This case of sleep walking, if we consider it, seems first to correspond entirely to the popular view, that the wanderer carries over to the nighttime the activities of the day, or to speak more correctly, of the most important day of the last month. We saw in the first act how she reproaches Macbeth for his cowardice, encourages him and controls his actions. Only in two points, very significant ones to be sure, does it appear that she has now taken over her husband's rôle upon herself; in the disturbance of her sleep and the concern for the blood upon her hands. How had she rebuffed Macbeth when he had called out in regard to his bloody hands, “This is a sorry sight!” It was only a foolish thought. “Go get some water, And wash this filthy witness from your hand.” But Macbeth was not to be shaken, the entire ocean would not suffice. Rather would the king's blood, which he had shed, change its green to glowing red. Yet when Lady Macbeth completes his work for him, she remarks lightly, “My hands are of your color; but I shame To wear a heart so white.… A little water clears us of this deed.” In her sleep walking itself she encourages her husband, “Wash your hands, put on your nightgown.” She seeks however in vain in this very sleep walking to wipe the stains from her hands, they smell always of blood and not all the perfumes of Arabia will sweeten her hands. Must not the inner meaning of all her sleep walking lie exactly in these two points, in which she has so completely turned about?
It must be observed that in the tragedy as in the previously related tale of the “Sin Child” the sleep walking does not begin in childhood nor in puberty, but in both instances in somewhat more mature years, and, what is significant, as an illness, more precisely a psychic illness. The sin child fell ill because he had lost his pure beloved one, who had taken the place of his mother, the original love object of his earliest childhood; and Lady Macbeth, who had herself become queen through a murder, falls ill just at that moment when her lord must go to the battlefield to defend his life and his crown. For not without reason the fate of Macduff's wife, who was slain when her husband had gone from her, occurs to her also when she, while wandering, speaks of the much blood which Duncan had. Therefore it seems likely, and is in fact generally believed, that Lady Macbeth becomes ill because of her anxiety for life and kingdom. Only the facts do not strictly agree with this. In the first place her husband's campaign is by no means unpromising. On the contrary he has heard from the witches that his end would be bound with apparently unfulfillable conditions, so unfulfillable that the prophecy at once frees him from all fear.
Having hidden nothing from the “partner of his greatness” he would scarcely conceal the promise of the witches, which increased his confidence to the uttermost. Besides it cannot be fear and anxiety which brings on her night wandering. Another current explanation also seems to me to have little ground. As Brandes has recently interpreted it, “The sleep walking scene shows in the most remarkable fashion how the pricking of an evil conscience, when it is dulled by day, is more keen at night and robs the guilty one of sleep and health.” Now severe pangs of conscience may well disturb sleep, but they would hardly create sleep walking. Criminals are hardly noctambulists. Macbeth himself is an example how far stings of conscience and remorse can lead a sensitive man. He has no more rest after he has murdered the king and Banquo, yet he does not become a sleep walker. There must be another cause here which precipitates Lady Macbeth's sleep walking.
We will first examine the relation of husband and wife to one another in order to trace out this mystery. The character of Lady Macbeth has caused many a one in Germany to rack his brains since the time of Tieck. Up till that time she passed simply as Megaera, as an “arch witch,” as Goethe calls her. This opinion prevailed not only in Germany but in the English motherland too. But this view went against the grain with the German spirit. Therefore Ludwig Tieck first looked upon Lady Macbeth as a tender, loving wife. From this time on there arose critics and even poets, who in the same way wished to wash her clean. I will cite the two most important, Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Rudolf Hans Bartsch. The former, of whom I explained earlier, that he did not hesitate to make an interpolation to prove his point, sums up his judgment in the following sentences: “It is not ambition alone that moves her, but love which would see her lord become great” (p. 78). And in a second place, “She loved her husband and had sacrificed her conscience more for him than for herself” (p. 124). R. H. Bartsch goes much further in his romance, “Elisabeth Kött.” Wigram says to the heroine, “Do you not feel how she (Lady Macbeth) before everything that she says cannot hitch horses enough to carry her slow and immovable lord along?” In the sleep walking scene “the utter crushing of this poor, overburdened heart burst forth in the torture of the dream wandering.” At the close he pronounces his opinion: “If there is a poor weak woman upon earth, so it is this arch enchantress, who loves her husband so much that she has in admirable fashion studied all his faults and weaknesses that she may cover over the deficiencies with her trembling body. Seek the wife in her rôle!”
What truth is there in these viewpoints? The poet himself has been dead for three hundred years and has left behind him not a syllable concerning Lady Macbeth except in the text of the tragedy. Therefore according to my opinion nothing remains but to keep to this. At the most we can draw upon Holinshed's chronicle, which Shakespeare so frequently followed literally. According to this Lady Macbeth was extravagantly ambitious and when she continually urged Macbeth to murder Duncan, this was only because she “burned with an unquenchable desire to bear the name of queen.” There is never a syllable of a feeling of love for her husband, or that she desired the crown only for his sake. This objection might be made here, that as Shakespeare has often gone beyond his source, as in creating the sleep walking scene without a model for it, so he might just as well have given characters to Lady Macbeth of which the source said nothing. Certainly that would be a priori conceivable. Only that must appear clearly from the text of the tragedy. Yet what does this say? Carefully as I have read its lines, I have not been able to find a single, actual uninterpolated word of love from Lady Macbeth. That is of double significance from the poet of “Romeo and Juliet.” He who could give such language to love would not have completely denied it in “Macbeth,” if Lady Macbeth was to have been a loving wife. One can find everything in her words, warning, entreaty and adjuration, upbraidings and threatenings, anger, yes, almost abuse, yet not one natural note of love.
This has a so much harsher effect since her husband approaches her usually as an actual lover, or more accurately stated up to the murder of Banquo. She is warm only where it concerns the attainment of her goal; it is her ambition which demands satisfaction. She is always to her husband “my dearest partner of my greatness” as he once appropriately writes her. It is not to be considered that Shakespeare, who always overmotivates his situations, should have at the height of his power so obscured from recognition all the love impulses, which would have seemed to be decisive for her whole character. The truth is simply that Lady Macbeth is no loving wife, but merely greedy of fame, as already represented in the Chronicle. I suspect that the authors who all the way through see in her the loving spouse are expressing their own complexes, their own unconscious wishes. Such an one as Bartsch for example cannot think otherwise of a woman than as unfolding lovingly to the man.
Lady Macbeth makes upon me, in her relation toward her frequently wooing husband as it were, the impression of a natura frigida, that is a sexually cold woman. If one takes her own frightful word for it, that she could tear the breast from her own sucking child and dash its brains out, then the mother love seems never to have been strong within her, but rather whatever feeling she has possessed has been changed to passionate ambition. Now psychoanalytic experience teaches that when a woman remains sexually cold toward a sympathetic and potent man, this goes back to an early sealing up of affect with a forbidden, because an incest object. Such women have almost always from their tenderest infancy on loved father or brother above all and never through all their lives freed themselves from this early loved object. Though at puberty compelled to cut them off as sexual objects, yet they have held fast to them in the unconscious and become incapable of transferring to another man. It is possible also in the case of Lady Macbeth to think of such an indissoluble bond. Moreover certain features in the sleep walking scene seem to speak directly of a repressed sexual life.
Lady Macbeth wanders at night, since her husband has left her and marital intercourse has been broken off.[36] In her hand is a lighted candle, which according to her express command must burn near her bed, and only now for the first time, otherwise the lady in waiting would not have laid such stress upon the fact. The candle in her hand, that is a feature which up till now we have met in none of our cases, but which, as a glance into literature teaches me, is by no means infrequently found with sleep walkers. It can hardly be considered a mere accident that Shakespeare discovered just this characteristic, which is really atypical. One would be much more inclined to suspect in it a secret, hidden meaning. Then at once a connection forces itself. We know from the infantile history of so many people that a tenderly solicitous parent, the father or the mother, likes to convince himself or herself, with a candle in the hand, that the child is asleep.[37] Then we would have on one side a motive for sleep walking in general, that one is playing the part of the loving parent, as on the other hand a motive for the lighted candle. The latter has however a symbolic sexual sense which is quite typical and is repeatedly and regularly found. The burning candle always stands for one thing and signifies in dreams as in fairy tales, folklore, and sagas without exception the same thing, an erect phallus. Now it becomes clear why Lady Macbeth, after her husband had gone to the war, has a lighted candle always burning near her bed, and why then she wanders around like a ghost with it at night.
The conclusion of the words she utters during her sleep walking contains a second unmistakably sexual relationship. Here she repeats not less than five times the demand upon her husband, “To bed,” while in the corresponding murder scene (II, 2) it simply reads, “Retire we to our chamber; A little water clears us of this deed.” The further repetition, “Come, come, come, come, give me your hand,” sounds again infantile through and through. So one speaks to a child, scarcely to an adult. It seems as if she takes the father or the mother by the hand and bids them go to bed. One recognizes already in this passage that this atypical sleep walking of Lady Macbeth also leads naturally into the sexual and the infantile.
It will not be difficult to determine now toward whom the repressed, because strongly forbidden, sexual wishes of Lady Macbeth are directed. Who else could it be but her own father, the original love object of every little girl; what other person of her childhood, who later becomes an unsuitable sexual object, but yet hinders for all the future the transference of love over to the husband? This is the one who summons her to walk in her sleep, the lighted candle in her hand. It is quite an everyday experience, which holds for everyone, for the well as for every one who later becomes ill, that in reality the first love, which bears quite clearly features of sense pleasure, belongs to the earliest years of childhood, and that its objects are none other than the child's own parents and in the second place the brothers and sisters. Here the polar attraction of the sexes holds in the relation of the elder to the younger and vice versa, that is the attraction of the man to the woman and the woman to the man. It is “a natural tendency,” says Freud[38] in the “Interpretation of Dreams,” “for the father to indulge the little daughter, and for the mother to take the part of the sons, while both work earnestly for the education of the little ones when the magic of sex does not prejudice their judgment. The child is very well aware of any partiality, and resists that member of the parental couple who discourages it.… Thus the child obeys its own sexual impulse, and at the same time reinforces the feeling which proceeds from the parents, if it makes a selection among the parents that corresponds to theirs.”