Macbeth (Vol. 29) - Gender Issues
GENDER ISSUES
Robert Kimbrough (essay date 1983)
SOURCE : "Macbeth: The Prisoner of Gender," in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. X V I , 1983, pp. 175-90.
[In the following essay, Kimbrough examines the portrayal of gender in Macbeth, maintaining that through the "unnatural" characters of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare endorses "androgeny"—the harmonious blending of male and female characteristics within the individual.]
Long before "conscience was born of love," the human species had inherited a mammalian subdivision into sex, female and male, nature's way of providing generation and continuity of our species. Before mammals all generation was a unisexual operation. Post-conscience-ness sensed as much with its invention of the myth of androgyny, a myth most readily available in the Judeo-Christian version of God the Creator as an Androgyne, creating humanity in the image of that androgyny, with the division of...
[The entire page is 12030 words long]
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