In Macbeth, William Shakespeare explores ideas about appropriate male and female identity and behavior in regard to living and dying. The complicated partnership between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth reveals the gaps between expectations and actions, as well as the consequences of failure to uphold social standards.
While the ruler of Scotland is unquestionably the king, Macbeth needs a woman’s support to commit manly violent acts. He relies on his wife both to muster the resolve to commit the murders and to cover the traces of his bloody deeds. In this respect, Shakespeare shows that developing an identity as a man is interdependent with relying on a woman.
For Lady Macbeth, however, there is a glass ceiling to her ambitions. She knows that playing a complementary role to her husband is her only route to power. She aims to detach herself from what she understands as female limitations—to be “unsexed.” The irony related to the success she achieves in this goal, however, is that Macbeth shows no sense of appropriate limits. He misinterprets the meaning of manliness and a warrior’s courage, slaughtering innocent children. This travesty against nature effectively disqualifies him to lead, as it makes him an unnatural man.
Macbeth attempts to reassert his masculinity and redeem himself at the end by fighting on as a warrior, albeit in service of a lost cause. While he can choose to lose his life in an "appropriate" way (i.e., on the battlefield), that path is blocked to Lady Macbeth, as a woman, and she takes her own life.
Shakespeare works with stereotypical ideas of men and women's "natures." A man is supposed to be strong, brave, and capable of violence. A woman is supposed to innately be a nurturing mother figure given to compassion rather than hardness.
Lady Macbeth tries early in the play to "unsex" herself and fill herself with gall. This way, she can steel herself to prodding her husband to murder Duncan. She calls on the spirit world to help her with her task.
Lady Macbeth is successful in appealing to Macbeth's masculinity in persuading him to go ahead with the murder, even though he had changed his mind. He can't very well back down against her seemingly hard masculinity without looking weak himself.
Ironically, however, the play ends up affirming traditional gender roles. Lady Macbeth, for all her bold talk, is the one who cracks and goes mad because of the guilt she carries, sleepwalking at night and trying to wash Duncan's blood off of her hands. Ultimately, the crime becomes too unbearable for her, and she commits suicide. Macbeth is the one who grows hard and is able to morally withstand what he has done. He is miserable, but he doesn't crack under the strain as she does.
Macbeth can, to a degree, be seen as a commentary on the conventional implications of "being a man" or "being a woman."
Lady Macbeth's invocation to the "spirits that tend on mortal thoughts" asks that they "unsex" her. The suggestion is that for the purpose at hand—killing Duncan—she wishes not to have the normally gentle and merciful qualities associated with femininity.
At the same time, Lady Macbeth, in criticizing her husband's nature as "too full of the milk of human kindness," is attributing a kind of femininity to Macbeth. When Banquo's ghost appears in the supper scene and Macbeth becomes hysterical, she pointedly asks him, "Are you a man?" to which he replies, "Ay, and a bold one that dare look on that which would appall the devil." Her questioning of his manhood is presented as the worst insult that a woman can deliver, though her intention is to knock some sense into Macbeth and get him to stop panicking. She and the others at the banquet, of course, do not see the ghost. This leads us to the still unsolved question of whether the ghost is merely a hallucination, as Lady Macbeth asserts: "This is the very painting of your fear! This is the air-drawn dagger you said led you to Duncan." Macbeth is not a coward, but the depth of his guilt has caused him to react in a fearful, violently emotional way.
The most significant thing about the traditional concepts of "man" and "woman" presented in Macbeth is the irony that the male lead, Macbeth, has more compassion than his female counterpart. Lady Macbeth's encouragement is what sets the plot in motion and causes the killing. Without Macbeth's own inner cruelty, however, her urging would have fallen on deaf ears. So the ultimate message Shakespeare gives is that both men and women are equals in their potential to destroy others and, ultimately, themselves.
To be a good man in Macbeth is to be brave and strong, a warrior, like Macbeth and Banquo are at the beginning of the play. Consider how highly they are initially praised by Duncan, a character whom we are clearly supposed to like (even Macbeth must admit how kind, generous, humble, and honest a ruler Duncan is). Duncan is, in many respects, an ideal man and ruler—he only lacks the discernment to realize whom he should and should not trust. Further, a man ought to care deeply about his family, like Macbeth does for Lady Macbeth at the beginning, or like Macduff does for his wife and children, or like Duncan does for his sons.
From our knowledge of Elizabethan England, we might make a case that to be a good woman in Macbeth is to be soft and nurturing, a woman who stands by her husband and supports him in his principles. Essentially, we might infer that a woman ought to be everything Lady Macbeth is not. She manipulates her husband, emasculating and insulting him, trying to run roughshod over him and his principles. In the end, she pays a terrible price when she loses her sanity and takes her own life. These are the major clues that her behavior is wrong by Elizabethan standards.
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