November 10 , 11:30-12:30 
Assistant Professor of English Rachana Sachdev

Macbeth and Menstruation

What makes women different from men? As far as the early modern medical establishment was concerned, women seemed to be women only when they were capable of menstruation. Since menstruation was central to the definition of womanhood, it was also considered essential to regulate it--to provoke it when it was late, to think of menstrual variations as disorders, and to provide several cures for women who did not menstruate as expected. Almost all early modern compendiums of female diseases start with that most dreaded disease, the suppression of the menses, and prescribe many herbal, astrological, and chemical cures for it.

Shakespeare’s invocation of this common female malady in the construction of Lady Macbeth raises important questions about the representation of femininity in the play, especially as her diseased body functions as a signifier for the entire state. I see Lady Macbeth’s invocation to the spirits to “unsex” her as the starting point of a process through which both her body and the body politic become diseased. The stoppage of blood within Lady Macbeth’s body is then mirrored in a similar disease within the body politic after Duncan’s murder.

The metaphors of disease are not confined to Lady Macbeth and the body politic, however; the text presents the male body of Macbeth as diseased as well, but with a difference. Whereas in Lady Macbeth, the source of disease and madness was located in the womb, in the male body of Macbeth, the source is imagination or the mind. The consequences of these gendered variations are important in establishing the full ideological import of the representations of disease in the play and in the early modern era, and that is where I hope to end my analysis of Macbeth.