Theme of Violence in Macbeth

This is an essay on the theme of violence in Macbeth. It is a Section A (1 hr) response.

Explore the nature of violence in the play Macbeth.

William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” revolves around the tragic downfall of the play’s protagonist, Macbeth. True to any Gothic text, the play has its fair share of violence. However, as the question states, many critics have gone ahead to say that the “violence is excessive”. There are many instances that support this statement in the play.

Most of the violence is “Macbeth” begins when Macbeth, and his wife Lady Macbeth, begin to plan the murder of then king, Duncan. It is interesting to note that Shakespeare, using his authorial intent, avoids showing much of the violence through the narrative in the play; rather, he provokes the reader’s imagination to such an extent that it terrorises them; in this respect, violence is not excessive. However, the imagery used after the murder is committed portrays a different interpretation.

“Is this a dagger I see before me?” Macbeth questions himself, before he is about to kill Duncan; it could be interpreted that whilst the dagger signifies the immoral act of murdering a king, Macbeth is truggling with the internal violence of psychological trauma. Lady Macbeth, who conforms to the stereotype of being a “dangerous seductress” (Bertens, 2000), instigates her husband into doing the “deed” with a “keen knife” when she says, “If thou durst do it, you were a man.” The psychological violence that Macbeth juggles throughout the play is contextually significant, considering that puritans despised theatre, whilst a Jacobean audience considered the result of sin was death. Macbeth’s mental conflict reflected the guilt and regret he felt in addition to the betrayal of a king who took shelter in his castle in “double trust”.

Nevertheless, once the murder is committed, Macbeth says, looking at his hands, “This is a sorry sight”. By keeping the actual murder off stage and using Macbeth as a means to demonstrate the crime, Shakespeare leaves the imagination to the audience’ however, the imagery of excessive blood may come across as comic to the modern audience. “The multitudinous seas incarnadine will turn the green one red” – the fact that Macbeth has committed a murder that would turn “great Neptune’s” green ocean red not only overdramatises the violence, but rather induces a streak of unintentional comedy in the play. In the words of critic Pete Bunten, “Gothic castle, violence and villains, clichéd and recreated by popular imitation, ceased to evoke terror or horror.”

Another instance of violence is shown when Lady Macbeth says, “Out, damned spot!” In addition to a mark of violence not easily being washed away, the Gothic element of the supernatural decreases the effect of physical violence, and instead emphasises the mental violence inflicted on Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s soul. Macbeth calls the imaginary dagger a “false creation” and a product of the “heat-oppressed brain”. Furthermore, his guilt and remorse that results from repetitive violence causes him to say, “false face must hide what false heart doth know”. The fact that psychological trauma, as a form of violence, is shown in the play guarantees the morality of “Macbeth” and could be interpreted by critics to be genuinely expressed mental violence.

Lady Macbeth’s and Macbeth’s plan to kill the latter’s friend, Banquo, again involves physical violence. Again, the actual murder is kept offstage, but the allusions to ‘thick night” and “fateful” night convey the unshown violence of death to the audience. Macduff is another target of Macbeth’s, and his family is killed in cold blood. A messenger says, “your castle’s slaughtered!” As critic Botting says, “Gothic texts lack rationality ... reason ceases to exist.” It is therefore not surprising to see Shakespeare keep much of the action off-stage, so as to make the violence appear excessive and instead refocus on Macbeth, the protagonist of the play. Structurally, the violence and show of bravery in the first part of the play illustrates Macbeth’s heroism; however, as the play progresses, Macbeth’s attempts at violence not only become excessive but less striking in nature so as to reflect his downfall as a tragic hero.

Furthermore, Macbeth, the protagonist, exhibits a certain level of violence within his speech. Early in the play, whilst addressing his wife, his speech seems to be calm and composed; for example, when he curtly disagrees to kill Duncan, he says, “We shall proceed no further in this business.” The iambic pentameter is unbroken and suggests Macbeth’s calm as a character. However, towards the end of the play, his soliloquies and asides decrease, and his speech becomes more fragmented. It could be argued that Macbeth’s speech, that aims to inflict violence on his enemies sees an increasing change as the play progresses – however, instead of chilling the audience, it turns out to be excessive and melodramatic.

Overall, violence can be divided into two categories in Shakespeare’s Macbeth; one that is horrific, whilst one is terrific. In the words of Robert Kidd, “terror is provoked by the mind, while horror produces disgust.” Shakespeare utilises more terror than horror in the play and it could be argued that the horrific violence is more excessive while the other genuinely terrorises the audience. When lady Macbeth says, “who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?” it chills the audience, yet fails to make as much of an impact as compared to when she says, “Thou musn’t be th’innocent flower, but the serpent under’t.” From this, it can be seen that the argument of violence being excessive or genuine boils down to how the author or playwright portrays it in the text. Shakespeare, as Kidd comments, “subverts the establishment” of the Gothic genre when presents violence in the play. On one hand, the murders of Duncan and Lady Macduff and her son do not create spine-chilling fear in the audience, while the violent intentions and conversation between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stir up a range of emotions (terror, horror and fear).

In addition to this, one must also take into account the contextual factors of “Macbeth”. Written in the Jacobean era, Shakespeare depicts the genuine fears of the then king, James I, of political instability, and display of military might in England and Scotland. Whilst a traditional Jacobean audience may find the violence graphic and blood-curdling, the modern audience would find this antique and possibly even comic, considering murder is widely discussed topic today.

In conclusion, the physical violence in Macbeth could be said to be excessive, considering the authorial intent and portrayal of the murders as established earlier in the essay. However, one could argue that the psychological trauma and terrorising acts as a form of violence are not excessive, and are genuine in their own respect for a traditional audience.

Angela Carter

I will be posting notes on Elements of the Gothic from Angela Carter’s collection ”The Bloody Chamber” that I studied at A-Level; however, the aim of this post is to guide you through this blog, its aim, and how to use it.

This blog aims to help those who study A-Level English, or simply those that enjoy literature. On the Home Page, you will find a "Search" bar beneath the heading "TheCommunique's Notes." I request all users to make a search using that toolbar, so as to be able to retrieve old posts easily and make the blog more accessible to everyone.

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Christopher Marlowe

I will be posting notes on Elements of the Gothic from Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” that I studied at A-Level; however, the aim of this post is to guide you through this blog, its aim, and how to use it.

This blog aims to help those who study A-Level English, or simply those that enjoy literature. On the Home Page, you will find a "Search" bar beneath the heading "TheCommunique's Notes." I request all users to make a search using that toolbar, so as to be able to retrieve old posts easily and make the blog more accessible to everyone.

I prefer the "Search" method as it would be very tiresome to glance through my Blog Archive and find the relevant page you are looking for.

For example, if you wish to search for “significance of women in Dr Faustus”, please enter " significance of women in Dr Faustus" in the Search bar and you should receive relevant results - it may so happen that I have not posted notes for the query relevant to you, if so, please leave a comment somewhere and I will try and help you with it as soon as possible.

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William Shakespeare

I will be posting notes on Elements of the Gothic from Shakespeare's "Macbeth” that I studied at A-Level; however, the aim of this post is to guide you through this blog, its aim, and how to use it.

This blog aims to help those who study A-Level English, or simply those that enjoy literature. On the Home Page, you will find a "Search" bar beneath the heading "TheCommunique's Notes." I request all users to make a search using that toolbar, so as to be able to retrieve old posts easily and make the blog more accessible to everyone.

I prefer the "Search" method as it would be very tiresome to glance through my Blog Archive and find the relevant page you are looking for.

For example, if you wish to search for ‘violence in Macbeth', please enter "violence in Macbeth" in the Search bar and you should receive relevant results - it may so happen that I have not posted notes for the query relevant to you, if so, please leave a comment somewhere and I will try and help you with it as soon as possible.

Thank you very much for visiting this blog and I hope you enjoy all the posts on TheCommunique's Notes!

Thank you!

Hello all,

It is extremely gratifying to see views coming in from all parts of the world, more so to see how many English enthusiasts we have out there!

Many many thanks to all of you who visit this Page regularly :)

This overwhelming response has really made me want to put up more notes - it would be great if you could leave comments below if you require notes for any text specifically, I would be more than happy to glance through my folders and post those up if they could be of assistance to anyone!

Thanks again and keep visiting! :)

Aspects of Narrative in The Great Gatsby

THE GREAT GATSBY – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Setting:

The Great Gatsby suggests rather than develops the era of the twenties, it does evoke a haunting mood of a glamorous, wild time that seemingly will never come again. The loss of an ideal, the disillusionment that comes with the failure to compromise, the efforts of runaway prosperity and wild parties, the fear of the intangibility of that moment, the built-in resentment against the new immigration, the fear of a new radical element, the latent racism behind half-baked historical theories, the effect of Prohibition, the rise of a powerful underworld, the effect of the automobile and professional sports on post-war America – these and a dozen equally important events became the subject of The Great Gatsby, a novel that evokes both the romance and the sadness of that strange and fascinating era we call the twenties.

The Great Gatsby is a novel that is set against the ending of the war. Both Nick and Gatsby have participated in the war, although like much of the historical background in the novel, these events are more implied than developed. When Nick first meets Gatsby, Gatsby asks, “Your face is familiar... Weren’t you in the Third Division during the war?” Nick tells him, “Yes... The ninth machine-gun battalion,” to which Gatsby responds, “I was in the Seventh Infantry until June nineteen eighteen.”

Imagery:

Fitzgerald has described events such as European immigrants bringing with them socialist ideas, or the growing resentment of “foreigners” among Americans in The Great Gatsby. He speaks of the streets of New York filling up with people with “the tragic eyes and short upper lips of South-Eastern Europe,” an illusion that gets picked up with Meyer Wolfsheim and his “gonnegtions”.  Fitzgerald also described blacks coming from the South to cities like Chicago and New York. As Gatsby and Nick enter the city over the Queensboro Bridge, they see a panorama of ethnic faces outlined against the skyline of the new city, itself one of the unstated forces at work in the novel. The Tom Buchanans control the legal institutions of this city, and the Meyer Wolfsheims control the underworld.

Imagery and Foreshadowing:

-          The owl-eyed man steps from a car “violently shorn of one wheel” – next chapter, we find out that Tom Buchanan was involved in an automobile accident outside of Santa Barbara where he “ripped a front wheel off his car.” – Myrtle Wilson killed by an automobile

-          Rain falls on the reunion of Daisy and Gatsby – Rain falls on Gatsby’s funeral

-          Daisy and Jordan sit on a couch that seems to float to the ceiling – in Chapter 7 they sit on the same couch oppressed of the heat, as if the airiness of their being has finally come down to earth

-          The carnival gaiety of Gatsby’s parties disintegrates under Daisy’s disapproving eye

-          The city that Nick sees in its “wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world,” gives way to the reality of death in chapter 4 where, “A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms.”

-          The copy of Clay’s “Economics” that Gatsby reads while waiting for Daisy is apt for a woman whose voice is “full of money”

-          The “out-of-date timetable” that Nick uses to write down the names of Gatsby’s guests proves the obsolescence of Gatsby’s dream

-          The words that Myrtle speaks when she first meets Tom, “You can’t live forever, you can’t live forever,” reverberate with irony

Themes:

A thematic subcurrent of The Great Gatsby involves a sense of a new, urban public manipulated by power brokers, and Nick’s sudden awareness that a World Series can be fixed gives him insight into the corruptibility of this vast world.

Fitzgerald was working within terms of several broad themes in this novel. One involves the theme of America, the initial sense of promise of the New World as it was played out by the Frontier and transformed by the new megalopolis. A second involves the theme of love and romance, embodied in Daisy Fay and played out and transformed in her five years of marriage with Tom Buchanan. A third, of course, involves Gatsby himself, his internalising these themes - first, by modelling himself on Dan Cody and second, by making his reunion with Daisy inseparable from the idea of self.

When one lost the sense of life or promise, which Fitzgerald characteristically predicated on youth – then life lost its sense of wonder, its splendour, and its romantic promise. To desire was, ironically, more important than to have. The man who had great wealth, Tom Buchanan, or the man who was beaten by life, George Wilson, lacked the intensity of experience of a Gatsby who was a “son of God” and who “sprang from the Platonic conception of himself,” as the novel tells us. To lose the romantic conception of oneself is to move to hellish world, which in the novel is embodied by the valley of ashes and incarnated by George Wilson, who appropriately becomes the agent of Gatsby’s death when Gatsby loses his sense of wonder and “romantic readiness”, when his world becomes “material without being real” and a rose becomes “grotesque.”

Theme of Lost Past:

-          Over wound clock

-          Declining seasons of the year: Novel begins in late spring and ends in late autumn

                                                     

Theme of romantic exhaustion and lost promises:

-          Intensified by ash heaps and dust imagery

-          “Mingled her dark thick blood with the dust” – language infuses both religious and romantic meaning.

-          Tom’s remark, Gatsby “threw dust into your eyes,” not only picks up the dust/ashes imagery but connects it with the theory of seeing/misseeing.

-          The custodian of the Valley of Ashes, an “ashen and fantastic figure,” George Wilson murders the green dreamer, Gatsby is ironic

-          Violence of Myrtle’s death is attached to the many references to bad driving and moral carelessness

-          ‘Green light’ at the dock suggests Gatsby’s fertile dreams and money

Absence of God:

-          Except for Gatsby’s godlike sense of the potentiality of self, God has withdrawn from this world and is replaced by the commercial billboard with the blind eyes of T.J. Eckleburg, and embodied by the equally blind eyes of the owl-eyed man who appears at Gatsby’s party and reappears at his funeral, bridging the connection between the two, just as the end product of Gatsby’s parties are embodied in the orange pulps and lemon rinds and by that other symbol of romantic waste and emotional exhaustion – the valley of ashes. This is a blind world because there is no source of moral vision.

Symbolism:

Gatsby and Moon Symbolism:

-          The ‘moon’ that bathes Gatsby’s house at the start of the novel

-          Same moon shines on Gatsby when he waves goodbye at the party

-          Stands vigil at Daisy’s house after the fatal accident

Gatsby and God Symbolism:

-          “She blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.” Note the word ‘incarnation’.

-          Called a “son of God.”

Structure of the Novel:

Both structurally and chronologically, The Great Gatsby builds towards Chapter 5, the scene in which Gatsby again meets Daisy after their long separation. In a nine-chapter novel, this is the exact halfway point; the first four chapters build toward this moment, while the last four chapters lead away from it.

Chapter 5 is the static centre of the novel. Here, past and present fuse; the dream comes as close to “incarnation” as it is possible for it to come. Fitzgerald infuses this section with time images and references.

Jay Gatsby:

What Fitzgerald did in The Great Gatsby was to raise his central character to a mythic level, to reveal a man whose intensity of dream partook a state of mind that embodied America itself. Gatsby is the last of the romantic heroes, whose energy and sense of commitment take him in search of his personal grail.

Gatsby brought his Western intensity East and found a “frontier” equivalent in the New York underworld, the world of professional gamblers, bootleggers, financial schemers and a new breed of exploiters that the East bred differently from the West. Such a man will stand out in “respectable” company because he will lack social credentials.

The romantic intensity that the pioneers brought to a new world, Gatsby now brings to a beautiful, but also rather superficial, self-involved, self-protecting, morally empty young woman. The power of this novel ultimately comes from the structured relationships between these narrative elements. We have two kinds of seeing in this novel: a visionary whose vision has been emptied and a moral observer who is initially unsympathetic to what he sees in the visionary. “Gatsby... represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn,” but who is eventually won over by what is compelling and poignant in Gatsby’s story. Nick comes to see that Gatsby’s fate cannot be separated from his own or from the destiny of America.

Gatsby’s Father Figure – Meyer Wolfsheim:

Meyer Wolfsheim becomes Gatsby’s second father figure and introduces him to the New York underworld. It is thus with money that comes from bootlegging, gambling and bucket shops that Gatsby makes the fortune that allows him to buy his mansion on West Egg. When Nick confronts Wolfsheim after Gatsby’s death, he asks him if he had started Gatsby in business. “Start him! I made him!” “I raised him out of nothing, right out of the gutter.”

To Gatsby, money is money, and he never understands the difference between East Egg or West Egg. That is why Daisy is “appalled by West Egg.”

Gatsby - “Son of God”:

In one of the biographical recollections that Nick Carraway gives, he tells us that Gatsby “was a son of God” and that “he must be about His Father’s business.” The “Father’s business” turns out to be the pursuit of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.” Gatsby’s resolve comes at the moment he invents himself – “so he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent.” – And this moment comes simultaneously with Gatsby’s meeting Dan Cody. Once this equation is in place, Dan Cody takes on godlike proportions, and his business – the exploitation of America – becomes Gatsby’s business as well, even to the extent that Gatsby creates the kind of self necessary for such a pursuit.

Wilson goes out and kills the wrong man. Not only is God blind, but Wilson, his agent, is blind as well, and Wilson becomes an incarnate inversion of Gatsby. Pale of face, with yellow strawlike hair, he seems to leave a trail of ashes behind him, a possibility of death, the death of a godlike vision.

George Wilson:

The function of the exhausted apostles is taken over by George Wilson, who also sits in front of his garage – between the railroad and the road, watching the traffic go by. He is described as “one of those worn-out men” who “sat on a chair in the doorway and stared at the people and the cars that passed along the road.” Wilson and his wife live in “a small block of yellow brick,” surrounded by a “waste land” which locates them among the middle class. Their failed sense of wonder and disbelief in God makes their world an equivalent of hell, which is like the “impenetrable cloud” of dust that is prevalent in the Valley of Ashes.

Setting in The Great Gatsby

Write about some of the ways setting is created in “The Great Gatsby”.

·         Fact that Nick Carraway has returned to the place from where his family’s from, he’s an “original settler”

·         We find out about West Egg and East Egg through him, thus giving us a more realistic view of the entire setting of the story

·         Nick explains a lot of the happenings in the two places, gives us a feel of the kind of people or class of men and women who lived there

·         We see that there is a stark difference in the nouveaux riche who live in West Egg, while East Egg is home to the ‘historically rich’

·         Fitzgerald uses land and water to bring out the inaccessibility between the two – West Egg and East Egg are two islands separated by the Sound, or a stretch of water and this body of water acts as a barrier between the two

·         Within West Egg itself, we see contrast in Gatsby’s and Carraway’s house. The former’s residence is no less than a mansion, while Carraway, who considers himself well-off anyway, is struggling to make his ends meet at home. But, Nick takes pride in being the neighbour of such an influential and well-known man; this dissolves Nick’s feeling of inferiority compared to Gatsby

·         Nick describes the Buchanan’s house as an ‘elaborate Georgian Colonial mansion,’ and the fact that it has a lawn running for a quarter of a mile before the entrance to it almost gives the reader a sense that the house has been made to complement the garden, and not the other way round. Also, ‘bright vines’ adorn the mansion’s walls unlike Nick’s ‘thin beard of raw ivy,’ which again brings up the theme of difference in society