LM: APPEARANCE VS REALITY

• Lady Macbeth

  • One of the most significant examples of the difference between appearance and reality, and the conflict between the two
  • Her ambition fuels her deception of others
  • She ensures she disguises her true intentions in order to gain power
• Lady Macbeth's outward appearance as a woman

  Audience would assume her to be weak and therefore superfluous to the story line
• As the play progresses

  We see the inner workings of her mind and realise internally she is stereotypically masculine
• As she becomes more powerful and masculine


  She is ultimately destroyed by her weak mind
• Lady Macbeth: '"To beguile the time, / Look like the time, bear welcome in your eye, / Your hand, your tongue,"'
• Lady Macbeth: '"Sleek o'er your rugged looks, be bright and jovial / Among your guests tonight,"'
• Lady Macbeth: '"Look like th'innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't,"'
• The juxtaposition of "flower", which connotes femininity, with "serpent", which connotes masculinity and trickery, shows how there can be a dangerous divide between a person's outward appearance and inward nature
• "Serpent" is an allusion to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, where it is a symbol of the devil
• Shakespeare demonstrates how appearances cannot be trusted because they are moldable, meaning they offer no insight into the reality of a person
• Shakespeare shows how appearances can be used for acts of self-denial as well as deception, keeping the conscience clear even though a crime has been committed
• Lady Macbeth: '"Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, / That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, / Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,"'
• The personification in "my keen knife see not the wound it makes" implies there is a level of self-deception to her plan, where her "knife" appears to be a symbol for herself
• The semantic field of darkness implies our reliance on what we can see makes us ignorant and gullible. Shakespeare could be criticising his society's focus on obvious, black and white truths
• Her hallucinations are symbolic of her losing control of herself, which is ironic as she has tried so hard within the play to control everyone else
• By the end she cannot control her mind and is ultimately destroyed by it