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Page 134

ing was part of a series of three, designed by Hicks with the title Woman’s Mission; all three sold immediately.17 The Howard and Bromley illustrations of Lady Macbeth show her enacting the role of Woman’s Mission, and along with the Meadows portrait, they depict a woman ‘‘respectable in energy and strength of mind, and captivating in feminine loveliness” —what Sarah Siddons had written about Lady Macbeth (Siddons in Campbell 1834:2:11).

When John Ruskin, in his famous essay “Of Queens’ Gardens” (1865), writes of the foolishness of “the idea that woman is only the shadow and attendant image of her lord, owing him a thoughtless and servile obedience” (1891:115), we expect that he, like Siddons, Jameson, and others, might respect Lady Macbeth’s “strength of mind.” Not at all. While Ruskin appreciates Shakespeare’s depictions of women (“Shakespeare has no heroes; he has only heroines”), he nevertheless denigrates Lady Macbeth along with Goneril and Regan, who, he says, “are felt at once to be frightful exceptions to the ordinary laws of life” (116, 121). Ruskin, like Ellis, wants a woman who keeps the home as a place of shelter and peace from the turmoil of the outside world, a woman whose “intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision” (136). His woman is the equal of her husband, but only as one sex complements the other. And though Ruskin makes her a queen, her rule is only within the restricted garden of her home.

On the one hand, Ruskin offers women a kind of power, but on the other he withdraws it, for a woman of Lady Macbeth’s strength of character is too terrifying to contemplate. Other women, however, can contemplate her, and write her back into the script of Victorian womanhood. Anna Jameson, as we saw, appreciates her intellect, and Mary Cowden Clarke, in The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, tries to explain Lady Macbeth’s willful temperament by making her the daughter of a woman who wanted only to produce a son, and who then neglects the daughter born to her and dies after a bout of postpartum depression, leaving the girl to grow up unrestrained and allowed to follow her own inclinations. The most powerful answer to Ruskin, however, comes from a relatively obscure monograph written by M.Leigh-Noel, author of the later volume Shakspeare’s Garden of Girls (1885).18

Leigh-Noel’s Lady Macbeth: A Study (1884) is the result of the kind of thoughtful reading that both Ruskin and Ellis recommend to women. A period of illness, which allowed Leigh-Noel to meditate upon the

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