This automatic act is a reminiscence of her earlier remark after the murder of Duncan, "A little water clears us of this deed. The third complex entering into the sleep-walking scene distinctly refers to the murder of Macduff's wife and children - "The Thane of Fife had a wife, where is she now? Thus a vivid and condensed panorama of all her crimes passes before her.
Since blood was the dominating note of the tragedy, it was evidence of Shakespeare's remarkable insight that the dominating hallucination of this scene should refer to blood.
The analysis of this particular scene also discloses other important mental mechanisms. Lady Macbeth's line "What's done cannot be undone" not only reverses her earlier argument to her husband "what's done is done" Act III, Scene 2 ; it also recalls the words of the general confession from the Prayer Book: "We have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us. She has done violence to her feminine instinct, and she pays the penalty for it.
She exists in the present, but her imagination lives in the past. Her last sane words to her husband:. The light she keeps beside her shows her fear of darkness but she once has invited darkness which was the cover for her own evil deeds. Her ramblings also embrace the murder of Lady Macduff The Thane of Fife had a wife, where is she now?
She recalls her comforting words to her husband. Her firm, assured. Nothing can be undone, but her poor shattered mind is the inevitable result of the doing. The bold, brave, impulsive, impassioned woman thinking more for her husband than of herself is reduced and battered by their deeds, and the retribution of conscience which she despised in Macbeth, eventually drives her insane.
Her battered condition is the inevitable retribution. She is an essential woman but she has sacrificed her womanliness —. Lady Macbeth was conscious of the compunctious visitings of nature.
She had appealed to the murdering ministers to unsex her. She has the motherly instinct in remembering her babe and daughterly instinct in seeing in Duncan the face of her father. She cannot stand the shock of the discovery of murder, she faints. We have analysed Macbeth as a whole here.
When was it she last walked? See 5. Even Shakespeare has some plot holes! A Waiting-Gentlewoman attended on the lady of the house, and spent her time in close quarters with her. Lady Macbeth has been observed getting out of bed, putting on her night-gown, and taking a paper out of her private closet. She has written something, read it, and then sealed it up again. But, as the Gentlewoman reveals, she has done all of this in her sleep.
But it has been speculated that she is writing a letter to her supposedly absent husband, trying to reassert her control over him even as their plans unravel and they become besieged on all sides. Is she feeling worried about the state of her immortal soul, and trying to make amends as a means of spiritual self-preservation and confessing her sins on paper in the hope that it will persuade God to go easy on her in the afterlife?
Or has she perhaps more improbably recalled her last traces of humanity and compassion and, realising they have both gone too far, is writing to their enemy to warn her of the danger she is in? In this slumbery agitation, besides her walking and other actual performances, what, at any time, have you heard her say?
It is as though all the individual murders have coalesced into one seamless pageant of blood. Perhaps the most ironic line is the one which near-perfectly echoes an earlier line of Macbeth 's. Lady Macbeth's line "What's done cannot be undone" not only reverses her earlier argument to her husband "what's done is done" Act III, Scene 2 ; it also recalls the words of the general confession from the Prayer Book: "We have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us.
Now, though, the promise of salvation has been all but abandoned. She may be sleepless, but it is her soul's rest that really concerns her. Previous Scene 3.
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