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dressed in a dark red velvet gown similar to those modeled by the aspiring Lady Macbeths in Tatler. Writing about this image, reporters use the words “elegant,” “regal,” and “glamorous.” Robin Givhan of The Washington Post says,

It is a portrait loaded with subtext: a scorned woman victorious. … This cover, which combines statesmanlike grandeur with womanly elegance and restrained chic, suggests self-assurance— politically, personally, and physically.

(1998)

Quoting Givhan, Hugh Davies of the London Daily Telegraph notes that “becoming a cover woman was also a natural progression for the former bespectacled ‘policy wonk’ once described as ‘the Lady Macbeth of Little Rock’’’ (Davies 1998). Lady Macbeth continues to figure our society’s conflicted admiration for and fear of women’s rights, power, and professional success. She frightens us, as she frightened our forebears, because of her perceived ability to empower the feminine while disempowering the masculine. Looking at cultural perceptions of a figure like Lady Macbeth over a period of years helps us to tease out notions of gender that construct us as much as we have constructed them.

Notes

1  

See Rowell 1978:57 and Appendix.

2  

For an intelligent discussion of the nineteenth-century canonization of Shakespeare and the idealization of his female characters, see Tricia Lootens 1996. My own work has developed independently, along parallel lines with that of Lootens. See the two introductory essays in Ziegler 1997:11–31.

3  

Jameson is gaining wider recognition as an important early “feminist” critic. Anne E.Russell (1991) discusses some of the tensions that arise as Jameson tries to define Shakespeare’s heroines within the context of nineteenth-century “womanliness,” while Christy Desmet (1990) views Jameson’s Shakespearean criticism against its background of the Romantics’ views on Shakespeare.

4  

Technically, the honor of being the first female editor must be given to Henrietta Bowdler, who did much of the work on the famous “sanitized” version of Shakespeare (1807) that was popular throughout the nineteenth century. The efforts of Mary Cowden Clarke, however, are closer to our modern notion of editing. See Thompson and Roberts 1997:46–47.

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