Mutuality and Patriarchy in Shakespeares Macbeth Essay

Mutuality and Patriarchy in Macbeth Since the beginning of recorded time, the basic human distinction in human social order has revolved around gender; our sex at birth determines the role we will play in our society, the status we will hold in our culture, and even the structure of our daily lives. The biological reality that women can give birth and men cannot has led to a habitual consciousness of two sex classes, and, in the past, these two classes coexisted with equality in co-operative communities; however, Marilyn French contends in The War on Women that as men began to build what would become patriarchy, or male supremacy built by force, the female class became disempowered, marginalised, and subjugated to the will of†¦show more content†¦Whether playfully resolved in the comedies or brutally exposed in the tragedies, at some level, all Shakespeares works symbolically explore the conflict between male and female, or control and emotion, within society and the individual self (Novy 3); however, it is in the tragedies that Shakespeare moves beyond merely reflecting a womans need to transcend socially imposed limitations to an in depth exploration of the dangers inherent in a worldview that prescribes the extreme devaluation and expulsion of the feminine in order to maintain masculine power and domination (200). In particular, Shakespeares Macbeth is a play in which the masculine-centred world of the protagonist metaphorically and literally reflects the miserable alienation of both men and women when a fear of the feminine within society and themselves leads to chaotic disorder and the death of the soul. In order to first understand the world Shakespeare wrote from and about, I will briefly discuss the male/female dichotomy within the Renaissance. Gender distinctions can be traced throughout Western history, but it is in a new conception of the family in the sixteenth century that patriarchy gains