Agency and Responsibility in Lady Macbeth (2016)

Please note: this feature contains a full description of events in Lady Macbeth and as such contains spoilers. 

Marriage in the nineteenth century – particularly between the lower middle classes, perhaps, who had enough to lose but little enough to boast – must have been for many women a miserable existence. Firstly, women often had limited influence on the matches proposed to them, having to consider the fortune of their families and dependents as well as themselves, when respectable opportunities to earn money were very limited. The Married Woman’s Property Acts did not come in until 1870 and beyond; until that time, women forfeited any land, property or money they had in their own names, passing it directly to their husbands at the point of marriage. They had no legal rights to their own children – the father de facto retained that right – and limited access even to the extreme solution of divorce which, in the rare cases it took place, frequently led to women being socially ostracised, shunned by neighbours and family, and of course penniless, if they had no other arrangement or allowance entailed upon them. The only legitimate, respectable way out of a middle-class marriage was widowhood.

As the first reels of Lady Macbeth (2016) unfold, we’re left under no illusions about the stifling, isolating existence of many bartered brides in the mid-nineteenth century. The teenage Katherine has essentially been sold as a chattel, alongside a piece of purposeless land, to a much older man – under the wary eye of her father-in-law, a man who can only boast that he’s even more unpleasant than his son. From as early as her wedding night, her new husband Alexander makes it clear that her domain is indoors, where things will be more ‘comfortable’ for her. His wife insists she likes the fresh air, but he’s implacable, and so Katherine begins a dreary domestic life as his wife; not for nothing is she so often in frame with a clock. It also seems telling that her gasps of pain, annoyance and embarrassment so often occur when something is literally being done behind her back: when she’s being laced into a corset, submitting to having her hair brushed for the ornate braids she wears, or – more humiliating still – when her husband prefers to keep her at a cold, unconsummated distance, facing the wall…

Because of this, she can’t even get on with the arduous, risky business of providing the family with an heir, her whole reason for being procured for this out-of-the-way house – given Alexander’s predilections, as well as his long absences. Without books, callers or other occupations of any kind, Katherine seems primed to go the way of a thousand nineteenth century heroines, dissolving into ‘nervousness’ or lapsing into apathy, yet another Catherine Earnshaw or Margaret Sherwin perhaps. But Katherine has a ‘thick skin’, as she puts it, and a steely reserve. With her husband away, she takes over the duty of overseeing his labourers, which includes a new boy – Sebastian, a man who doesn’t care a jot about her social status, and treats her with the same easy disrespect he does her maid, Anna (whom he’s in the process of humiliating when Katherine first claps eyes on him.)

Knowing the young bride is alone in the house one night, Sebastian takes his chance and sneaks in, giving the lie to the absent Alexander’s assertion that Katherine will be ‘safer’ there. At first, Katherine acts the part of the valiant virgin, trying to repel what seems a would-be rape – but then, subverting the expected codes of behaviour, she inverts the situation, suddenly reciprocating his advances. Sebastian suddenly has to re-assess, finding himself no longer in the stereotypical male role; he might have expected her to behave more like Anna perhaps, who even as a social inferior is demure enough to be mortified. Respectable women at this time were supposed to be passive, and virtually asexual – only submitting to the act for the purpose of maternity. Dr William Acton, practitioner to Queen Victoria, wrote a famous paper in 1857 – so, contemporary with the film – where he claimed that ‘the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled by sexual feelings of any kind’: certainly, Sebastian is surprised by the way Katherine responds, and it’s not what he would have expected. It is also the moment that his own agency begins to rescind, irreparably, whilst hers blossoms – at least, up until a point.

Katherine’s descent into crime echoes not only the Shakespearean origin behind the film’s title (and the story behind the screenplay here) but also the extreme means which many literary women of the era utilised in order to satisfy their needs – be these lust or larceny. From Lady Audley to Emma Bovary, sexual appetites and liberation always demand a heavy penalty in the end. However, Lady Macbeth thwarts the anticipated Victorian (or Tsarist) moral payback in some key respects – and the screenplay deviates from its basis in the Russian novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1865) to see Katherine progress through increasing magnitudes of extreme behaviour, but without presenting viewers with a straightforward penance. If Katherine commences her criminal life in an expected way, then she doesn’t end it thus.

Her initial rebellion – against that ghastly old man, her father-in-law, who unfairly accosts her for neglecting her wifely duties when her husband is elsewhere – begins with a ‘woman’s crime’, the ubiquitous poisoning (closely echoing The Beguiled) which takes place in the home through a contaminated meal. Posing for a post-mortem photograph with her father-in-law’s remains in the correct full mourning garb, Katherine looks every inch properly sorrowful. It is, however, a ruse, and Katherine wastes no time in restructuring the household around her wishes and desires. The more Katherine is able to empty the house, the more agency she’s able to enjoy; the fewer people to witness her at home, the fewer people to have opinions on her conduct. With Boris gone, she has free access to her lover once again.

However, when her husband eventually returns, she doesn’t attempt the ‘woman’s crime’ again – although she could have, as she rushes to bring him a drink of tea – another feminine staple. He’s not apparently suspicious of the circumstances surrounding his father’s demise, doesn’t mourn him, and probably could have been dispatched the same way. However, in response to her husband’s rising anger – his wife may have tried to limit people’s knowledge of what she’s been up to, but he’s heard the rumours – Katherine opts against the life of penance and prayer books suggested by him, actually bringing Sebastian into the bedroom and then caving in Alexander’s head with a poker when he – perhaps reasonably – objects. A woman’s crime, this ain’t. Katherine has not opted to play safe and plausible here.

But getting rid of a gentleman (and his horse) is a different prospect to excusing the death of an elderly man, and marks a turning point in her behaviour. Sebastian now begins to shrink from her; she’s too demanding, too active. It seems she’s capable of anything at this juncture, and when her home is invaded by unexpected visitors, she takes the ultimate step for a Victorian lady – murdering a child, the ultimate inversion for someone whose role is meant to view childrearing as an almost divine calling. She’ll do anything, it seems, to keep Sebastian near to her, even when it seems like he’s exhausted and damaged by her attentions. However, in the novels of the period, including Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Katherine would simply be found out. She would pay a bloody price for her deeds; she might even confess. Order would be restored, probably by her death.

This isn’t to be in Lady Macbeth. When accused of her final crime, Katherine takes refuge behind her status as a woman of means. Again inverting Sebastian’s attempts to steer his own course, she turns his revelations that she murdered her husband’s ward back onto him. How could she kill a child? She loved the boy as if he were her own, she says. On the other hand, the lowly worker is naturally a suspicious character; she exploits his dirty, dishevelled appearance and shifts the blame. (He’s also mixed-race, but so are the new inhabitants of the house, including the child, so it seems as though his class is more significant in this instance.)

On consideration, those present are convinced by her story. Katherine has gone from counteracting expectations to get what she wants, to enacting the same expectations, also to get what she wants. Well, she saves her own skin, at least – but her victory is a hollow one, ultimately, as she is left entirely alone in the marital home. She has condemned her lover, and isolated herself in pregnancy, a pregnancy which would be both illegitimate and go on to produce another child of mixed race – a definite stigma, when you have just sent the mixed-race father to the gallows as a liar and a murderer. The film ends abruptly here, inviting the audience to consider Katherine’s ominous future. It’s a judicious place to leave the narrative, and sees her almost as powerless as she was when she first wore her bridal veil. To live – at what cost?

The overall effect of Lady Macbeth is to put your sympathies into a centrifuge. At first, it’s difficult to feel anything other than unequivocal pity for this young girl, married off and isolated (we know little about her family, but she does at one point say that she misses her mother.) Even as she begins to unpick the fabric of her very limited world, taking a lover – even getting rid of her father-in-law – you can still feel for Katherine. But as her behaviour escalates, and she shows that she’s willing to do anything, no matter how bloody, it becomes more challenging to sympathise with her. Is she simply a victim of circumstance? Does she have any other means available to her? Or is she herself inherently flawed somehow?

There’s no simple answer here, but it’s worth remembering that she is not the only woman whose lot in life is pinioned by her social role. Anna, the lady’s maid, is a liminal figure in the film who is often present at key moments, but utterly peripheral, unable to influence things one way or another. She tries – valiantly – but she is in the unenviable position of being on the lowest rung here, the only person Katherine can command with propriety and impunity. There’s an interesting relationship between the two women, one which moves from some degree of intimacy to complete alienation. As Katherine’s sense of agency escalates, Anna’s already-limited agency diminishes – to the point when the girl becomes utterly voiceless in the face of the crimes she is forced to witness.

It is this voicelessness which Katherine finally exploits when faced with Sebastian – who is by now utterly powerless – and his accusations of her guilt. Had Anna been able to speak for herself, then she could have saved them both; however, the long and arduous process which has seen her become so traumatised that she becomes mute leads to a heart-breaking scene where she simply cannot form the words; she closes down completely, and so she will hang for a crime she did not commit. Katherine’s voice may be limited, but when she uses it to exonerate herself, she is still believable as a genteel young woman shocked by these insinuations of crime. Anna has no such redress, and her ultimate lack of power is emphasised by her literal speechlessness.