Women are Evil in Macbeth

To me, Macbeth is a pretty misogynistic play. Most of the women characters motivate the male characters to do the evils they perform throughout. It all starts out when Macbeth and Banquo, after returning home victorious in separate wars, stumbling upon three witches in the midst of their rituals. They predict that Macbeth will become Thane of Cawdor, then King of Scotland, while Banquo's lineage will ascend to the throne after that. Macbeth tries to get information from the witches on how this will happen: “Say from whence / You owe this strange intelligence, or why / Upon this blasted heath you stop our way / With such prophetic greeting. Speak, I charge you” (2583). Despite this reasoning, the witches simply vanish, leaving the men in the dark about what this prophesy could've meant.

This presents a couple of problems, especially when King Duncan promotes Macbeth to Thane of Cawdor. Macbeth suddenly becomes fascinated by the prophesy and obsessed with the idea that he's becoming king. It's unclear of how the prophesy would have played out if the witches have never told it to Macbeth. Maybe King Duncan would've died of natural causes or something similar and somehow his son wouldn't be able to inherit the throne. Maybe it would've taken decades for Macbeth to ascend the throne. The witches leaving so suddenly seemed an evil act because it left Macbeth highly ambitious to become king.

Macbeth, of course, tells his wife about the prophesy, as a good man tells his wife everything. This however, leads to the revelation that the other major woman character, Lady Macbeth, is evil. In a monologue she claims Macbeth has too many feelings about the whole situation to act, acting would involve Macbeth murdering King Duncan. She says: “Yet I do fear thy nature. / It is too full o'th' milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way” (2587). She later tells Macbeth to just suck it up and kill the king when he stays over their estate for a night of dinner and drinking: “O never / Shall sun that morrow see.…To beguile the time, / Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, / Your hand, your tongue; look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't” (2588). So, even she is the convincing factor that leads to Macbeth stabbing King Duncan in the temple. He blames in on his Duncan's servants, and Duncan's sons Malcolm and Donalbain flee because they are afraid of being murdered as well. Their escape make the brothers an easy scapegoat in their father's death.

These actions lead to a chain reaction where more killings must take place: Banquo becomes murdered under Macbeth's order, and so does Macduff's family. Macduff being a character proclaimed to be an enemy of Macbeth through the witches. Macduff's wife is the only character who isn't evil in the play, and she dies before there's any real chance of character development.