Lady Macbeth — Dinaburg Writes

by Ava Reid

The Sword of Shannara was my personal entry into fantasy books; as a twelve-year-old, I wasn’t conversant enough in the landscape of fantasy literature to know how closely it mapped onto The Lord of the Rings. When I eventually got to the first Wheel of Time book, The Eye of the World, I still didn’t recognize the structural mirroring of The [Noun] of the [Noun] fantasy format–I was firmly in the “all my money goes to Mercedes Lackey and David Eddings” world.

After two years spending all of my available cash on all of the fantasy paperbacks the newly opened Barnes & Noble had to offer, I didn’t have a lot to say when I was asked as a freshman in high school English class what my favorite book was. Well, I suppose I had many options but and it was the mid 1990s and I wanted to be cool (“cool” to my peers in our accelerated classroom), so I pointedly did not say The Mists of Avalon, the huge and amazing retelling of he Arthurian legend from the point of view of Morgan le Fay. I can’t remember what I did say, but it was not impressive—most likely The Hatchet because we all had to read that clunker in sixth grade and it was assuredly masculine enough to create the impression I was not some sort of deranged psycho that had a wall of paperbacks titled Magic’s Pawn or Pawn of Prophecy or a few dozen other non-pawn wizard books. I did not like The Hatchet. The only thing that I remember from that entire class, beyond the blind terror of outing myself as a true fantasy gee was that we read The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad. I thought it was okay.

Jump to 2024, and the genre that Lady Macbeth finds itself in–retelling myths & legends, resettling foundational fictions from the point of view of the women involved who were often given short shrift—is not new, nor is it new to me. Contrary to whatever I said in that schoolroom, The Mists of Avalon was my favorite book at 14, and it remained near the top for a long time (though for reasons of later-discovered authorial uh, unpleasantness, I will not unearth it from my mind palace). Lady Macbeth comes to me at what I can only imagine is the tail-end of the more-than-half-decade-long Circe-spearheaded “titular-female-characer, big-illustrated-face” genre (the covers of which I would pastiche together into a single image if I still had access to photoshop). Think books titled Ariadne, Medusa (the book I keep picturing is actually called Stone Blind, which is a more interesting title but cedes a lot of valuable SEO mental real estate), Atalanta, Galatea, Lilith, Hera, Clytemnestra (Clytemnestra, the character, along with actress Michelle Borth, were listed as two of my “heroes” on my MySpace page because I was “random awkward turtle” cool in 2004 (and also they’re both great)). In addition to just being what Amazon recommends if you type “Lady Macbeth” into their search engine, all of these books have a similar aesthetic. They’re playing to a type, and that type is, “Hey, I recognize that archetype and I would in fact like to read an account that humanizes her.” Here is me, patiently waiting for a modern Queen Mab novel.

Lady Macbeth, though is different. I have a real soft spot for The Scottish Play, and for Lady Macbeth as a lady in particular. I trace it back to my pre-Sword of Shannara days, when I was an avid reader still struggling to find my niche–Goosebumps was too simple, “adult” books were too boring–so I filled my time rereading Foxtrot and Calvin and Hobbes anthologies.

On a side note, I also blame/credit Foxtrot for putting me on the path that led me to choosing Anna Karenina for my junior (high school) year independent book report, wherein I can vividly recall having to read the final 230 pages on a five-hour bus ride back from Madison Square Garden after a Rangers game with my dad. I delayed that book for weeks because–certainly not surprising to my English teacher–I was not actually equipped to read Anna Karenina at sixteen. I bet I read a lot of Foxtrot during the two months we were given to read our chosen book.

But dude, can you imagine the big, stylized face of Anna Karenina looking at you in a book titled, like, Anna Karenina: Rebirth? If the push for woman-centric retellings came in the mid-aughts when the joke book Pride & Prejudice & Zombies came out, I bet we’d be awash in Anna Kareninas: a Kim Possible Anna Karenina; a Pink Power Ranger Anna Karenina; a Dungeons & Dragons Anna Karenina. Basically, Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse but with Anna Karenina. Would a Super Smash Bros. full of Anna Kareninas—no, strike that, women from literary remakes—maybe rule?

I have gone tragically, delightfully, tragically off-topic, which is ill-deserved for a book as good as Lady Macbeth. But sometimes we get what we get, and not what we deserve:

His gaze flickers. “Was it worth it, your vengeance?”
If she were a man, he would not ask her this. For men there is no debt of blood which goes unpaid. If the world tips in another’s favor, it must be made to tip back again. But the world is never in a woman’s favor. She cannot tip the scale. The only choice is: live the same mute, unjust life you have always lived, or tear apart the world itself.

The genre of Chappell-Roan-esque reimaginings of historic women remains a really strong one, though I have mentioned my Cassandran prediction that it is about to have run its course. (Cassandra, of course, does have an eponymous book, but it’s from the 1980s so it doesn’t have a big, stylized face on the cover.) I like the idea of Chappell Roan as the template for female autonomy—you can already overlay almost any theming onto her and make it make sense. If we run it back to the Smash Bros. roster of women in fiction, Chappall Roan is Kirby, who can absorb anyone else’s aesthetics & powers. Real nerds know Kirby is true cosmic horror, as powerful as Sailor Moon and Goku having had a child. Yes, Chappell Roan gets to be in the women of literature fighting game.

Take away the subgenre hook of a misunderstood literary figure being cast in the role of protagonist and Lady Macbeth still has my attention: Any book set in the time where Briton was known as the ragged end of the civilized world, a wild island awash in forest and magic, automatically begins with points in its favor. The writing, too, is simply beautiful; brutal in its cultural intrusions but gossamer-touched in its stylistic voice:

Perhaps her husband is wiser than the brute she has considered him to be. “Did they speak such to your father, as well?”
Then Macbeth’s face shutters. She has ventured too far.
“You are not given to know this much, Lady Roscilla,” he says. “This power is for the Thane of Glammis alone.”
Yet he has answered her question anyway. The Thane of Glammis was his father, too, and his grandfather–this she learned back in Naoned, before they wed.

Would you be able to wriggle out an answer in such a subtle way, or even know there is information in the slip? “For the Thane of Glammis alone,” not “For myself only”—thus such power did reach back at least one generation. Too clever, indeed, to not point out to the reader. But would we have noticed such complex bait without the assistance? I did not ever feel talked down to in the pages, even when I felt outwitted. Gossamer touch, indeed.

“Macbeth freed me, on the condition that I fight for him. He knew he would need every man at his side. And yet he swore he sent his harlot, demon-bearing wife to hell.”
“Perhaps hell could not hold me.” Her blood is hot.

It’s the “perhaps” that gets me, here, the still-passive enculturation of femininity injected with potent venom. It’s so good. Roscilla is good. A great character, an excellent version, a powerful reimaging, a strong POV. Lady Macbeth, the character Roscilla wears like a costume, has access to some of the most entrenched and potent imagery in literature, and the book does not shy away from wielding it:

It is too much; he cannot expect her to do this. She has only just cleaned her hands. She has given three different men their deaths. Is this what it means, truly, to be Lady Macbeth? Sorceress, murderer, the dagger in her husband’s hand?

Nearly every time she was referred to as a metaphorical “dagger”—by herself, or others—I gasped with joy. “They said the line!” It’s shiverful.

She should not wear a white garment ever again. At least a dark linen will better hide the blood she sees dripping from her hands, soaking the hem of the dress, and pooling on the floor around her feet.

Blood, too, gets its due, though the restraint at having no “damned spot” that I could see proves Lady Macbeth is a work of fine art rather than a pulp of known content pressed into a new shape.

What emerges from the whole of the text is one of the more beautiful reworkings I have yet read. If this, rather than Mists of Avalon, was the fantasy-tinged retelling of a classic piece of literature that I had picked up the summer before high school, perhaps I would have been able to admit to the class that I had been soaking up things of greater depth than CRACKED magazine.

No one knows quite what to make of themselves before they discover what kind of reader they are, and announcing a “favorite” book as an adolescent is more blueprint for who you want to become than acceptance of who you are.

No one knows exactly what a witch looks like (so in fact everyone knows what a witch looks like), yet they can all agree, it sounds like the sort of curse a witch would give: the shiny apple with the rotted core.

Lady Macbeth the character might need to figure herself out, but Lady Macbeth the book certainly already knows.