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As audience members, we need memory in order to experience difference as well as similarity.1
- Linda Hutcheon
Lady Macbeths status as one of Shakespeare's most devious and fascinating characters has been recognized in the proliferation of criticism on and adaptive works oí Macbeth over the past 400 years. Of particular concern has been how she achieves her ambitions and advances her and her husband's political interests while working within a stringently patriarchal society. One way critics have explained Lady Macbeths relative success is through her associations with demonic forces and the fateful powers of the notorious three witches. Others have looked at how in the play she verbally manipulates gender values and expectations to suit her purposes. As Cristina León Alfar reminds us, "Lady Macbeths 'evil' is ... an ideologically inscribed notion that is often linked in our literary tradition to strong female characters who seek power, who reject filial loyalty as prior to self-loyalty, and who pursue desire in all its forms - romantic, adulterate, authoritarian, and even violent."2
In Shakespeare's play, Lady Macbeths portrayal begins with the powerful elements of her ambitious and successful plotting of Duncan's demise, effective rhetorical manipulation of her husband to "be a man" and take action, and her position - potentially - as Macbeths equal in their relationship, his desired "dear partner of greatness." And yet, for the most part, these powerful moments are all in the service of disorder (of tyrannical usurpation of the monarchy and the usurpation of control within her marriage) and the unnatural (through her affiliations with the supernatural in the "unsex me here" speech). Her guilt- filled sleepwalking scene and later suicide register therefore as bodily signs of her corruption and as (self-)punishment for her transgressive, "evil" ways.
From the beginning, Lady Macbeths cultural value has generally included the sense that she is monstrous - she not only has crossed the boundaries of appropriate behavior for a wife and subject, but she has called on demonic forces to help her achieve her goals. The play's narrative about her ambition to obtain position and fame collapses into a heavily gendered cautionary tale about tyrannical overreachers and their demise. Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth borrows from earlier "monstrous women" stereotypes but also provides an iconic model...