Nguyen 1

Diana Nguyen
Tanaka
Honors Humanities
01 October 2013
Macbeth & Antigone: Make Me a Man?
Feminism is a method of analyzing women’s positions in society by examining the gender role and how/why some behaviors are stereotyped towards a certain gender. A concept of feminism, patriarchy is a male centered and controlled society and is arranged to make women feel inferior to men in every occupation whether it be religion, family, politics, economics, legal or art. Women are then seen lacking in male organ,which is representative of male power and male character traits; they wind up being referred to as objects because of their non­masculinity and lose their respect as human beings because they are women lacking male …show more content…

In contrast, Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Sophocles’s Antigone both demonstrate that women cannot maintain power for long, because their female traits take over. In Shakespeare’s
Macbeth, Lady Macbeth begins to feels timid and cannot kill Duncan because he resembles her father when he sleeps. “Had he not resembled/ My father as he slept, I had done ‘t” (Shakespeare
II.II.14­15). The fact that she saw her father sleeping in that moment also stresses, she isn’t ruthless enough to kill her father. Originally Lady Macbeth planned to kill Duncan herself but froze up, following the female gender trait to be timid, forcing Macbeth to kill Duncan. In that moment Lady Macbeth could have killed Duncan, and taken the title as his murderer, giving her power because she would become a female political leader. But she did not kill Duncan.
Macbeth did. Lady Macbeth’s timidness took over, preventing her from taking the opportunity to kill Duncan, which would have given her power. Further into the story, Lady Macbeth starts to sleepwalk because she feels guilty about Banquo’s death. “Wash your hands. Put on your night/gown. Look not so pale. I tell you yet again, Ban/quo’s buried; he cannot come out on ‘s grave” (Shakespeare V.II.65­67). Shakespeare alludes to Lady Macbeth washing the blood from her hands after