Masculinity, femininity, and androgyny in MacBeth

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Macbeth isolates and contrasts conventional notions of masculinity and femininity, yet also examines their interplay, in the form of androgyny, or their absence, in the form of sexlessness. In a play that treats the themes of succession, hierarchy, and order, Shakespeare’s perversion of orthodox concepts of manhood and womanhood, in terms of physical anatomy and mental sensibilities alike, may be mapped onto the presence, within the play, of the disruption of the so-called natural order. Through Macbeth’s androgynous witches, whose beards cloud the distinction between male and female physical attributes, Shakespeare associates the conflicting presence of masculinity and femininity simultaneously with a parallel distortion of natural harmony and the eerie consequences of supernatural interference. Whereas the androgyny of Macbeth’s witches constitutes a combination of masculine and feminine elements, Lady Macbeth’s androgyny signifies a rejection of sex entirely. Nonetheless, said defeminisation of Lady Macbeth, as she pursues her unsexing, is, likewise, accompanied by an indication of the unnatural ruthlessness and civil chaos which she engenders as a result of her purported rejection of the course of nature. Just as Lady Macbeth rejects her femininity, Macbeth himself is emasculated. Formerly the embodiment of the warmongering and virulent masculine ideal, Macbeth’s personal and political unravelling is concomitant to his compromised manhood, indicating a distortion of masculinity that is mirrored in the disruption of mental and societal order. That the corruption of environment and administrative order is resolved by the reintroduction of masculine hegemony at the play’s climax demonstrates most explicitly the association of order with masculinity and femininity that is distinct and orthodox. Equally, Shakespeare’s perversion of traditional notions of masculinity, femininity, through androgyny, is evocative of environmental and political chaos.