Freud - Complete Works (513 page)

   It would be a perfect example of
poetic justice in the manner of the talion if the childlessness of
Macbeth and the barrenness of his Lady were the punishment for
their crimes against the sanctity of generation - if Macbeth could
not become a father because he had robbed children of their father
and a father of his children, and if Lady Macbeth suffered the
unsexing she had demanded of the sprits of murder. I believe Lady
Macbeth’s illness, the transformation of her callousness into
penitence, could be explained directly as a reaction to her
childlessness, by which she is convinced of her impotence against
the decrees of nature, and at the same time reminded that it is
through her own fault if her crime has been robbed of the better
part of its fruits.

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   In Holinshed’s
Chronicle
(1577), from which Shakespeare took the plot of
Macbeth
, Lady Macbeth is only once mentioned as the
ambitious wife who instigates her husband to murder in order that
she may herself become queen. There is no mention of her subsequent
fate and of the development of her character. On the other hand, it
would seem that the change of Macbeth’s character into a
bloodthirsty tyrant is ascribed to the same motives as we have
suggested here. For in Holinshed
ten years
pass between the
murder of Duncan, through which Macbeth becomes king, and his
further misdeeds; and in these ten years he is shown as a stern but
just ruler. It is not until after this lapse of time that the
change begins in him, under the influence of the tormenting fear
that the prophecy to Banquo may be fulfilled just as the prophecy
of his own destiny has been. Only then does he contrive the murder
of Banquo, and, as in Shakespeare, is driven from one crime to
another. It is not expressly stated in Holinshed that it was his
childlessness which urged him to these courses, but enough time and
room is given for that plausible motive. Not so in Shakespeare.
Events crowd upon us in the tragedy with breathless haste so that,
to judge by the statements made by the characters in it, the course
of its action covers about
one week
.¹ This acceleration
takes the ground from under all our constructions of the motives
for the change in the characters of Macbeth and his wife. There is
no time for a long drawn-out disappointment of their hopes of
offspring to break the woman down and drive the man to defiant
rage; and the contradiction remains that though so many subtle
interrelations in the plot, and between it and its occasion, point
to a common origin of them in the theme of childlessness,
nevertheless the economy of time in the tragedy expressly precludes
a development of character from any motives but those inherent in
the action itself.

  
¹
Darmesteter (1881, lxxv).

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   What, however, these motives can
have been which in so short a space of time could turn the
hesitating, ambitious man into an unbridled tyrant, and his
steely-hearted instigator into a sick woman gnawed by remorse, it
is, in my view, impossible to guess. We must, I think, give up any
hope of penetrating the triple layer of obscurity into which the
bad preservation of the text, the unknown intention of the
dramatist, and the hidden purport of the legend have become
condensed. But I should not subscribe to the objection that
investigations like these are idle in face of the powerful effect
which the tragedy has upon the spectator. The dramatist can indeed,
during the representation, overwhelm us by his art and paralyse our
powers of reflection; but he cannot prevent us from attempting
subsequently, to grasp its effect by studying its psychological
mechanism. Nor does the contention that a dramatist is at liberty
to shorten at will the natural chronology of the events he brings
before us, if by the sacrifice of common probability he can enhance
the dramatic effect, seem to me relevant in this instance. For such
a sacrifice is justified only when it merely interferes with
probability,¹ and not when it breaks the causal connection;
moreover, the dramatic effect would hardly have suffered if the
passage of time had been left indeterminate, instead of being
expressly limited to a few days.

   One is so unwilling to dismiss a
problem like that of
Macbeth
as insoluble that I will
venture to bring up a fresh point, which may offer another way out
of the difficulty. Ludwig Jekels, in a recent Shakespearean study,
thinks he has discovered a particular technique of the
poet’s, and this might apply to
Macbeth
. He believes
that Shakespeare often splits a character up into two personages,
which, taken separately, are not completely understandable and do
not become so until they are brought together once more into a
unity. This might be so with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. In that case
it would of course be pointless to regard her as an independent
character and seek to discover the motives for her change, without
considering the Macbeth who completes her. I shall not follow this
clue any further, but I should, nevertheless, like to point out
something which strikingly confirms this view: the germs of fear
which break out in Macbeth on the night of the murder do not
develop further in
him
but in
her
.² It is he who
has the hallucination of the dagger before the crime; but it is she
who afterwards falls ill of a mental disorder. It is he who after
the murder hears the cry in the house: ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep . . .’ and so
‘Macbeth shall sleep no more’; but we never hear that
he
slept no more, while the Queen, as we see, rises from her
bed and, talking in her sleep, betrays her guilt. It is he who
stands helpless with bloody hands, lamenting that ‘all great
Neptune’s ocean’ will not wash them clean, while she
comforts him: ‘A little water clears us of this deed’;
but later it is she who washes her hands for a quarter of an hour
and cannot get rid of the bloodstains: ‘All the perfumes of
Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’ Thus what he
feared in his pangs of conscience is fulfilled in her; she becomes
all remorse and he all defiance. Together they exhaust the
possibilities of reaction to the crime, like two disunited parts of
a single psychical individuality, and it may be that they are both
copied from a single prototype.

  
¹
As in Richard III’s wooing of Anne
beside the bier of the King whom he has murdered.

  
²
Cf. Darmesteter (1881, lxxv).

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   If we have been unable to give
any answer to the question why Lady Macbeth should collapse after
her success, we may perhaps have a better chance when we turn to
the creation of another great dramatist, who loves to pursue
problems of psychological responsibility with unrelenting
rigour.

   Rebecca Gamvik, the daughter of a
midwife, has been brought up by her adopted father, Dr. West, to be
a freethinker and to despise the restrictions which a morality
founded on religious belief seeks to impose on the desires of life.
After the doctor’s death she finds a position at Rosmersholm,
the home for many generations of an ancient family whose members
know nothing of laughter and have sacrificed joy to a rigid
fulfilment of duty. Its occupants are Johannes Rosmer, a former
pastor, and his invalid wife, the childless Beata. Overcome by
‘a wild, uncontrollable passion’ for the love of the
high-born Rosmer, Rebecca resolves to remove the wife who stands in
her way, and to this end makes use of her ‘fearless,
free’ will, which is restrained by no scruples. She contrives
that Beata shall read a medical book in which the aim of marriage
is represented to by the begetting of offspring, so that the poor
woman begins to doubt whether her own marriage is justifiable.
Rebecca then hints that Rosmer, whose studies and ideas she shares,
is about to abandon the old faith and join the ‘party of
enlightenment’; and after she has thus shaken the
wife’s confidence in her husband’s moral integrity,
gives her finally to understand that she, Rebecca, will soon leave
the house in order to conceal the consequences of her illicit
intercourse with Rosmer. The criminal scheme succeeds. The poor
wife, who has passed for depressed and irresponsible, throws
herself from the path beside the mill into the mill-race, possessed
by the sense of her own worthlessness and wishing no longer to
stand between her beloved husband and his happiness.

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   For more than a year Rebecca and
Rosmer have been living alone at Rosmersholm in a relationship
which he wishes to regard as a purely intellectual and ideal
friendship. But when this relationship begins to be darkened from
outside by the first shadow of gossip, and at the same time
tormenting doubts arise in Rosmer about the motives for which his
wife put an end to herself, he begs Rebecca to become his second
wife, so that they may counter the unhappy past with a new living
reality (Act II). For an instant she exclaims with joy at his
proposal, but immediately afterwards declares that it can never be,
and that if he urges her further she will ‘go the way Beata
went’. Rosmer cannot understand this rejection; and still
less can we, who know more of Rebecca’s actions and designs.
All we can be certain of is that her ‘no’ is meant in
earnest.

   How could it come about that the
adventuress with the ‘fearless, free will’, who forged
her way ruthlessly to her desired goal, should now refuse to pluck
the fruit of success when it is offered to her? She herself gives
us the explanation in the fourth Act: ‘
This
is the
terrible part of it: that now, when all life’s happiness is
within my grasp - my heart is changed and my own past cuts me off
from it.’ That is to say, she has in the meantime become a
different being; her conscience has awakened, she has acquired a
sense of guilt which debars her from enjoyment.

   And what has awakened her
conscience? Let us listen to her herself, and then consider whether
we can believe her entirely. ‘It is the Rosmer view of life -
or your view of life at any rate - that has infected my
will. . . . And made it sick. Enslaved it to laws
that had no power over me before. You - life with you has ennobled
my mind.’

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   This influence, we are further to
understand, has only become effective since she has been able to
live alone with Rosmer: ‘In quiet - in solitude - when you
showed me all your thoughts without reserve - every tender and
delicate feeling, just as it came to you -
then
the great
change came over me.’

   Shortly before this she has
lamented the other aspect of the change: ‘Because Rosmersholm
has sapped my strength. My old fearless will has had its wings
clipped here. It is crippled! The time is past when I had courage
for anything in the world. I have lost the power of action,
Rosmer.’

   Rebecca makes this declaration
after she had revealed herself as a criminal in a voluntary
confession to Rosmer and Rector Kroll, the brother of the woman she
has got rid of. Ibsen has made it clear by small touches of
masterly subtlety that Rebecca does not actually tell lies, but is
never entirely straightforward. Just as, in spite of all her
freedom from prejudices, she has understated her age by a year, so
her confession to the two men is incomplete, and as a result of
Kroll’s insistence it is supplemented on some important
points. Hence it is open to us to suppose that her explanation of
her renunciation exposes one motive only to conceal another.

   Certainly, we have no reason to
disbelieve her when she declares that the atmosphere of Rosmersholm
and her association with the high-minded Rosmer have ennobled - and
crippled - her. She is here expressing what she knows and has felt.
But this is not necessarily all that has happened in her, nor need
she have understood all that has happened. Rosmer’s influence
may only have been a cloak, which concealed another influence that
was operative, and a remarkable indication points in this other
direction.

   Even after her confession,
Rosmer, in their last conversation which brings the play to an end,
again beseeches her to be his wife. He forgives her the crime she
has committed for love of him. And now she does not answer, as she
should, that no forgiveness can rid her of the feeling of guilt she
has incurred from her malignant deception of poor Beata; but she
charges herself with another reproach which affects us as coming
strangely from this freethinking woman, and is far from deserving
the importance which Rebecca attaches to it: ‘Dear - never
speak of this again! It is impossible! For you must know, Rosmer, I
have a - a past behind me.’ She means, of course, that she
has had sexual relations with another man; and we do not fail to
observe that these relations, which occurred at a time when she was
free and accountable to nobody, seem to her a greater hindrance to
the union with Rosmer than her truly criminal behaviour to his
wife.

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   Rosmer refuses to hear anything
about this past. We can guess what it was, though everything that
refers to it in the play is, so to speak, subterranean and has to
be pieced together from hints. But nevertheless they are hints
inserted with such art that it is impossible to misunderstand
them.