Villines Samantha
AP English 12
Ms Yu
2015 august 3
The play Hamlet and Macbeth by Shakespeare and the short story “ story of an hour” by Kate Chopin deal with the main female characters and their deceitful lives. Examining these works the authors refer to these marriages as a form of deception and because these characters decided to break away from the deception in their marriage, they broke the balance that society had set on them, which led them to their downfall. The female characters deception was power, marriage and freedom.
In Shakespeare’s novel Macbeth, the main female character lady Macbeths downfall is a result of her trying to obtain more power because she was deceived into believing she needed more than she had in her marriage. When Lady Macbeth received the letter she immediately thinks that she must kill Duncan to gain the power she wanted. By taking control of the marriage and convincing her husband into killing because she believed that it would help her but in the end just led her to her downfall To commit this crime she had asked to be rid of all of her feminine attributes to accomplish her goal “Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood. Stop up the access and passage to remorse,” breaking society’s balance in the process. She had go to exceeded lengths to get the power that she craved for, Lady Macbeth broke her marriage with Macbeth when she had deceived him into committing murder which was the first stage in the failing of their marriage. “We fail? But screw your courage to the sticking place,
And we'll not fail.” Lady Macbeth was deceived into thinking that with higher status she would become more powerful but in turn she ended up powerless because whe psychological effect of their deed were too strong for her to handle, the guilt had made her hallucinate and paranoid “Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!—One; two: why, then 'tis time to do't.—Hell is murky.—Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our pow'r to accompt?—Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” Her actions resulted in the downfall of her power and therefore she committed suicide being the last and final downfall in her marriage.
In Shakespeare’s novel Hamlet, Gertrude early on in the play began her downfall by marrying her dead husband’s brother Claudius. In the society in which Gertrude had, she would have been removed from the throne and her son would have taken it, but because she was deceived by society making her believe that she must always have a husband and when her husband died she felt a loss of reason which caused her to marry. She continuously lies to herself about the consequences of her actions and the betrayal of her husband. Gertrude being so enraptured by trinkets and fine luxuries she didn’t see a problem with her sudden marriage but later in the play she is confronted by Hamlet and she begins to realize her deceitful actions "Thou hast cleft my heart in twain" she realizes that she married out of lust and loss. After she had realized her wrongful deed she then tried to fix it by deceiving Claudius and protecting Hamlet and concealing his insanity to her husband but in turn She ended up paying the ultimate price for her actions throughout the story by dying from poison that Claudius had set