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Page 136 unlawful ambition, standing a mute and awful figure, distinct and prominent against the storm-swept horizon. Could any lesson be more salutary? Does not one feel intense commiseration for the criminal? Who amongst us can cast the first stone? She had loved, had sinned, had suffered, and now she dies in complete desolation and despair. (1884:75) Leigh-Noel writes here out of an increased notion of “woman’s mission to women,” characterizing “the role of respectable women in the reclamation of the fallen” that developed from mid-century on (Nead 1988:196). Yet Lady Macbeth has not committed adultery; she is “fallen’’ only in the Victorian sense that her assertiveness and single-minded willingness to assume that the ends justify the means remove her from acceptable womanly behavior. Leigh-Noel herself ultimately looks beyond her own social conventions and understands that Shakespeare has created a character of tragic power. She sees in Shakespeare’s play a terror and sublimity beyond the merely ordinary: “there are degrees of suffering, and a light and facile spirit cannot grasp the thunderbolt that may shake a human soul” (Leigh-Noel 1884:85). Perhaps the terribleness of depicting the shaken soul kept Dante Gabriel Rossetti from executing his planned painting of The Death of Lady Macbeth. He made at least four studies for this painting, one of which (1876), now at the Carlisle Museum and Art Gallery (Cumbria), draws on the tradition of history painting in its overall design and on that of the fallen/mad woman in its uncompromising portrayal of Lady Macbeth in the last throes of mental agony, staring fixedly at the hands that she cannot wipe clean.19 She is surrounded by three of her handmaids, one of whom lies exhausted in sleep at her side, the sleep that will never more come to her mistress, except in death. A holy friar prays at the foot of her bed, while a kindly-faced doctor wipes her brow and an old crone, perhaps her nurse, stands worriedly at Lady Macbeth’s pillow. The two focal points of the painting are the praying friar and the mad woman, suggesting that Lady Macbeth needs the divine more than the physician (see Macbeth 5.1.64). The agony on the face of this tortured soul terrifies the viewer, who becomes a voyeur to this scene where the mental and spiritual are held in tension, waiting for the drama to be played out. Though we are profoundly disturbed by her, Rossetti’s Lady Macbeth lives in the neo-medieval world of the pre-Raphaelites, |
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