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Page 120 Asked why her active involvement in her husband’s administration provoked so much controversy, she said it was a reflection of the national debate over the role of modern women. “People are struggling to define what it means to be a woman, a mother, a wife,” she said. (1993:9) Contemporary feminist thinking has taught us that notions of gender are culturally constituted and it invites us to destabilize the status quo. But redefining received cultural structures makes many people uncomfortable. We have inherited a number of these structures from the nineteenth century, a period that refined and idealized the notion of womanhood, while beginning to challenge and stretch its boundaries. Though Queen Victoria saw Macbeth at least eight times, praised the acting of Ellen Kean as Lady Macbeth,1 and fell under the spell of things Scottish, neither she nor her subjects would have granted Victoria the unseemly political ambition of a Lady Macbeth. Quite the contrary. Idealized as wife and mother in both her domestic and national realms, “Queen Victoria offered the perfect solution to Britain’s fears of female rule and of excessive monarchic power,” as Margaret Homans has pointed out (1993:3). Nevertheless, Lady Macbeth could not be ignored. She was, after all, a major tragic heroine created by that nineteenth-century idol of British literature, Shakespeare. What does one do, however, with a wife who is strong-minded, ambitious, and given to evil in a period in which most women did not have careers, when a good nature and grace, not aggressiveness, were admired, and when husbands were expected to have the last say in matters concerning their married life? The twentieth century may turn Lady Macbeth into the smart professional woman, but the nineteenth century had other ways of appropriating her character. The discussion that follows uses pictorial representations as well as British and continental criticism to tease out these various methods of appropriation. First, however, I want to consider briefly and more broadly the moralizing function of Shakespeare’s heroines, an approach that dominated much nineteenth-century criticism. I Shakespeare’s heroines and/as Victorian womenQueen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901) corresponded to a heightened cult of womanhood that focused on the heroines of that other idol of |
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