Addressing the Oedipal Dilemma in Macbeth

Elaborations on the theme of patricide reverberate throughout Shakespeare's (1980a) Macbeth, and are the source of much of its powerful impact on the audience. The play asks us to witness Macbeth's struggle with his death wishes toward the king, the father, and his struggle with his fears of the sons, those who could succeed him. In Macbeth we recognize a man contending with oedipal fantasies which exist almost universally: the wish to get rid of the father-king as the only way to establish his own manhood, and the wish to do so without guilt and without fear that the same will be done to him by growing sons.

This view of Macbeth as a play about the oedipal crime of patricide is, of course, not new. Freud (1916) described Duncan's murder as patricide.¹ Many psychoanalytically oriented critics since Freud (Barron, 1960; Jekels, 1943) have argued the same point. What has been neglected in this approach to the play is an understanding of the third component of the oedipal triangle, the role of the woman, the oedipal mother for whom the crime of patricide is dared in the first place. My aim in this article is to elucidate Lady Macbeth's role in the oedipal drama, so that we can better understand Shakespeare's treatment of women throughout the play, and to clarify a solution to the oedipal dilemma implicitly offered in the play.

The play begins with the weird sisters setting the scene, initiating through their prophecies what seems like an inevitable series of events to follow. Macbeth's response to the sisters' prophecies and the hope that they might come true is set in the imagery of the theater, the first of many theater metaphors throughout the drama: