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Page 130 of her savage determination, as ameliorating and humanizing her character: they “place the woman before us in all her dearest attributes, at once softening and refining the horror, and rendering it more intense” (327). This womanly nature is evidenced further in the ambition that Lady Macbeth has, not for herself, but for her husband, for whom she shows “no want of wifely and womanly respect and love,” while unconsciously realizing “her own mental superiority’’ (328). On the face of it, Jameson’s reading of Lady Macbeth seems far removed from the view of Englishwomen given just a few years later by Sarah Stickney Ellis in her Women of England (1839). Men, Ellis writes, exist in the world of business, the marketplace where “envy, and hatred, and opposition” reign; “to men belongs the potent…consideration of worldly aggrandisement” (52, 51). Women, on the other hand, should provide in the home the peace and moral center that men need; they are “a kind of second conscience, for mental reference, and spiritual counsel, in moments of trial” (53). Lady Macbeth, by contrast, attempts to enter the “marketplace” herself when she meddles in politics and pushes her husband in his “consideration of worldly aggrandisement.” In the end, however, even she is kept out of the public sphere by her own conscience and by Macbeth. Her scruples prevent Lady Macbeth from killing Duncan herself, and after that deed is done, Macbeth ceases to confide in her as before, leading to her isolation and madness. Jameson’s insistence on Lady Macbeth’s wifely “respect and love,” the “entire affection and confidence” (1854:328, 332) she has with her husband, especially in the early parts of the play, and the references to her womanly attributes of childbearing, place her—however flawed —within the accepted framework of Victorian womanhood. Jameson’s view was highly influential; we find it echoed later in the century by other Shakespeare critics such as M.Leigh-Noel, Mary Cowden Clarke, and Edward Dowden in England; and by Friedrich von Bodenstedt, Louis Lewes, and Georg Gervinus in Germany.14 Pictorially, it is a view reflected in a counter-tradition of illustration running simultaneously with the one we have observed. As early as 1827, F.Howard completed a set of line drawings (probably influenced by the work of John Flaxman, a Wedgwood designer and illustrator of the Iliad and Odyssey) to illustrate Macbeth.15 Several of them emphasize the companionship between Lady Macbeth and her husband. For the line, “My dearest love,/Duncan comes here tonight” (1.5.56–57), Macbeth stands frowning and resting on |
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