In the spirit of Halloween, we take a look at two women – one fictional, one real; one regal, one common. Both killers.
The weeks leading up to Halloween make those of us young and young at heart giddy with expectation. For the young, it’s thoughts of candy corn dancing in their heads; for the young at heart, it’s thoughts of which alter ego we’re going to channel this year.
In the past I have channeled The Ghost of Red Sox Past, a Freudian Slip, and a PEZ dispenser. This year I’m playing with the idea of channeling the Balloon Boy’s Mother (from her Wife Swap days).
One year, I spent weeks preparing for my part, I mean, costume. I shopped around for appropriate dresses, fashioned a bloody knife out of the strongest cardboard I could find, and memorized my soliloquy, where I invoke ravens and ask the Divine to make me less female so that I might kill without hesitation or remorse. Lord knows I don’t think that husband of mine had the nerve:
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here
And fill me from crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood;
Stop up th’ access and passage no remorse (Act I, scene 5).
Acts later, I just can’t seem to wash the figurative blood off my hands whilst I sleepwalk:
Out, damned spot! out, I say! (Act V, scene 1).
I’m quoting The Scottish Play, and thespians who perform MacBeth know better than to call it by its real name. The name MacBeth haunts those who perform it, and speaking the name anywhere in the theatre, as every actor knows, is bad luck.
Lady MacBeth, the speaker of the above lines, was sufficiently unsexed to conspire to murder (she planted evidence), kept awake at night by the blood on her hands, and eventually driven to suicide by her guilt. She was determined, as those batty witches on the moor had predicted, that her husband would be the next King of Scotland. Unfortunately folks like Duncan and Banquo were in the way. So they and anyone else in the way had to go.
In MacBeth, Shakespeare is telling us that iron will driven by blind ambition coalesces into a perfect storm of all that is dark in human nature. The perfect storm’s name in this case is a lust for violence.
This study of the darkest pit of the human soul is what makes Shakespeare so great and what makes Lady MacBeth an iconic, if not archetypal character. She represents what happens to a person when she wants something so bad, she’ll kill for it.
Sadly these perfect storms still lash about. One of the most sickening incidences of blind ambition found a home in Wanda Webb Holloway, now and forever known as the Texas Cheerleading Mom. In 1991, Holloway tried to put a hit on Verna Heath. Both Holloway and Heath had daughters who were trying out for the cheerleading squad. Heath’s daughter Amber had, in the past, stood in the way of Holloway’s daughter Shanna making the squad. You know what comes next. The stakes were too high. The Heaths had to go. We are, after all, talking cheerleading here.
Fortunately the plot was foiled, whatwith the beauty of wiretapping. Unfortunately, Halloway only served six months out of her sentenced ten years.
Ambition is good. Iron will can also be good. Blind the ambition and add an iron will, and you’ve got a Lady MacBeth on your hands.
This is the first part of a two-part series. Read part two.
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Brian King said:
Speaking literally of whacking, I can’t help but think of the Nancy Kerrigan incident. Not nearly as bad as offing someone, but the blind ambition and iron will were in play when Tonya Harding put a hit on Kerrigan by trying to break her kneecap so she couldn’t skate in the Olympics.
October 23rd, 2009 at 9:13 am
Playing Lady MacBeth « SheSpoke. Find out what she said said:
[...] in the spirit of Halloween, I wrote a tribute to the iron-willed heroine turned crazy lady of the Scottish Play. [...]
October 23rd, 2009 at 11:41 am