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Stephanie Ericsson's Macbeth: The Ways We Lie

906 Words4 Pages

The Ways Lady Macbeth Lies People fib every single day, consciously and unconsciously. Sometimes the lies are transparent and it is not too difficult to read between the lines to acknowledge the truth. According to Stephanie Ericsson’s The Ways We Lie, there are many subcategories. These include deflection, omission, delusions, stereotypes, dismissal and more. Many of these are present in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As portrayed in the play, lying can be a big deal because it can alter one’s decisions, causing confusion and other dangerous changes in the future. One character who tells many lies throughout Macbeth is Macbeth’s wife, Lady Macbeth. One type of lie she tells is delusion, defined by Ericsson as “the tendency to see excuses as facts” …show more content…

Stephanie Ericsson claims, “Dismissing feelings, perceptions, or even the raw facts of a situation ranks as a kind of lie that can do as much damage to a person as any other kind of lie” (414). After Macbeth slew Duncan, Lady Macbeth reassured, “A little water clears us of this deed” (II, ii, 86). By saying this, she is dismissing the fact that she and her husband just plotted and killed the king of Scotland and making it seem like an everyday ordeal. She also stated, “Consider it not so deeply” (II, ii, 41). The way she says this is similar to saying “No big deal.” This displays dismissal because she is pushing the horror of the crime out of her own mind, making herself believe it was …show more content…

Lady Macbeth is a character who lies quite frequently which allows for strong consequences including a husband with blood lust and a loss of sanity. Evidently, Lady Macbeth’s lies were more harmful than helpful; however, can some lies be more beneficial? Maybe lying to protect someone or to save their feelings would not be so wrong. Then again, maybe it would. Out-and-out lies are described by Ericsson as a type of lie that “doesn’t try to refashion reality, it tries to refute it” (413) and deflecting is when one deflects attention from something they choose to hide by not bringing it up (411). Are these types of lies just as harmful to the decisions of others as dismissal and delusion were to Lady Macbeth, or are they no different? As shown in Macbeth, lying is not something to play with because the outcome never seems to work as

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