Moral Thoughts Essays

Submitted By Inessa1970
Words: 814
Pages: 4
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Come, you spirits
That tend on moral thoughts, unsex me here,
And fillme, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,
Stop up th'access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th'effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,
Whatever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come thick night,
And pass thee in the dunnest smoke of hell
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry "Hold, hold! (I.5.41-55)

Macbeth is a play written by William Shakespeare. The story is about a Scottish lord whose quest for power had caused him to murder a lot of people. This paper will dissect a passage of the play in which Macbeth’s wife, Lady Macbeth is asking for courage to be able to kill someone. This passage has a dark feministic leaning in which Lady Macbeth asks for a man’s courage to be able to fulfill her plan of killing someone without any feeling of remorse. The passage opens with Lady Macbeth asking for the spirit’s intervention to “unsex” her which can be interpreted to mean that she wants to have the courage of a man. She wants to have the firm resolve of which a man is known for however, there is also the possibility that Lady Macbeth wants the physical strength of a man so that she can execute her plan of killing someone who is stronger than she. Women are known to be the weaker sex and compared to a man’s physical strength, the woman’s strength can be considered as puny, thus, Lady Macbeth’s plea for intervention, "Come, you spirits,/That tend on moral thoughts, unsex me here." Lady Macbeth also wants to be firm in her resolve and does not want to feel any remorse. “Make thick my blood,/ Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse.” She uttered those words because she does not want her courage to escape her at a crucial moment when she will be given an opportunity to execute her plans of killing the said person. Not only that, Lady Macbeth is consumed with evil desire because she wants to get away with the murder that she intends to make. “And pass thee in the dunnest of smoke of hell,/ That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,/ Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark.” The passage is saturated with feminine undertones that emphasized the weakness and disadvantage of being a female. The feminine parts of a woman are present in the text as the poem talks about breasts and milk, the only physiological parts of a woman. It is not clear in the play if Lady Macbeth had a baby. Words such as unsex means that Lady Macbeth wants to become a man because for her woman is incapable of doing the deed. However, it is contradiction in itself for the reason that a
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