1At the onset, Macbeth makes us face the dogmatic riddle put forth in the cryptic statement of “fair is foul and foul is fair1”. The interchangeability of fair and foul opens up the possibility of a dual perspective while, at the same time, nullifying all linguistic and semantic definitions. This equation or de-differentiation seems to encapsulate the whole mystery of the play. Shakespeare seems to warn us from the start that his play will pervert all patterns of normality and topple all of our complacent devices about what is fair and what is foul. From this very moment, the blurring of demarcating lines starts at all levels. Neither the human nor the cosmic world is spared, “confusion (makes) his masterpiece” (2.3.59). In the feudal system that governs Scotland, the Lord-Vassal hierarchy is usurped in the natural and harmonious order of the universe much cherished by the Elizabethans, as horses turn cannibals and eat each other and the cycle of day and night is upset (2.4.1-18), and also in the gender roles where the general and particularly Elizabethan assumptions about men and women are inverted and desecrated. It is this latter pattern of reversal that our present study will examine, as Macbeth, beyond its political dimension, is a domestic play where royal success is understood according to a perverted definition of masculinity.

2The world of Macbeth is ruled by the feminine and maternal figures represented in the witches and Lady Macbeth. The tragic downfall of Macbeth, though he wittingly imputes it to his “vaulting ambition” (1.7.27), should be set against the backdrop of the network he entangles himself in, a network that his wife and the witches, though unknown to each other, weave around him. The witches’ biological and social representations and the striking similarities that Lady Macbeth offers with them, make up the essential pattern of sexual de-differentiation in the play that will directly influence the trope of masculinity.

3Before even their meeting with Macbeth and Banquo who wonder at their androgynous physical features (“you should be women/and yet your beards forbid me to interpret/That you are so” says Banquo, 1.3.43-44), the witches display a fantasy world fraught with images of sexual perversion. Denied chestnuts by a sailor’s wife, one of them gleefully projects herself into a “rat without a tail” (1.3.8) which, despite its hermaphroditic handicap, will “do and do and do” (1.3.9). The sexual implication of this euphemistic but triple action becomes obvious when the witch explains what she will “do”: Beside raising tempests to toss the sailor’s bark, and exhausting him with lack of sleep, she will “drain him dry as hay” (1.3.17). The half incubus, half succubus demon into which she will turn, this rat without a tail, will drain the sailor off his semen by repetitive sexual assaults, and thereby cause his sterility, making him “dwindle, peak, and pine” (1.3.22). The fantastic image of the castrated rat is completed by the sudden display, by that same witch, of a “pilot’s thumb” (1.3.26), which she most probably takes from underneath her clothes and exhibits, in a bawdy gesture, as a phallic fetishistic object that would invest her with magical power and double her whimsical projection into a hermaphrodite creature.

4These images that Marjorie Garber locates at the heart of the “gender undecidability” or “gender anxiety” that permeates the play2 bring about the representation of the witches as unwomanly and anti-social figures. Shakespeare here incorporates elements of the village witch stereotype such as those shared by the popular beliefs of his time. Always constructed in terms of the feminine and the maternal, the witch is an ugly and old woman whose post-menopausal body sets at the opposite of the generous, fertile and feminine body of the ideal woman and whose attitude and behaviour keep on the margins of neighbourly interactions and community life. Much like early modern village witches, the Weird Sisters in Macbeth are old women who wreak vengeance on people, most probably neighbours (like the sailor’s wife), destroy households, harm domestic animals (one of them says she’s been “killing swine”, 1.3.2), cause sterility in men and women and practice necromancy or black magic by the use of bodily parts cut from fresh corpses they dig up in churchyards (like the pilot’s thumb and all the miscellaneous limbs they throw in their cauldron in Act 4 scene 1). These malevolent witches are paradoxically good mothers to the imps or “familiars” they rear. In the first scene of the play, two of the witches are most likely solicited for food by their familiars, one by her cat Graymalkin and the other by Paddock, a toad (1.1.9-10)3.

5But beyond the stereotype of the village-level witch, Shakespeare adds the profile of the gentry-level one, who is constructed as the enemy of God and of the State. Hence, on the political level, the destructive power of the witch is conveyed in the dangerous dynastic motherhood she opposes to the structure of the patriarchal society4. In the play, Macbeth feeds on the witches’ prophetic words for his rebellion against Duncan, the pater patria or father of the nation, and leans on their spiritual guidance for royal security. Being the vice-gerent of God on earth, King Duncan represents both a patriarchal and a godly rule which is threatened by the marginal and subversive figure of the witch who tempts Macbeth with the idea of circumventing patrilineal government. But if the three witches operate from without the social sphere, on the heath or in churchyards, Lady Macbeth emerges as a much more sinister witch from within the domestic sphere, the house or the hearth that is invested, in early modern Europe, with ideological significances of womanly virtue, household containment, and even sexual, economic, and political order5. Within this enclosed space, Lady Macbeth plays the roles traditionally prescribed to women: She acts as a woman, a wife, a mother, and a hostess, but in a peculiarly perverted way.

6Upon reading the letter where Macbeth breaks the news of the witches’ prophecies, Lady Macbeth confesses that she “fear(s) (his) nature” (1.5.14) that would preclude him from gaining royalty. The metaphor she uses to illustrate the softhearted temperament of her husband is not devoid of sarcastic undertones where Macbeth’s body, “too full of the milk of human kindness” (1.5.15), suggests that of a lactating mother. Moreover, she disparages him for his honesty and nobility of mind, that she perceives as signs of meekness and cowardice, and promises to use “the valour of (her) tongue”, metonymically her means of influence and persuasion, to “pour (her) spirits in (his) ear” (1.5.24-25). This highly sexual image casts Lady Macbeth into a man whose penis (tongue) discharges semen (suggested by the use of “pour”) into the ear (vagina) of the womanised Macbeth, to impregnate him with her verbal shrewdness and convince him of the best way to get the crown.

7In the Duncan issue, she assumes her feminine role of comforter and helper when Macbeth shows signs of hesitation and she urges him to: “screw (his) courage to the sticking place and (they)’ll not fail” (1.7.60-61). But as the piece of advice she gives cunningly aims at toppling the patriarchal rule of Duncan and causing havoc in the realm of Scotland, Lady Macbeth invests the role of Grand Mother Eve, the temptress that caused the bane of mankind and obsessed the Elizabethan mentality, nourished with the Calvinistic ideas of the original sin and the Fall incurred from it.

8After the murder, “she heartens her husband in housewifely terms”, as Frances Dolan suggests, urging him to wash his hands from blood and put on his nightgown6. By emerging as the bad counsellor in the household, Lady Macbeth perverts the ethical and Christian image of the ideal housewife and helpmate that the precepts of married companionship require in the homilies and sermons of early modern Europe. According to the numerous marital conduct books written in England during the Renaissance – such as Robert Dod’s and John Cleaver’s Godly Form of Household Government (1598) – and in the influential Very fruitful and Pleasant Booke Called the Instruction of a Christian Woman by Lewis Vives (translated from the Latin in 1529), women are required to observe wifely submission and obedience, to give good counsel to their husbands, to stay at home and to respect the values of hospitality7. Bad counsellor to her husband, Lady Macbeth is also the very opposite of the “fair and noble hostess” (1.6.25) that Duncan mistakes her for, since she contrives an evil plot at home. She prepares for “malice domestic” and clears off its traces with the very zeal of a housekeeper busy with house chores (3.2.25). It is therefore the very locus of hospitality that she desecrates and it is “under (her) battlements” that Duncan is killed (1.5.38)8.

9In the scene where she invokes the daemonic spirits to possess her, she metaphorically undergoes a process of defeminization and worse, of dehumanization out of which she comes metamorphosed into a monster, a composite creature at the very antipode of the woman/mother image. In fact, Lady Macbeth asks the spirits to subvert all the feminine traits in her. She fantasises a biological transformation by which she would be deprived of her sex and made sterile, as her menstrual blood would be blocked:

Come, you spirits,
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here
And fill me from the crown to the toe topfull
Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood […] (1.5.38-41).

10In the gynaecological treatises of the time, thick blood was a sign of amenorrhoea or post-menopausal sterility. In The Sick Woman’s Private Looking-Glass (1636), John Sadler explains that if the suppression of the menstruals is not natural, it is “morbifical”, that is producing disease, such as apoplexies, frenzies, melancholy, etc.9. Besides, in their treatise on witchcraft, Malleus Maleficarum (1486), Henrich Kramer and Jacob Spranger state that the unnatural stopping of menstrual blood is a consequence of bewitchment10. Hence, Lady Macbeth projects herself into the hard-bodied witch, who is beyond maternity11.

11Lady Macbeth’s third entreaty from the spirits, to “come to her woman’s breasts/and take her milk for gall” (1.5.45-46) suggests the malevolent nurture of the witches feeding their familiars. Gall is akin to choler or yellow bile, an acid liquid that was thought to insufflate boldness and bitterness, and which, in his self-indictment, Hamlet acknowledges to be lacking: “I am pigeon-livered and lack gall” (2.2.529). Lady Macbeth here offers to the “murdering ministers” her motherly breasts filled with gall instead of milk, while her husband is “too full of the milk of human kindness” and while she will later imagine herself, in a Medea-like rage, dashing the brains out of the “babe that milks [her]” (1.7.55). Out of this rite of passage, Lady Macbeth emerges callous, pitiless and stolid. Nothing will “shake [her] fell purpose” (1.5.44), the ruthless prospect of murdering Duncan which she sets her mind on. By dispelling all the feminine and maternal qualities in her, that is by achieving this biological perversion, she will strive to distort the moral perception of manhood in her husband, reshape his understanding of manliness and instil in him her poisonous speech, the outcome of this noxious mixture that now fuels her whole being.

12Lady Macbeth’s understanding, or misunderstanding, of what true manhood is conforms with the machiavellian perception according to which beastly force constitutes the paragon of virtù. The Roman word virtus designates both, virtues as moral qualities, and manly fortitude or valiantness in war; however, it is this second, narrow sense of the word that the Romans exalted, as Plutarch explains in his Lives12, and that Machiavelli means by his virtù. According to Lady Macbeth’s standards of true manliness, to be a man is to exceed one’s humanity or humane nature and to make desire – here the desire to become a king – and act agree with each other. When Macbeth wavers in his decision to kill Duncan, she taunts him with cowardice and touches the very sensitive chord in him, his sense of manliness:

Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour,
As thou art in desire? (1.7.39-41).

13In her hierarchical order of manhood, to be less than a man is to be a beast, and contrarily, to be more than a man is to achieve the ideal status in the rank of manhood:

What beast was it then
That made you break this enterprise to me?
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 (1.7. 47-51).

14At this stage, Macbeth’s standards are totally opposed to hers as he deems excessive manifestations of masculinity to be a perversion, a reduction or even a nullification of true manhood:

I dare do all that may become a man,
Who dares do more is none (1.7.46-47).

15The “none” is to be understood as synonymous with beast, the station above rocks and plants but below that of mankind in the hierarchy of nature or the chain of being much cherished by the Elizabethans. Hence, Macbeth’s understanding of what “becomes a man” corresponds to “the comprehensive ideal growing out of the familiar Christian concept that man is between the beasts and the angels in the hierarchy of creation”, as Eugene Waith puts it13. To be worthy of the rank of manhood, a man must achieve a harmonious mixture of soldierly bravery and moral gentility, and complement his Machiavellian fortitude, or virtù, with the moral meaning of the Roman word. In Julius Caesar, Anthony praises Brutus for the loftiness and magnanimity that temper his courage:

His life was gentle and the elements
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world “this was a man”14.

16In Macbeth, when the English camp receives the news of the murder of Lady Macduff and her children, Malcolm urges Macduff to “dispute it like a man” (4.3.222). He answers: “I shall do so,/But I must also feel it as a man” (4.3.223-24). Macduff seems to comply with the comprehensive definition of man, who is not a brutish beast bereft of feelings, but whose humane qualities encompass the visceral instincts of the fighter and the transcendental emotions of the husband and the father.

17In contrast with his wife, Macbeth is aware of the moral nature of man. His mental torment grows out of the conflict between the narrow concept of man as the courageous male and the more inclusive concept, the comprehensive ideal of man as a being whose nature distinguishes him from the beasts (“I dare do all that may become a man”, 1.7.46, emphasis mine). Bullied into subscribing to her challenging definition of manhood and therefore into accepting the plan to kill Duncan, Macbeth uxoriously relinquishes his standards of manhood. Hence, he starts his descent into the realm of the beastly and sets off on a criminal career out of which he emerges utterly metamorphosed into one of Scotland’s “rarer monsters”, that Macduff promises to expose “Painted upon a pole and underwrit,/Here may you see the tyrant” (5.8.25-27).

18If Macbeth eventually acknowledges that he is goaded into committing the regicide by his “vaulting ambition”, he first weighs the pros and cons of this plan at length and considers the moral consequences of it in his soliloquy that opens with the speculation: “If it were done when it’s done, then it were well/it were done quickly” (1.7.1-2). His assessment of the murder gets him to the conclusion he breaks to his wife: “We will proceed no further in this business” (1.7.31). It is then that Lady Macbeth jeers at his retraction and brands him a “coward” (1.7.43). Therefore, if he resets his mind upon his first idea and tunes up to his wife’s expectations, it is because he feels this urgent need to please her and to be recognized as a man in her eyes. The murder of Duncan becomes his certificate for success in manliness, a warrant that seals his belonging to the world of men.

19Hence, Macbeth has become aware that what is at stake is not only his manliness but also his couple, in which he is supposed to play the role of the man, as Lady Macbeth measures his love by his capacity for crime. She clearly sets the rules of the game and adamantly puts forth that if he wishes to express his love to her and implicitly to win hers in return, he has to accomplish the murder. “From this time/Such I account thy love” she warns him (1.7.38-39). Her sexualised language in describing the murder in terms of “desire” and “act” makes the regicide a chance for Macbeth to assert his masculinity and phallic potency. Macbeth’s comparison of himself with Tarquin on his way to Duncan’s chamber tinges the crime with a sexual connotation. Sextus Tarquinius is the Etruscan prince who raped Lucretia who later committed suicide. Shakespeare was inspired by his story of the 6^th century B.C. in his narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece. Macbeth is going literally to kill Duncan but metaphorically to rape him as he moves lustfully to the king’s bedchamber with “Tarquin’s ravishing strides” (2.1.55). Later, he justifies his murder of the two chamberlains as a consequence of the “violent love” he bears to the king (2.3.103).

20On the other hand, different patterns of imagery present Duncan through a feminine discourse whereby he, traditionally the father of the nation, is womanised. First, his vulnerable nature is underscored by Macbeth’s description of him as “meek” (1.7.17). Then, he is presented as the mother of the Scottish nation whose generosity and bounty are underlined by Macbeth who, addressing Donalbain and Malcolm, laments their father’s death using this image: “The spring, the head, the fountain of your blood/Is stopped, the very source of it is stopped” (II. 3.91-92). In contrast with the dried-up body of Lady Macbeth congealed with gall and thick blood, Duncan’s body resembles that of the moist and wet female body exuding fluids, as the medical tradition from Hippocrates describes it15.

21Finally, the most striking of all the images used about Duncan is that of the Gorgon to which he is likened by Macduff (2.3.66). The Gorgons were three monstrous sisters in Greek mythology. One of them, Medusa, had the power to turn its onlookers into stone. Because of its appalling features—protruding eyes, distorted face and snakes instead of hair—the Medusa or Gorgon figure is used by Freud as the very symbol of castration and the embodiment of the castration fears the child struggles with at the sight of his mother’s genitalia16. Duncan appears therefore as the castrated male, the androgynous mother of the Scottish nation, who turns the frightened Macbeth into stone, but who also comforts him about his sexual potency as Freud explains that, allegorically, being turned into stone is to have an erection and to be paradoxically relieved in fright17.

22Macbeth comes back from Duncan’s chamber holding the daggers besmeared with blood as the ritualistic objects that have secured his manhood and as symbolic tokens of his phallic power that he emphatically displays to his wife. The sign of recognition he seems to be looking for is “my husband?” (2.2.13) with which Lady Macbeth greets him and implicitly rewards his manliness. But this moment where he enjoys his acknowledged and applauded virility is short-lived: No sooner is he lifted to the prestigious rank of a man and made worthy of the epithet “husband”, than he is again sarcastically demeaned to the low level of the coward and treated as a child when he recoils from his wife’s command to take the daggers back to Duncan’s chamber18:

Infirm of purpose!
Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead
Are but pictures, it is the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil (2.2.55-58).

23In the Banquet Scene, he is again confronted with such a debunked and vilified image of himself when he feverishly manifests his fear at the sight of Banquo’s ghost. He is castigated for behaving like a child scared by a tale told by his grand-mother:

O these flaws and starts,
Impostors to true fear, would well become
A woman’s story at a winter’ s fire
Authorized by her grandma. Shame itself! (3.4.63-66).

24Infantilised by his wife who adopts the role of the Terrible Mother, Macbeth seems to be beset by one more Gorgon, whose remarks, like the ghost of Banquo, castrate him. Faced with the “gory locks” that Banquo’s ghost shakes at him (3.4.51) and make his resemblance with Medusa very striking, Macbeth has to endure, at the same time, the fateful rhetorical question that puts his masculinity at stake: “Are you a man?” (3.4.58). It is soon followed by another similar attack: “What, quite unmanned in folly?” (3.4.73). Macbeth who has unconsciously adopted his wife’s standards of manliness, accepts this debased version of himself as he proclaims, when the ghost leaves, trying to comfort his anxiety of castration: “I am a man again” (3.4.108).

25Nevertheless, Macbeth is aware of the unnaturalness of his wife’s reactions and of her perverted womanhood. In this scene he compares her “ruby cheeks” with his own “blanched with fear” (3.4.115-116) and before the murder of Duncan, when she rails at his hesitation and discloses her machiavellian devises of how to kill the king and make his grooms bear the guilt, he stands amazed and awed at her virago-like nature:

Bring forth men-children only,
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males (1.7.72-74).

26Her natural disposition is so manly in the narrow sense of the term, that he can not imagine her “undaunted mettle” or unabashed and resolute spirit to breed daughters. “Mettle” suggests “metal”, the substance, and “males” offers a possible pun on “mails”, or armours. Lady Macbeth is allegorically cast into the image of the iron-lady whose children are born bellicose and armoured for the fight, bereft of childish vulnerability as much as their mother is devoid of female sensitivity19.

27Reminded of his squeamish nature at every step he undertakes, Macbeth will eventually adjust himself to the perverted vision of manhood. He will progressively grow hardened as he commits crime upon crime. He plunges headlong into bloodshed with the alacrity of the demented whose decimating machine can not be stopped:

I am in blood
Stepped in so far that should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go over (3.4.136-38).

28If his virility is put to the test by his manly wife, it is also the focus of his other motherly figures, the witches. The idea that they act as spiritual mothers with him is suggested by Hecate’s remark: “[…] all you have done/hath been but for a wayward son”, 3.5.10-11). Unable to win the gratitude of his wife, Macbeth sets off on a lonely criminal career but remains unswervingly reliant on the spiritual help and comfort of the witches. When he seeks them out after the murder of Banquo, they raise three apparitions the third of which advises him to be “bloody, bold and resolute” (4.1.78). This triple requirement is reminiscent of Lady Macbeth’s constant goading, and exacerbates Macbeth’s awareness of his shortcomings in terms of manliness. Nevertheless, and for his security, this same apparition comforts him that “none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth” (4.1.79-80), making it obvious for him that no one has been born otherwise. This prophetic sentence pinpoints the play’s association of femininity with vulnerability and mortality and fuels Macbeth’s anxieties about matriarchal threats. However, it serves him as a talisman that he will henceforth use apotropaically against his potential enemies, as it reassures him about not being the only one whose dependence on the mother figure is inevitable. No one as vulnerable as he is will score a victory against him, and this, paradoxically, empowers him and makes him feel invulnerable. As Madelon Gohlke Sprengnether explains it, Macbeth conceives power in a gendered way:

Macbeth reads power in terms of a masculine mystique that has no room for maternal values, as if the conscious exclusion of these values would eliminate all conditions of dependence, making him in effect invulnerable20.

29The prophecy also suggests the fantasized ideal and impossibility of male self-generation that would free the child from the maternal womb. If Macbeth was, like all men, born from a woman, Macduffwas “from his mother’s womb/Untimely ripped” (5.8.15-16). This implies that he was born by caesarean section which, in early modern Europe, killed the mother. In his medical treatise Childbirth Or The Happy Delivery of Women (1612), James Guillimeau states that the surgeon can not save the baby by the means of a caesarean section unless he is assured that the mother is dead21. Macduff seems therefore to be immune from harm by the mere fact of having been released from his mother’s womb and cast away from the polluting contact of the feminine body earlier than in the usual process of delivery. His revelation about his premature birth brings Macbeth’s gender anxieties back to the surface: “accursed be that tongue that tells me so/for it hath cowed my better part of man” (5.8.17-18). His “better part of man” is the one he has long striven to construct and consolidate according to the precepts of the feminine and maternal figures he has wished to please. Brandishing the exceptionality of his birth, Macduff emerges already as triumphant in the contest. His decapitation of Macbeth’s head can be psychoanalytically read as an act of castration22, whereby Macbeth is like the mythological Medusa and its counterpart in Freud’s theory, the female genitalia, both the emasculating and the emasculated threat. Macduff’s manly prowess in emasculating Macbeth underscores the triumph of patriarchal power while it scapegoats and expels female and matriarchal ones, including the womanly Macbeth, and Lady Macduff who “exists only to disappear23”. Macduff, the hero who was “from his mother’s womb/Untimely ripped” (5.8.15-16) and Malcolm, the future king of Scotland who is “unknown to woman” (4.3.126) stand as two alternatives of successful masculinity in that they both nourish the fantasy of an all male dynasty with the least contact with the feminine and the maternal possible24.

30Feminist readings of the play emphasise the binary opposition between the omnipotent threat of maternal power and the helplessness of male figures who secure their manliness only by eliminating the female25. However, the tragic pattern in Macbeth lies mostly in the fact that the two gender categories fail to keep separate and that the main characters float in a liminal position, half-way through their rite of passage, Lady Macbeth towards complete defeminization and Macbeth towards independent manliness. Indeed, the transformation for which Lady Macbeth yearns remains fantastic, while she actually never conceives of herself as otherwise than a woman, epitomizing, as Joan Larsen Klein suggests, “the sixteenth-century belief that women are passive, men active26”. It is Macbeth who puts into practice her plan and she confesses that what keeps her from carrying it out herself is an emotional impediment: the king’s resemblance to her father (2.2.12-13). In his study of the play, Coleridge insists upon Lady Macbeth’s femininity and maintains that “so far is the woman from being dead within her”, because she does not regard “with savage indifference”, as he writes, the darkest and bloodiest scenarios she imagines. She “(has) given suck and know(s)/How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks (her)” (1.7.54-55). It is that very tenderness she recognizes as a mother instinctively does that she paradoxically would strip herself of through radical and gruesome means27. Furthermore, and for all the boldness she has manifested throughout, Lady Macbeth faints upon hearing the news of Duncan’s murder (2.3. 111-12). By fainting, she confirms Macduff’s gender prejudice that “the repetition [the report of Duncan’s murder] in a woman’s ear/Would murder as it fell” (2.3.78-79). If the swoon was a sham as some critics have interpreted it, then the whole sleep-walking scene would be discredited. In fact, the swoon is the first stage in Lady Macbeth’s psycho-somatic illness and the first symptom of her mental schism. Unable to cope with that manly alter ego she has fashioned for herself (manly in the restricted sense of beastly or inhumane), Lady Macbeth is faced with her too womanly, or too humane fragility that eventually surfaces despite mental resistance and inhibition28. The intrapsychical conflict between her true essence and her fantasised one is finally translated into the bodily torture she inflicts upon herself and which puts an end to her life.

31Likewise, Macbeth attempts to break loose from the intoxicating woman-ruled world he has found himself enmeshed in. After the regicide, he cuts himself off from his wife, choosing, for instance, not to reveal to her the mystery of the “deed of dreadful note” he has contrived on his own (that of killing Banquo and Fleance, 3.2.44-45). However, the decision is not perfectly carried out as he is checked by her sarcastic remarks in the banquet scene. It is only when she withdraws in her bedchamber, racked by tormenting thoughts, that Macbeth turns from her. But, unable to dissociate himself from the female sphere, he exchanges his wife for the witches, his other spiritual guides, or surrogate mothers. He therefore proves to be slave to “the angel whom (he) still hast served” (5.8.14), in Macduff’s terms, and inexorably dependent on the female charm that has surrounded him (5.8.14) and that he uses as a protective bulwark in the confrontation with the Thane of Fife:

Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests;
I bear a charmed life which must not yield
To one of woman born (5.8.11-13).

32That charm is soon dispelled by the not-of-woman-born Macduff and leaves Macbeth utterly defenceless. His “better part of man” now intimidated by his opponent, Macbeth puts the blame on the “juggling fiends” he has so far trusted and withdraws from the fight (5.8.18-22). Macduff then addresses him using the very epithet his wife hurled at him when he disclosed his qualms about committing the murder (1.7.43): “Then yield thee coward” (5.8.23). In a sudden burst of self-consciousness, Macbeth challenges the accusation and sets off to “try the last” (5.8.32), to take a chance in the battle, and (sub)consciously to test his manhood for the last time, desperately attempting to redeem himself in the world of men. In his psychoanalytic reading of the play, David B. Barron explains that Macbeth “attempts to act as an individuated man cut off from female influence”, but that, despite much endeavour, eventually fails in doing so29. In his relationship with his wife as well as with the witches, Macbeth fails to achieve what Jungian psychology formulates as individuation. Indeed, according to Carl Gustav Jung, individuation, equivalent to “self-realization”, implies becoming one’s own self. The dynamics of individuation consist in progressively divesting the self of the power of the archetypes, among which Jung lists “the Mother Archetype”, a variety that ranges from mothers in the literal sense to mothers in the figurative, symbolic and impersonal forms (witches, graves, gardens, cities, etc.30). In Macbeth, the opposite image of the hero entangled in matriarchal nets is that of Macduff, the saviour of the nation, who also happens to be the paragon of individuation and manliness. The violent separation of Macduff from his mother’s womb emphatically points at successful individuation where the mother and the archetype of the mother are altogether shunned. That same Macduff “in that rawness left (his) wife and child […] without leave-taking” as Malcolm notices (4.3.26-28), choosing instead to honour his country in a rebellion against Macbeth.

33Alienated from humanity and trapped in the ever-intensifying compulsion to commit more and more violence, Macbeth curses himself by adopting the ways his prophetic claim warns against: “I dare do all that may become a man;/Who (the man) dares do more is none” (1.7.46-47, emphasis mine). He becomes a degenerate version of man, a hybrid or composite creature whose essence is halfway between vulnerability and brutality, between sub- and supra-humanity. He stands as a replica of Lady Macbeth’s perverted nature, or an uncanny offspring of the witches’ cauldron. At the end, the image of the “fiend-like queen” (5.9.36) and Macbeth the monster merge together to better underscore the fusion and the confusion of gender roles in the tragedy. The unsexed woman and the unmanned man who is decapitated or symbolically emasculated by the manly Macduff, hang as the last images of a world of de-differentiation.