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Women In Macbeth

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Women, Power and the Devil; although many may incline to believe this to be the feminist holy trinity, it is, in fact, men's worst fear. Going back from second-century Christian theologian Tertullian who claimed women to be the gate of Hell (2) to a notorious American businessman who recently accused this presidential candidate of being the Devil himself (Volk and Sullivan,"Trump calls Hillary Clinton ‘the devil’"), men have always been prone to demonize women in order to prove their unfitness to govern. Shakespeare is no stranger to this thought pattern which he explores in his 1606 play, Macbeth. Indeed, Shakespeare's vile portrayal of Lady Macbeth and the Witches in the play stems from the medieval demonization of women. Through his choice …show more content…

For instance, she uses words related to cowardice to describe him such as "pale" (1.7.41), "afeard" (1.7.43) , "coward" (1.7.47) , "poor cat" (1.7.49) before using the parallelism " you were a man [...] you would be so much more the man" (1.7.56-58). The past tense indicates that Macbeth is no longer a man whereas the modal verb "would" teases a better status in the future, provided that he murders the King. As a result of this provocation, Macbeth makes his mind to commit the crime declaring "I am settled" (1.7.91). In essence, Shakespeare uses this dialogue of Lady Macbeth to show the danger of women who can easily play on men's Achilles heel in order to make them commit evil deeds. Following this logic, if women were allowed to have power, they would throw world peace into hell. In the same fashion, the Witches employ another of the Devil's strategies to trick Macbeth: temptation. Shakespeare shows the danger of empowering women who are alluring by nature in Act I, scene 3 lines 49-51 through the use of both anaphora and accumulation. The Witches begin by hailing Macbeth one after the other using the exact same words before adding one of his future titles by order of importance ( they

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