The Shakespearean Woman

Interestingly, looking at systemic misogyny (particularly in American culture) has been a common theme in many of my courses this week. As part of this idea, I have been looking at the way woman characters are written and comparing/contrasting the the way women are written by male writers vs female writers, as well as the time period of the literature and how that plays a role in the ideas about women in society.

As an example, I have been reading William Faulkner and Toni Morrison in a Writers of Significance course. Although these authors share a lot of stylistic elements in their writing, the role of female characters is one of their largest differences.

Morrison's novels frequently surround the idea of womanhood/motherhood and focus on the strength and perspectives of such characters. Faulkner on the other hand writes primarily male driven plots where the women characters are less dynamic.

Leading into Macbeth and Shakespearean play-writting, Lady Macbeth is the only female character we see early on in Act 1 of the play. Not surprising and before getting to see very much of her character it might be easy to assume that she is just the "token" woman, serving only as the main character's wife. In plenty of other plays of this era (Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, and both Shakespearean plays I've read: Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet) we see few female roles, all of whom were played by men in actual performances at the time, that display woman as troubled, weak, unable to control themselves, inane, hysterical, and even subservient to men. In both of these Shakespearean plays we see women characters take their own lives. While there are male characters that also end their own lives, it seems to be that the men do it for prideful or fearful reasons (somehow more rational) where women do it in states of hysteria. My biggest point is that many of these female characters are specifically made to seem weak and unable to take care of themselves.

Now reading Macbeth, we have an initially surprising lead female role. While she is still the only woman in a play full of male kings and nobles that control all of what is happening, behind the scenes it seems as if Lady Macbeth is a more interesting (and devious) character than a lot of the woman written in other fifteenth century plays. Lady Macbeth is currently pulling the strings in her plot to have Macbeth murder King Duncan, assuming this will bring her and her husband to more power. Unfortunately, seeing this surprisingly strong female character is still made less significant because she is immoral and corrupt, implying to me that the woman who are not "in their place" or hysterical and unable to control themselves are secretively malicious and unjustly in search of power they don't deserve. And, to further the terribly misogynistic writing of the woman, *SPOILER* Lady Macbeth "goes crazy" and kills herself in the end... So we aren't fully given a character who gives even a shot at redemption in the crafting of the woman character.

Says: "Was Lady Macbeth naturally evil, or was she just portraying someone she wanted to be?"  How do you think Shakespeare would respond to this question about his character? Even in this question we see an obvious conundrum because either way Lady Macbeth is displayed negatively as evil or desperate. 

It's definitely important to remember that the era this play was written in certainly did treat women differently in society and is drastically different than the era we live in, however I can't say the women in our media are represented fairly even today (google The Bechtel Test if you're curious of an example). These representations in plays and all kinds of writing are definitely windows into the societal perspectives of the time-period in which they were written.