Macbeth Research Paper - the Man Who Caged Himself

The Man Who Caged Himself:

A Study of Macbeth’s Mental Prison

Chase Robinson

Macbeth Critical Essay

Rucker- English 4H

12 April 2017

        From the moment Macbeth took a glimpse down the path of imperium, his lust and his power thirst would bring him to dominion, but would ultimately destroy his old alliances, his morality, and eventually himself. What makes the case of Macbeth so interesting is his conscious awareness of the schizophrenia-like hallucinations he endures and the decreasing moral code happening to himself the entire time it takes him to become insane and to decay. Macbeth’s slow decline from power and life can be attributed to his original submission to evil, his awareness that he is slowly disintegrating into a worse amalgamation, and his gradual acceptance of his failing moral and physical state as well as his regretful decisions.

         It is Macbeth’s excessive trust in women that contributes to his initial seduction into his corruption. He clearly believes the witches when Banquo is suspicious, and he is easily pressured by his wife. From the time the play begins until the first encounter with the three witches that would be his downfall, the young general Macbeth is in the prime of his life. The plethora of dominoes that wrought down the walls of Duncan would begin at this very scene where Banquo and Macbeth, two heroes, stumble upon the supernatural. This is the point where Macbeth splits into separate thoughts of conscious thinking and wishful thinking that will dissociate him in the mind (Favila 7).  Wishful thinking, which becomes ingrained in the young hero’s brain, will carry him on to a throne and a grave covered with the blood of those he loves, and, will destroy Macbeth’s moral compass and conscious thinking, which leads him further down his violent path. The witches seduce the hero into this magnificent daydream, but it is ultimately his wife, Lady Macbeth, who in turn is extremely coaxed into this delusion, which turns him for the worst. Lady Macbeth ends up with an even more poisoned mind than Macbeth after she prays for all her emotion to leave her (1.5.40-53). Once Duncan announces that Macbeth will not succeed him as king, another psychological effect takes place in the mind of the character as well as Lady Macbeth spilling her rage out to scare Macbeth into doing what she says. When Duncan breaks the social code and chooses his son to be the next king, a father and son-like conflict emerges between Duncan and Macbeth, as Favila states in “Mortal Thoughts and Magical Thinking in Macbeth”, that, “Early Freudian readings focus on the oedipal complex: the father/son struggle between Macbeth and Duncan and the fall of the hero through a fatal conscience. When objects relations usurps the oedipal complex, Renaissance scholars…switch focus to the mother/infant matrix…Both readings merge beautifully in the play because the link between these two viewpoints is the magic/mortal thinking so prevalent in the hero’s mindscape. Consider the similarities between the loss of the pleasure principle (where object relations are born) and the creation of the super ego (the consolation of oedipal desire). A quick recap of these two moments in psychic development will help illustrate Macbeth’s position between them, for the play begins with the hero’s temptation into the child’s world of magical thinking, where wish informs the future and the superego has yet to be formed” (Favila 2). Macbeth’s corruption also sprouts from his initial submission. Killing Duncan is the mountain that Macbeth is faced with. Once he commits to the act, he only begins a downhill road to his demise. At this point, Macbeth still has an intact conscience and realizes what he has done, giving him a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder from which he never fully recovers (Birenbaum 3).  After murdering the king, delusions litter the hero’s mind, slowly changing the way he thinks until the end of the play. His furthering delusions also become connected to his moral compass. The more evil deeds that Macbeth does, the worse his fits get, such as when he sees Banquo’s ghost at the dinner table shortly after getting confirmation that his hired murderers had done their job (3.4.94-117).

        When Macbeth does become the king of Scotland, he and Lady Macbeth realize that they must keep secret their evil deeds or be overthrown and executed. It is at this point that Macbeth becomes aware of his degrading condition. He is slowly becoming insane because of Duncan and Banquo, and therefore he tries to repress his memories of their deaths and his involvement. Repression is a psychoanalytical theory of a basic defense mechanism in the body that banishes anxiety arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness (Myers 560). Macbeth unconsciously attempts to repress Duncan and Banquo in vain however, for they haunt him and Lady Macbeth for the rest of their days. Lady Macbeth comes to her senses after sometime, and upon realizing her and her husband’s actions, commits suicide as an outcome of being unable to repress her short lived malignant nature. Macbeth treads on, however, still entranced by his schizophrenic world of terror. It is at this point in time that the tragic hero begins realize that he is caged in his own mind with no chance of escape. From his first hallucination after murdering Duncan (2.2.34-42) to the moment he had found out his wife was dead (5.5.16), Macbeth has become aware that an ill-done murder has degraded the hero from a great general that fought off the Norwegians, to a lowly and murderous tyrant with no chivalry or morals to guide him. When Macbeth is known to this, he knows his time is running out. Foster states in his book, “Macbeth’s War on Time”, “The suffering of Macbeth may be thought of as caused by the pressure of the world of order slowly resuming its true shape and crushing him. This is the work of time; as usual in Shakespeare, evil, however great, always burns itself out, and time is the servant of providence. Nowhere is this clearer than in Macbeth.” (Foster 323). Foster also states that instead of being fixated on past time, the play focuses on time past, time passing, and time to come, as Macbeth himself is focused on all three simultaneously with thoughts of Duncan, his current state, and the approaching army of Malcom that seeks to dethrone the king of Scotland with his army from England (Foster 324). Macbeth also begins to lose interest in controlling his new found impulses. His insomnia, a result of his haunted dreams, also tires him and puts him out of any wit he has left. Insomnia worsens when the insomniac worries about their lack of sleep (Myers 238). This is ironic because as Macbeth degrades more and more, he becomes more apathetic towards everything in life, as he grows closer to his permanent sleep. The character’s fits are no longer kept secret, but just expressed openly. Macbeth the tyrant no longer hides his delusions and hallucinations from his servants and people because he doesn’t care. At this point, Macbeth is care free, even when Malcolm’s army surrounds his castle to siege and overtake it, the tragic hero has no fear of death or torture, he only meets Malcolm and Macduff in battle just to “go out with a bang”. Even when Macbeth meets the son of Siward in battle (5.7.4-13), he carelessly slays the boy and moves on to meet more opponents to see who could kill him. When the fallen hero meets Macduff, he accepts his death knowingly and is felled by the new hero: a warrior and freedom fighter for Scotland. It was just before the battle that Macbeth fully accepted his maniacal, corrupt state. He had begun to tolerate his condition when he first hired murderers to end the threat of Banquo, and his son Fleance. As his reign shifted through time, Macbeth slowly acceded to his state of mind that was shifting darker on the color scale, until the point he reached at the very end, where Macduff would finally have vengeance on his family and the head of a Scottish tyrant. Macbeth’s apathy towards life, death, and the universe, at the end of his time may be attributed to the coming of the time in which he might finally rest after enduring the misery of his conscious awareness of his failing state and the failing state of his wife, Lady Macbeth until she committed suicide upon realization of what they had done once she was re-sexed into who she had been before the entire conundrum had iterated itself into the lives of the characters.