Sleep Walking and Moon Walking Part 9

Macbeth:

"Methought, I heard a voice cry, _Sleep no more!

Macbeth doth murder sleep . . . .

And therefore ... Macbeth shall sleep no more!_"

Lady Macbeth quiets him but he weakens his high courage by brooding over the deed.

"Go, get some water, And wash this filthy witness from your hand.-- Why did you bring these daggers from the place?

They must lie there. Go, carry them; and smear The sleepy grooms with blood."

Then however as her husband refuses to look again upon his deed Lady Macbeth herself seizes the daggers:

"The sleeping and the dead Are but as pictures; 'tis the eye of childhood, That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed, I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal."

Macbeth (alone):

"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather The mult.i.tudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red."

Lady Macbeth (returning):

"My hands are of your colour; but I shame To wear a heart so white . . . . .

. . . . . . . retire we to our chamber: A little water clears us of this deed; How easy is it then! Your constancy Hath left you unattended."

But the horrid deed has not brought the expected good fortune. After Duncan's murder Macbeth finds no rest and no sleep: "To be thus, is nothing; But to be safely thus." So he first considers removing Banquo and his son. But Lady Macbeth is little content:

"Nought's had, all's spent, Where our desire is got without content; 'Tis safer to be that which we destroy, Than, by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy."

Then comes her husband. All night he has been so shaken with terrible dreams that he would rather be in Duncan's place, "Than on the torture of the mind to lie, In restless ecstasy." Lady Macbeth tries here to comfort him with the only tender impulse in the drama:

"Come on; Gentle my lord, sleek o'er your rugged looks; Be bright and jovial 'mong your guests to-night."[35]

Macbeth promises to do as she asks and charges her to treat Banquo especially with distinction. Nor does he conceal from her what now tortures him most, "Dear wife, Thou knowest that Banquo, and his Fleance, lives." And immediately the Lady is her old self: "But in them nature's copy's not eterne." Though Lady Macbeth is represented as at once prepared for a second murder, Macbeth has now no more need of her: "Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, Till thou applaud the deed."

[35] One notes the emptiness of this pa.s.sage. She could scarcely have said much less, if she wished to comfort him. And yet this pa.s.sage is always quoted by those authors who accept love on the part of Lady Macbeth for her husband as the driving motive for her action. Indeed, Friedrich Theodor Vischer himself does not shrink from an interpolation and translates the pa.s.sage: Lady Macbeth ("caressingly")--"Come, come, my n.o.ble lord, remove thy wrinkles, smooth thy gloomy brow, be jovial this evening, well-disposed toward thy guests." And although the original English text contains no word for "caressingly," yet Vischer gives this commentary: "His wife's answer to him must be spoken on the stage with an altogether tender accent. She embraces him and strokes his forehead."

(Shakespeare-Vortrage, Vol. 2, pp. 36, 102.)

Yet, although he shrinks back no longer from any sort of evil deed, he does so before the horrible pictures of his phantasies, the hallucinations of his unconscious. Here is where Shakespeare's genius enters. The Macbeth of the Chronicle commits throughout all his acts of horror apparently in cold blood. At least nothing to the contrary is reported. With Shakespeare on the other hand Macbeth, who is represented in the beginning as more ambitious than cruel, is pathologically tainted. From his youth on he suffered from frequent visions, which, for example, caused him to see before Duncan's murder an imaginary dagger.

This "strange infirmity, which is nothing To those that know me," comes to light most vividly on the appearance of Banquo's ghost at the banquet. Lady Macbeth must use all her presence of mind to save at least the outward appearance. With friendly exhortation, yet with grim reproof and scornful word, she attempts to bring her husband to himself. In this last scene, when she interposes in Macbeth's behavior, she stands completely at the height. Not until the guests have departed does she grow slack in her replies. In truth neither her husband's resolution to wade on in blood nor his word that strange things haunt his brain can draw from her more than the response, "You lack the season of all natures, sleep." It seems as if she had collapsed exhausted after her tremendous psychical effort.

Shakespeare has in strange fashion told us nothing of what goes on further in her soul, though he overmotivates everything else, even devotes whole scenes to this one purpose. We first see her again in the last act in the famous sleep walking scene. She begins to walk in her sleep, falls ill with it one might well say, just on that day when Macbeth goes to war. Her lady in waiting saw her from this day on, at night, "rise from her bed, throw her nightgown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon it, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep."--"A great perturbation in nature! to receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watching," the evidently keen sighted physician thinks. He soon has the opportunity to observe the Lady's sleep walking for himself. She comes, in her hand a lighted candle, which at her express command must be always burning near her bed. Her eyes are open as she walks, but their sense is shut. Then she rubs her hands together as if to wash them, which she does according to the statement of the lady in waiting, often continuously for a quarter of an hour.

Now they hear her speaking: "Yet here's a spot. Out d.a.m.ned spot! out, I say!--One, two, why, then 'tis time to do't.--h.e.l.l is murky!--Fie, my lord! a soldier, and afear'd? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?--Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?--The Thane of Fife had a wife; Where is she now?--What, will these hands ne'er be clean?--No more o' that, my lord, no more o' that; you mar all with this starting.--Here's the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh! oh! oh!--Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so pale;--I tell you yet again, Banquo's buried; he cannot come out of his grave.--To bed, to bed; there's knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed." After such appearances she always in fact goes promptly to bed. The physician who observes her p.r.o.nounces his opinion: "This disease is beyond my practice. Yet have I known those which have walked in their sleep, who have died holily in their beds." Here however there seems to be something different:

"Foul whisperings are abroad; unnatural deeds Do breed unnatural troubles."

And then as if he were a psychoa.n.a.lyst:

"Infected minds To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.

More needs she the divine, than the physician.-- G.o.d, G.o.d forgive us all! Look after her; Remove from her the means of all annoyance, And still keep eyes upon her."

Also he answers Macbeth, who inquires after the condition of the patient.

"Not so sick, my lord, As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies, That keep her from her rest....

. . . . . . Therein the patient Must minister to himself."

Yet as the king's star declines neither the doctor's foresight nor his skill prevents Lady Macbeth, the "diabolical queen" from laying hands upon herself.

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 role 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 p.u.b.erty, 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 p.r.i.c.king 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 pa.s.sed 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 Kott." 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 p.r.o.nounces 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 role!"

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 s.e.xually 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 pa.s.sionate ambition. Now psychoa.n.a.lytic experience teaches that when a woman remains s.e.xually 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 p.u.b.erty compelled to cut them off as s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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.

[36] This is not without significance as a direct precipitating cause, although naturally not the true source of her night wandering.

[37] A second still more important motivation for the nightly visit I will discuss later.

The conclusion of the words she utters during her sleep walking contains a second unmistakably s.e.xual 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 repet.i.tion, "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 pa.s.sage that this atypical sleep walking of Lady Macbeth also leads naturally into the s.e.xual and the infantile.

It will not be difficult to determine now toward whom the repressed, because strongly forbidden, s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xes 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.xual 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."

[38] Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by A. A. Brill.

The Macmillan Company, London, New York, 4th edition, p. 218.

We will stop here at two factors which will occupy us again later, the being in love with the parent of the opposite s.e.x, and then the resistance against the one of the same s.e.x. Corresponding to the love, every child in the period of innocence wants to "marry" the former. I recall what a colleague told me of a dialogue between him and his little five year old daughter. She began, "I want to get married."--"To whom?"--"To you, Papa."--"I already have a wife."--"Then you would have two wives."--"That won't do."--"Very well, then I will choose a man who is as nice as you." And Freud relates (p. 219), "An eight year old girl of my acquaintance, when her mother is called from the table, takes advantage of the opportunity to proclaim herself her successor. 'Now I shall be Mamma; Charles, do you want some more vegetables? Have some, I beg you,' and so on. A particularly gifted and vivacious girl, not yet four years old, ... says outright: 'Now mother can go away; then father must marry me and I shall be his wife.'"

We will add just one more little experience to give us a broader point of view. The interpretation of dreams, fairy tales and myths teaches us regularly that the phantasies of the child, like those of all peoples in their period, identify father with king or emperor. Naturally then the father's wife becomes the queen. This fact of experience, which is always to be substantiated, can be applied to Lady Macbeth and makes her ambition at once transparent to us. I affirmed above that her lack of s.e.xual feeling toward her husband had its origin in the fact that she had loved her father too much and could not therefore free herself from him. Her s.e.xuality had transformed itself into ambition and that, the ambition to be queen,[39] in other words, the father's wife. So could she hold fast to the infantile ideal and realize the forbidden incest.

The intensity with which she pursues the ambition of her life is explained then by the glowing intensity of her s.e.xual wishes.

[39] Holinshed's chronicle lays emphasis upon this: "She ... burned with an inextinguishable desire to bear the name of queen."

With Shakespeare also king and father come together. A remark of Lady Macbeth shows that when she addresses herself to the murder of Duncan.

"Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done't." This physical likeness signifies ident.i.ty of individuals, as we know from many a.n.a.logous examples. The king therefore resembles the father because he stands for her parent. Still one more point may be well explained from her father complex. The Chronicle speaks of the overweening ambition of Lady Macbeth. Now we know from neuropsychology that burning ambition in later years represents a reaction formation to infantile bed wetting. It is the rule with such children that they are placed upon the chamber at night by father or mother. Thus we comprehend from another side, with the so frequent identification with beloved persons, precisely why the lady wanders at night with a candle in her hand. Here again appears plainly the return to the infantile erotic.