Oct 7, 2008

Macbeth | Gender and Sex Roles

In this excerpt, Jarold Ramsey argues that one of the organizing themes of Macbeth is that of manliness. Furthermore, the critic maintains, the more Macbeth pursues his ideal of manliness, the less humane he becomes, until he at last forfeits humanity, only to realize that his concept of manhood is worthless. Ramsey then explores Lady Macbeth's repudiation of gender and her cruel questioning of Macbeth's manhood in an attempt to turn his wavering over Duncan's murder into determination.

One of the organizing themes of Macbeth is the theme of manliness: the word (with its cognates) echoes and re-echoes through the scenes, and the play is unique for the persistence and subtlety with which Shakespeare dramatizes the paradoxes of self-conscious "manhood." In recoiling from Macbeth's outrageous kind of manliness, we are prompted to reconsider what we really mean when we use the word in praising someone. Macbeth's career may be described in terms of a terrible progressive disjunction between the manly and the humane. In any civilized culture—even among the Samurai,...