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In her biography of Ellen Terry, Nina Auerbach discusses in some detail Terry’s approach to the role of Lady Macbeth. Despite Sargent’s portrayal of Terry as a virago, Terry actually depicted Lady Macbeth as “the feminine woman” (Auerbach 1987:255). “In her notes, Lady Macbeth smiles incessantly.… She wins [Macbeth] to murder not by bullying, but by pleasing” (254). Terry’s stage portrait of Lady Macbeth is thus closer to attempts to accommodate her into Victorian womanhood than is Sargent’s painted portrait.
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Friedrich von Bodenstedt, writing first in 1874, suggests that because she is childless, Lady Macbeth has only one aim— “her husband’s greatness.” In order to achieve this end, ‘‘only once can she collect all her power and negate all her femininity”; afterwards, “she is not able to wade any farther into blood” and “her womanhood claims back its rights” (Bodenstedt 1878:307). (I am grateful to Dr. Christa Jansohn for the translation of Bodenstedt.) Georg Gervinus, in 1850, insists that Lady Macbeth “is far more a dependent wife than an independent masculine woman, for she wishes the golden circlet rather for him than for herself. Her whole ambition is for him and through him… she lives only in him and in his greatness” (Gervinus 1883:598). Similarly, Louis Lewes says of her: “She desires the throne, not for herself, but for her husband” (Lewes 1895:264). He finds the pair “endurable” because of their “warm and tender” love, but he finds that in Lady Macbeth, “the weakness of woman, which is a great part of her charm, gives way under a burden which a man, though he may seem weaker, can easily bear” (271, 273).
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The outline drawings by the German artist Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch did not begin to appear until the first publication of his Shakespeare Gallery in 1828. These became enormously popular, both on the continent and in England. See the article on Retzsch by W.H.T. Vaughan 1996.
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A picture from mid-century with very similar iconography is the painting by George Hicks, Woman’s Mission: Companion of Manhood (1863). Here we see a woman leaning on her husband’s shoulder with her hand on his arm, trying to comfort him in his grief. But she looks up at him in sweet adoration, while Lady Macbeth in Howard’s drawing is about the same height and looks at Macbeth more as a companion. For a discussion of Hicks’s painting, see the article by Helene E.Roberts 1972.
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Sounding like a reprise of the conduct books of Sarah Stickney Ellis, the other two paintings in the series were titled Guide of Childhood, and Comfort of Old Age, thus covering the total supportive role of women in the family. On these paintings, see Roberts 1972; Nead 1988:13ff and Treuherz 1993:114. On the relationship of the Hicks’s series to Ruskin’s description of an ideal wife and helpmate, see Casteras 1987: 50–52.
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Not much is known about Madeline Leigh-Noel, later Mrs. M.L. Elliott. See Thompson and Roberts 1997:173–74.
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