from the traditional social norms in the first place? One can come to the conclusion that she fears being displaced from society as during this era a woman’s role was to serve her husband and provide him with children - the inability to do so meant one became disposed of and was often referred to as a “walking mort”.

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Written by Shakespeare, “Macbeth” offers a journey, a deep analysis of fate and free will altering a man’s suppressed desire; driven by supernatural forces, to his closest loved one. One of Shakespeare’s most compelling characters Macbeth is depicted as a praised hero, a loyal and good warrior soon entangled with the likes of dark witches, his foils, and his wife that initiate the downfall of his short reign as king.” Macbeth” is an inevitable tragedy tainted by the grasp of corrupting power and ambition, a trail of destruction breaking moral constraints. ” Fair is foul, foul is fair”, appearances are deceiving some hidden behind intricate prophecies, or heroic acts; as a whole

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Shakespeare’s tragedy, Macbeth, focuses on the tumultuous events that surround a regicide. Despite being the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays, in his critical study of the play A. C. Bradley concludes that due to its vehement nature the audience is left with an impression “not of brevity but of speed” . The principal female character of Lady Macbeth is arguably one of his most contentious. Consumed with intense passion, ambition and greed she challenges the subservient role of the traditional Elizabethan woman. She has disturbed, horrified and intrigued both contemporary and modern audiences alike through her powerful diction.

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627 Words | 3 Pages

In his play, Macbeth, Shakespeare uses the ambitious construct of Lady Macbeth to portray his critical perception of the patriarchal Jacobean society. Consequently, Macbeth’s death is not displayed onstage reflecting gender inequality and the dangerous repercussions of disallowing women to obtain power. The persecution of Lady Macbeth fuels her desire to garner power, ultimately resulting in her manipulating and emasculating her husband to commit regicide. Sexism and the marginalisation of women causes Macbeth to call upon evil spirits to ‘Unsex me here’. ‘Unsex’ implies that Macbeth is aware of the societal disadvantage of being a woman and desires to be stripped of her feminine characteristics allowing her to become more powerful.

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1641 Words | 7 Pages

Within gothic texts in literary history, leading female characters tend to defy societal gender normalities, contrary to what society is accustomed to. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Euripides’ Medea, the authors challenge the patriarchal system of their times through the distinctive masculine characteristics of Lady Macbeth and Medea. During Elizabethan and Greek theatre, women were conventionalized to be soft, gentle, and weak compared to men, who ought to be strong heroic figures. As powerful female characters are hard to come by in the time period, it is critical to examine how Lady Macbeth and Medea, a sorceress, exhibit masculinity through their evil and fierce characters within a supernatural atmosphere. My paper argues that both Shakespeare

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Through Lady Macbeth’s change from ruthless and masculin to insane, Shakespeare illustrates the impact of murder. Shakespeare portrays Lady Macbeth as masculine, and ruthless in order to illustrate unmerciful cruelty. Just after Macbeth tells Lady Macbeth about his encounter with the three witches, Lady Macbeth prayed to be stripped of any emotions. She prayed to be unsexed which doing so she would have no grieve, guilt, or regret towards killing King Duncan.

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“Art not without ambition, but without The illness should attend it,”(1.5.19-20). Can one be ambitious without being corrupted by evil? The theme of ambition is prevalent in Macbeth, a tragedy written by William Shakespeare that follows Scottish thane Macbeth from his rise to power to his downfall, demonstrated through the corrupted ambition of not only Macbeth, but also Scotland and its other citizens. Through the theme, he also explores gender roles by expressing his explicit aversion to those norms–an unexpected notion in the patriarchal society of Scotland in the early 1600s. Ultimately, Act 1, Scene 5 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is the most significant scene in the play as it sets the tone for the rest of the play by encapsulating the overarching theme of ambition and moral downfall along with gender roles through the incorporation of a variety of literary devices such as allusions, couplets,

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In Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth, women drive the play forward, pushing Macbeth to make decisions, act rashly, and ultimately go insane. From the beginning, supernatural beings named “The Three Witches” tell prophecies that propel the brave Scottish general Macbeth into thoughts of obtaining the crown, eventually leading to Lady Macbeth, Macbeth's wife and a strong and more stereotypically “masculine” female character to coerce Macbeth into killing King Duncan to become the next King. Following the first murder, more ensue, which Lady Macbeth convinces Macbeth not to confess to and in the end, the guilt drives them both to insanity. This essay argues that women play a vital role in this play, and without them, little would happen. Lady Macbeth

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In the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare, neighboring characters around the central protagonist, and the lead himself, evolved from and endured many treacherous psychological transformations. Amongst the characters, none experienced a greater change in mental health to the extent that Macbeth had. Through the entirety of the play, Macbeth’s morals and perception of aspiration are hindered by greed, ambition, selfishness, and external forces. By using dramatic devices such as dramatic irony, nemesis, and soliloquies, Shakespeare is able to bring focus to the deterioration of Macbeth’s character.

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In “Macbeth: The Prisoner of Gender,” Robert Kimbrough explores the topic of manliness in Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth. Kimbrough begins by examining how masculinity and femininity came about in the first place, stating that the origin can best come from the “Judeo-Christian version of God the Creator” (179). The differences between males and females created a hierarchy in Shakespeare’s time, where males were on the top and females were on the bottom. Kimbrough states that the differences betweens the two genders are “matters of the mind,” and believes “Shakespeare sensed that so long as one remains exclusively female or exclusively male, that person will be ... denied human growth" (179). These “matters of the mind” are what Shakespeare tackles

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890 Words | 4 Pages

This story of Macbeth is yet another brilliance work of Shakespeare that brings the incumbent attention of treason and feminism to the world. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth shows that every human being has both masculine and feminine characteristics. In summary, we know that we are not all innocent humans. Even in the primordial story of Adam and Eve, both man and woman brought the fall upon us. Both Lady Macbeth and Macbeth plotted the king to be in the shambles to receive higher power, so they should be equally punished as for God did the same to Adam and Eve.

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1372 Words | 6 Pages

Through the course of ‘Macbeth’, masculinity is presented as a driving force to Macbeth’s crimes, making it a vital theme. In this essay, focus will be on masculinity’s presentation through Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. In the beginning, Shakespeare portrays Macbeth as “valiant”: a prized masculine quality and the key to respect in their society. However, this trait becomes warped along the play. Furthermore, Lady Macbeth has power comparable to man’s

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434 Words | 2 Pages

In William Shakespeare’s tragedy, Macbeth, the protagonist desperately tries to live up to the image of a man that his society portrays. The search for his manhood leads him to violent acts that inevitably get him killed. In this tragedy, male and female roles are constantly discussed and defined. Both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth equate masculinity to violence and aggression. They both believe that in order to be a real man, then a man must perform violent acts when necessary.

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859 Words | 4 Pages

This certainty of her shows us that women can be crueler and ambitious than men. It’s certain that because of the constraints of her society, Lady Macbeth relies on trickery and manipulation rather than violence to gain her desires. She only has one misery which is a request to have an exclusive final and perhaps more outstanding by her commanding existence of mind and relentless self-possession. Her purposes formed by powerless and womanly regrets than by the hardness of her heart or want of natural

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However, Lady Macbeth’s power depends on her husband’s, due to her disempowerment in the realm of the political. She believes her husband’s political power relies on him conforming to a more masculine identity. In order to convince Macbeth to undertake this transformation, like she did, Lady Macbeth must subvert the stereotypical role of a submissive wife and become domineering. This leads to her exercising power in the only form she can, that is, attacking Macbeth’s masculinity as she states: “When you durst do it, then you were a man; And to be more than what you were, you would Be so much more the man.”

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