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Page 137

somewhat removed from everyday life. I want to conclude, therefore, by juxtaposing Rossetti’s drawing with another image that completely domesticates the character and the play; together, drawing and painting represent the interpretive polarities given to Lady Macbeth in the nineteenth century. In 1864, Charles Hunt exhibited a painting of The Banquet Scene: “Macbeth” at the Royal Academy. That painting is now lost, but the previous year he completed another painting, My “Macbeth.” In it, we see Hunt standing with his wife and son in their comfortably furnished parlor, contemplating with pride The Banquet Scene, which stands on an easel to the right. Hunt points to the painting, his gesture echoing that of the “witch” within the painting (see Altick 1985:317). Not only is the story of Macbeth framed by and brought within the compass of the family home, but the scene depicted by the painting on the easel is actually a schoolboy performance of the play, in which all of the characters, including Lady Macbeth, are played by children. Altick suggests that Hunt’s son himself may be the ‘‘witch” who points back at his father from the inner painting. This miniaturization of the play, achieved both through the size of the painting-within-the-painting and the age of the actors, diffuses the sense of sublime struggle and makes it a work of Shakespearean “Literature,” co-opted by the educational system. In the larger painting, Hunt’s wife stands behind their son, her hand protectively on his shoulder, reminding the viewer of the role of woman as mother and moral nurturer of her children. It is she, not the childless and dangerous Lady Macbeth, who will guide her son’s future.

These two images of Lady Macbeth—as barbaric and passionate or domesticated and caring—figure the conflicted notions about women’s roles in the nineteenth century. All around the constructed view of the “Angel in the House” promulgated by Coventry Patmore’s wildly successful poem (1854–62), resistant forces were at work within society to reshape the idea of woman’s position and rights: the Married Woman’s Property Acts (1870–93), the admission of women to university education, the movement for women’s suffrage, and the gradual entrance of women into professions.

A hundred years later, we have inherited both the traditional values and the reactionary behavior of our ancestors. Halfway into her husband’s second term of office and bravely outfacing the role of “wronged woman” after his sex scandal, Hillary Clinton appears on the cover of the November 1998 U.S. Vogue magazine. Sitting queenly and poised in the Red Room of the White House, she is

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