In terms of the overall play, Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene helps us to see even more clearly the tragic hero, Macbeth's, trajectory as a character. She serves as a foil to him, helping to illuminate his progress from a relatively nice guy to a depraved and ruthless tyrant. In the beginning, Lady Macbeth prays to be as ruthless as possible, to be drained of any remorse or compassion she might feel; at the same time, she believes that Macbeth is "too full o' th' milk of human kindness" to do anything unscrupulous in order to gain the throne. She plans the murder of Duncan and then chastises Macbeth for dwelling on what they'd done.
However, by the time she sleepwalks, Macbeth has devolved into a despicable human being, ordering the murders of former friends, and innocent women and children. Ironically, Lady Macbeth's conscience can no longer support the role she has played in his change or bear up under the weight of her own terrible guilt. Though she believed him too good and hoped to steel herself to be capable of real evil, it turns out that he was the one who was truly capable of evil and she is the one with more fundamental "goodness" than he (if we can use her guilt as evidence of her goodness). The sleepwalking scene is Lady Macbeth's last and completes her work as Macbeth's foil, to help us further understand the extent to which he has fallen, and it also provides a great deal of irony and tension, leading up to the climax of the play.
Her evolution is incredibly provoking because Lady Macbeth had seemed to be sure, initially, that she was capable of terrible things. She turns out to be the more scrupulous of the two, which is pretty unexpected given the way things began.
Wednesday, August 21, 2019
The sleepwalking scene is one of the most memorable in drama. Relate this scene to the play overall and examine what makes Lady Macbeth's evolution so provoking.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment