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Page 129 tradition that depicted Lady Macbeth as a particular actress. That was another way for the nineteenth century to “tame” the figure of Lady Macbeth. If she could be seen as the creation of an actress on stage, then her threatening powers could be controlled as a theatrical presentation that had a beginning and an end. It is striking that Siddons and Terry, the two greatest interpreters of this role, both acted the part with more passion and power than their writings indicate. Terry, noting this difference in herself and Siddons, wrote: It is not always possible for us players to portray characters on the stage exactly as we see them in imagination. Mrs. Siddons may have realized that her physical appearance alone—her aquiline nose, her raven hair, her flashing eyes, her commanding figure—was against her portraying a fair, feminine, “nay, perhaps even fragile” Lady Macbeth. (Terry 1932:163) The idea of a feminine, “even fragile” Lady Macbeth evokes the alternate method by which the nineteenth century sought to appropriate her character. Siddons’s notion that only a woman who was intelligent and beautiful, “respectable in energy and strength of mind, and captivating in feminine loveliness,” could influence a man of Macbeth’s stature, heralded the nineteenth-century attempt to fit Lady Macbeth’s character into the model of acceptable womanhood (Siddons in Campbell 1834:2:11). III Lady Macbeth: domesticated and caringWriting her Characteristics of Women in 1832, Anna Jameson acknowledges that it is time to move beyond Siddons’s stage conception of Lady Macbeth (1854:322). She takes issue with the idea that Lady Macbeth should be seen primarily as a historical figure, the Gruoch “of an obscure age’’ (319). Rather, Jameson sees her as an evil but magnificent character with whom we sympathize “in proportion to the degree of pride, passion, and intellect, we may ourselves possess” (321). Lady Macbeth is a woman of superior intelligence, eloquence, and determination, dominated by ambition, who, “like an evil genius” goads her husband “to his damnation,” yet is “never so far removed from our own nature as to be cast beyond the pale of our sympathies; for the woman herself remains a woman to the last —still linked with her sex and with humanity” (323). Jameson sees Lady Macbeth’s references to her own sexuality, even in the midst |
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