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Page 135

play, resulted in one of the most sympathetic assessments of Lady Macbeth’s character ever made. Although she never says so explicitly, Leigh-Noel obviously accepts the parameters for a woman’s role as set forth by Ruskin, but she understands Lady Macbeth within this role. Though she compares Shakespeare’s play with “the sublime tragedies of ancient Greece” and notes that the play takes place in an age “far removed from our scrupulous times,” she is not content to use classicism or medievalism as a distancing device (Leigh-Noel 1884: 2, 3). Leigh-Noel draws upon her own sympathies and assumptions as a Victorian woman to create the portrait of a lonely woman, deprived of the love of a child and often solitary, lacking the companionship of her lord. Leigh-Noel characterizes the relationship between Lady Macbeth and her husband in a manner that shows she accepts traditional gender roles within Victorian marriage:

He, brave in the field, and favoured by fortune and nature alike, ambitious and yet scrupulous, bold in aspiration, but in action held in check by conscience; she, blind in her wifely devotion, owning no law but the advancement of her husband, and acknowledging no ties but those which bound her to him.

(5–6)

It is the witches, not Lady Macbeth, who give Macbeth the notion of murdering Duncan. She is ambitious for him and thus is prepared “to lay aside her womanhood, or rather all its sweeter and softer features, in order to place on her husband’s brow the crown he would never achieve for himself” (9). After Macbeth achieves the crown, however, their relationship dissolves, and Lady Macbeth is left solitary, unable to share the burden of her guilt. Accepting the Victorian assumption that a woman’s natural instincts are to comfort and support her husband and to bear and nurture children, Leigh-Noel fantasizes that at this time, Lady Macbeth would have ached to hold a child at her breast to alleviate her awful loneliness. The thought that she might have been partially responsible for the deaths of Macduff’s children would have been a shock that ‘‘must have hastened her end” (70).

Leigh-Noel’s final assessment of Lady Macbeth places her within the context of the “fallen woman,” a figure that haunted the edges of Victorian society:

[S]he remained a woman singled out by destiny to become an example of the torture of unconfessed sin and the bitterness of

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