A Cracked and Bloody Chalice:
The Distortion of the Celtic Divine Feminine in Lady Macbeth
1,2
As the play unfolds, Macbeth, who once referred to his wife as his "dearest partner of greatness" [I.5, 9-10], doffs his role as Celtic champion and assumes the part of the English patriarch, denying his wife her former role as equal partner. He arranges the murders of Banquo and of Macduff's family without consulting his wife, shutting her out as effectively as he asks the night to hide his own misdeeds:
"Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale." [III, 2 46-50]
Immediately after Duncan's murder, Lady Macbeth urges her husband to wash the blood from his hands as she does with her own ("A little water clears us of this deed. How easy it is then!" [II, 2 67-68]). Wells have always been considered sacred sites of healing and absolution in Gaelic cultures, and it is to the well in her own tainted hearth -- a well she herself tainted -- that Lady Macbeth turns for salvation. As the thread begins to unravel and the story moves toward its inevitable conclusion, though, the once great and terrible queen begins a downward spiral into madness -- a madness which could be called the logical warped parallel to battle frenzy gone wrong, just as Lady Macbeth is a warped version of the battle Goddess. It is at this point that Lady Macbeth sheds the raven robes of the Morrigan and takes on another of her aspects, the Bean Nighe, or the Washer at the Ford.
The Washer at the Ford sits at the river bank and washes a bloody sheet, beating it against the stones in a vain attempt to rid it of its stains. She appears at times of great strife and when war is imminent. She is also quite the dolorous figure, for she wails and rails against something that cannot be undone. The river, her tears and the blood on the sheet all mingle to cleanse mankind of its murderous nature.
As the partnership between the husband and wife disintegrates, so do the two themselves. In the case of Lady Macbeth, the disintegration is one of identity as well as conscience. She is queen, but in name only. She confers neither lineage nor sovereignty; she cannot provide Macbeth with heirs, and she has been excluded from his plans. She is left with nothing but her own self and the terrible thing in which she has taken part. While Macbeth wrestles with prophecies and riddles and making sense from nonsense, Lady Macbeth, once so resolute and firm on her course, becomes a weeping banshee unable to tell fantasy from reality who tries vainly to remove the stain of sin that she has smeared upon herself (yet another image reversal), a stain that no amount of water can wash clean.
"Out, damned spot! Out, I say! [...]
What, will these hands ne'er be clean? [...]
Here's the smell of blood still. All the perfumes
of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." [V,1 34-49]
Her efforts are of course futile, and by the end of the play she is dead by her own bloodstained hand, no longer able to live with the lot she has created for herself.
On a literal level, Lady Macbeth's fate is her own doing; there is no questioning that. She was knowledgable and accountable for at least the first murder in the play, and certainly connected to those that followed even if Macbeth acted on his own. Yet the inner struggle the character experiences as she loses all her identities one by one -- mother, wife and queen -- mirrors the metamorphosis of the Celtic divine feminine from the status of goddess to demon, and, depending on Shakespeare's motives, can be seen as either a call for revival of Celtic culture or a keen for its demise. In either case, the more distorted the glass that is held to her face, the more horrific she appears. The difference, of course, is that a goddess remains what she is despite human theological machinations, while a woman becomes more and more uncertain about the reflection until she finds that perhaps the nightmare visage is true -- and in Lady Macbeth's case, self-imposed. Robbed of a role in a social structure that makes goddesses into devils and murderers into kings, Lady Macbeth seizes upon an identity from another time -- an identity that has been so twisted and perverted that she herself does not truly understand it -- and her misapprehension of the sacred roles of the Goddess causes the mirror to come crashing down in her face.
Or, to use Shakespeare's words:
"[...]we
but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends the ingredience of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips." [I,7 8-12]
"There is no superstition stronger [...] than a belief in the curative power of the sacred wells... A holy well once lost all its power because a murder had been committed near it." 2
Citations:
1. Goodrich, Norma Lorre. Medieval Myths. New York: New American Library, 1977.
2. Wilde, Lady. Irish Cures, Mystic Charms and Superstitions [compiled by Sheila Anne Barry]. New York: Sterling Publishing, 1991.
October 1995
Copyright © 2005 Sukipot.com