Introduction
Today, the role and significance of women in world culture, both past and present, play a huge role in the scientific literature in the world. From this point of view, the most diverse periods of the history of culture are considered, for example, the Renaissance or the military and post-war periods. Many authors note the plight of a woman if she did not belong to high society and, nevertheless, striving for independence. Gilman (Stetson) used her writings to explore the role of women in America around 1900. She elaborated on many issues, such as the lack of life outside the home and the despotic forces of a patriarchal society. The world created by Shakespeare in Macbeth is the world of men and women trying to exist with existing gender stereotypes: shifting them, fighting them, and blurring roles. Thus, in different periods of literary development, authors were equally interested in gender roles in society.
Gender Roles
The concepts of “femininity” and “masculinity” are defining for the characterization of gender identity. Since these concepts are based more on the social nature of a person (gender) than on the biological nature (sex), they denote the behavior of women and men in society. It is a society that determines what it means to be a woman or a man. For example, activity, passivity, aggressiveness, emotionality, and shyness are directly associated with gender roles. Activity, aggressiveness, and courage are inextricably linked in the public mind with male nature, passivity, emotionality, and shyness – with female nature.
Led Man in the Arms of a Strong Woman
According to Lady Macbeth, the heroine of the Shakespearean play of the same name, her husband is full of ambition, but he is kind enough to take decisive action: kill Dukan and become king. In this regard, Lady Macbeth is ready to “clear” his mind and breathe his spirit into him, in other words, by talking and persuading him to do according to her will (Shakespeare). This speech shows that the clear leader and dominant partner in this relationship is Lady Macbeth, which is not typical of the stereotypical gender and social roles of the 17th century since husbands were supposed to rule their wives in the same way kings ruled countries. The secret plan of Lady Macbeth is a coup: the seizure of power that rightfully does not belong to her.
General Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are metaphorical images of masculinity and femininity in an individual or an entire culture. In the disconnection between them, a dynamic of evil is manifested when masculinity loses its reality, and femininity, created for love, submits to calculating cold-blooded ambition. Lady Macbeth is one of the most powerful women in Shakespeare’s plays. However, to carry out her plans, she feels she must not act herself but inspire her husband to work. There is a certain irony in this: Lady Macbeth tries to be a good wife and serves her husband by strengthening the masculine qualities in herself (Shakespeare). Lady Macbeth does not correspond to existing stereotypes; she struggles with them in herself and the outside world. However, despite Lady Macbeth’s desire to be more like a man to solve the task, she has to pose as a weak woman to achieve her goal (Gul and Rahman 242). Thus, although Lady Macbeth occupies the leading position, she still acts through her husband since they are still in the shadow of men in the Renaissance.
Another way to understand Shakespeare’s view of femininity in the play is to look closely at the role of witches and their relationship to Lady Macbeth. These two powerful female forces influence and sometimes control Macbeth’s actions (Shakespeare). Lady Macbeth and the witches are indirectly identified with each other by their deviations from the prescribed female subordination. They act as a catalyst for Macbeth’s actions, as well as the structure and symbolism of the play (Karuniawan 20). By adopting a masculine identity, women shun their feminine roles while remaining overtly feminine, still associated with their sex and humanity. The play’s main problem relates to how Shakespeare constructed these female characters and how he sought to present them to the audience of his time and future generations.
Female Madness
In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Stetson depicts the narrator’s insanity as a way of protesting women’s professional and social oppression. Despite a significant gap in eras, both in the time of Shakespeare and in the time of Gilman, women were still heavily dependent on men and did not have their rights. Husbands and male doctors were given the impression of acting in their interests, but women were portrayed as mentally weak (Gul and Rahman 242). The women’s rights advocates of the time believed that the “outburst” of this mental instability was a manifestation of their failure to play the roles they were allowed to play in a male-dominated society. Women were even discouraged from writing because it eventually created an identity and became a form of defiance (Stetson 649). Gilman realized that writing was one of the few forms of existence for women at a time when they had very few rights.
In drawing an analogy between the roles of men and women in the nineteenth century, one must first focus on how men and women see the external universe differently. Women view the universe through the prism of imagination and fantasy, while men look at the world in terms of reality and facts; they have a materialistic view of everything. The story can also follow the pattern of binary oppositions found in the characterizations of both major and minor characters (Anasiudu 321). The husband is a doctor who concentrates only on what can be seen and touched, tangible. However, his wife is supposedly a writer who uses her creative power to escape the harsh realities imposed on her by her husband and society, being forced to stay in a room and unable to write, her only refuge.
The story deals with various issues related to the suffering of nineteenth-century women, particularly its limitation limiting traditional gender roles. According to the heroine herself, Jane is locked in an upstairs room that used to be a nursery (Stetson 648). The windows are boarded up, the wallpaper is torn, and the floor is scratched. Jane begins to suspect another woman was imprisoned here against her will. She soon begins to see a figure in the wallpaper and eventually becomes convinced that a woman is hiding behind it (Stetson 650). Believing that she should try to free the woman from the wallpaper, Jane starts peeling the remaining paper off the wall. Consequently, this story is about the trap and flight of women.
It symbolizes the struggle of women for other women and themselves. Although the main character went mad, her main desire was to free the woman, herself, from the shackles of male oppression, which symbolizes the room in which Jane was. The use of yellow wallpaper becomes a symbol of surveillance; the female narrator of the story is in a prison cell, a children’s room with clear signs of incarceration, such as barred windows, and is under scrutiny from her doctor husband to see if she exhibits the proper behavior expected of her. In addition to constant surveillance by her husband, the room reflected the contemporary society for the writer, in which women were limited from the ‘world of men.’
On the last day of summer, she locks herself in her room to remove the wallpaper remnants from the walls. When John decides to return home, Jane refuses to unlock the door (Stetson 656). Returning with the key, he finds his wife crawling around the room in circles, touching the wallpaper. She exclaims, “I’ve got out at last,” and John faints as she circles the room, stepping over her inert husband every time she passes by (Stetson 656). It also demonstrates to some extent the weakness of the male sex in the face of the unknown.
Conclusion
As can be understood from the works of Shakespeare and Gilman, women are not born weak, irrational, and subjective. A woman’s anatomy alone is not enough to define her as male or female. Rather, these entities are shaped by the conscious awareness of individuals through the roles they play in the very heart of the society in which they live. At the time of Shakespeare, there was also a tradition of courtly attitude toward a woman, based on glorifying her as a deity and not on recognizing her as a real earthly creature characterized by weaknesses and illnesses, the birth of children, and more. Related to this is the presentation of Lady Macbeth as one of the witches. At the same time, in Gilman’s time, ‘female hysteria’ was widespread, which also found its relation in the writer’s work. Thus, the theme of gender roles, especially the position of women in society, is a hot topic for earlier writers and still has not lost its significance.
Works Cited
Anasiudu, O. “Literature, Idea and the Feminist Consciousness in Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper.’” ELS Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, vol. 5, no. 2, 2022, Web.
Gul, Nadia, and Atteq Rahman. “Gender and Manliness in Macbeth.” Journal of Languages, Culture and Civilization, vol. 3, no. 4, 2021, pp. 241–255., Web.
Karuniawan, P. “The Domination of Lady Macbeth in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 2021, Web.
Shakespeare, William. “Macbeth, Entire Play.” The Folger Shakespeare, Web.
Stetson, Cltarlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” National Library of Medicine, 1892, Web.