Lady Macbeth's Guilt

Humanity, as a whole, is plagued with individuals’ whose interests give them temporary blindness. It has been a character trope in a number of writings throughout the years. None, however, have managed to portray this more dramatically than Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth in his play, The Tragedy of Macbeth. Throughout the play, readers see Lady Macbeth’s slow, but continuous descent into feelings of guilt and a declining mental state. She is the spouse that maintains a braver face, but readers see much more deeply into her thoughts at certain parts of the play. The struggles combined with the morally questionable acts she her husband commit ultimately take their toll. Lady Macbeth becomes increasingly consumed with guilt. She spends much of her
Opposing additional violence, she reasoned with Macbeth in an effort to prevent him from committing needless murders. When he asserts that Banquo and Fleance could still be a threat, Lady Macbeth responds, “But in them nature’s copy’s not eterne,” (Shakespeare 94-95). This is an attempt from Lady Macbeth to prevent any more murders as time progresses. It assists in showing that she is a character that is not one to kill without what she feels to be legitimate reason. Lady Macbeth, aware of the witches’ earlier prophecy, realized that Banquo and Fleance were not threats and killing them would be unnecessary. She was not power hungry enough to the point of doing something that she personally felt crossed her sense of morality, and was able to maintain a larger aspect of her conscience. This maintaining of her personal values helps to promote the concept that Lady Macbeth is not a character that is beyond the point of being a positive
In times of both personal reflection and interaction with other characters of the play, Lady Macbeth exhibits periods of distress for her and her husband’s actions. She lives with the weight of the knowledge that her husband has become responsible for the disruption of the peace they once experienced. The manifestations of guilt truly bring out the level of redemption possibly attained. Lady Macbeth’s coping abilities degrade and as a result, readers see the issue as to the true feelings she has about the direction her husband has taken the situation. Lady Macbeth’s efforts in the early acts of the play were, in the end, clearly a temporary loss of her values and not her true persona. Her inabilities to incorporate these acts into her true sense of self ultimately lead to her