Do you feel pity for Lady Macbeth? If so, why?

Ans.

It is impossible at first sight to feel pity for Lady Macbeth. We are inclined rather to agree with Malcolm’s view of her as the ‘fiend like queen.” In the beginning she does impress us as a horrible women, dominating her reluctant husband and drawing him on relentlessly to commit the foul murder of their royal guest, who sent a precious gift to her before he retired to sleep. which unfortunately proved to be his eternal sleep. This impression for her terrible will is very powerful. She sacrifice all that human and womanly in achieving her ambition and she does it most systematical. She exhibits a will that is not touched by any feeling, conscience or imagination. She seems to be the embodiment of relentless, inflexible purpose.

However, she seems to be so, but she is really not so. And that is where we pity her. The point is that Lady Macbeth is really feminine in her sensibility and feeling of tenderness. She has a delicacy of feeling and refinement of perception which if permitted to affect her actions, would have prevented her from become bloody enough to realize ambitions. That is why she consciously and deliberately wishes herself to become ‘unsexed’. She holds in check by an act of will whatever feeling, conscience and imagination she possesses by nature. These are wilfully suppressed and outraged nature in her has its revenge in the final scenes. Even during the ‘murder scene’ She give evidence of her natural revulsion from blood and murder. She talks like a bloody minded fined but does not, cannot in fact act upon her thoughts and words She speaks daggers but cannot use them. That is why she gives up her initial plan of killing Duncan by her own hands with those characteristic words:

“Had he not resembled my father as he slept I had done it.”

That is a strange remakes from a field -like women. No she is nota bloody-minded fiend; she is an ambitious women who sacrifices her womanliness for attaining that ambition.

Shakespeare has created sympathy for Lady Macbeth by showing her in a moment when she is freed from her dominating and domineering will. This is when she sleeps, when her conscious mind is at bay and her sub-conscious nature is apparent of her women lines. She who has provoked Macbeth to murder king Duncan in sleep cannot sleep the heaty sleeps of the innocent. But she has a sort of nightmarish sleep when her will is suppressed. It is during this state of half-sleep that she utters those pathetic words, which excite our pity for this pitiless women. As she cries ‘O, O’ at her bloody hands which not all the perfumes of Arabia will sweeten, we feel for her wretchedness and suffering. She is beyond cure and she is happily saved from feeling her wretchedness, but we cannot withhold our pity at such a sight. The suppressed womanliness, the delicacy of perception and the regiment of feeling are thus expressed during the sleep-walking scene. We do not condone her crime but do sing over her tragedy. We feel how this women has suffered with tight lipped endurance all the remorse and guilty of her crime. We do realize what unexpressed burden of guilt she has carried all along. We admire the stock silence she has maintained throughout her remorse never once crowing for sympathy, never once expecting it, even from the partner in crime, her husband. In this she is sublime, rather then fiendish. Hence our pity for her.