Lady Macbeth

Ava Reid opens her story in medias res at a momentous turning point for the protagonist, as Roscille leaves the life she has always known for her marriage in a new country. Starting here enables the plot to parallel Roscille’s journey into the unknown, allowing for natural exposition as the protagonist experiences everything for the first time and creating a tone that mirrors her sense of strangeness and unfamiliarity. This makes the narrative quick-paced from the beginning and creates a sense of threat, establishing the central theme of Agency in a Violent World. 

In keeping with this theme, Roscille’s main fears emerge as sexual violence and “madness”—a loose term at this time that refers not to any specific mental illness but to a general loss of lucidity and control, as in Roscille’s fears that the sound of the ocean will unsettle her mental state. Meanwhile, her bedroom door only locks and unlocks from the outside, meaning she cannot control who enters, and she is immediately forced to initiate a scheme to delay marital rape. Through these revelations, Reid highlights that Roscille’s entrapment is structural. Her violent surroundings limit her options, which sets up the central conflict of the book: Roscille’s quest to maintain a sense of agency and self in a hostile environment. This also introduces the connected theme of The Origins of Individual Identity and Humanity, as to have a sense of her identity and to feel human, Roscille must find a way to exercise agency. 

Reid also introduces obstacles to this in this section. To retain her safety, Roscille must lean into the roles others impose on her, such as the passive or frightened bride or the crafty observer, but she cannot always separate these roles from her sense of self. She naturally cringes from Macbeth, and when her father treats her as a political pawn, she questions whether she is merely an extension of him in her craftiness. Notably, Roscille’s scheme to pit Macbeth against Cawder has unintended consequences, causing widespread violent death. She also quickly realizes its ineffectiveness, as Macbeth’s death in battle would only leave her at the mercy of another. Besides beginning the gradual escalation that continues through the next two acts, this predicament underscores the limitations on Roscille’s agency as long as she operates within a violent, patriarchal system.

Reid explores these ideas further through the theme of The Truth of Myth and Magic. Thus far, the existence of magic has been established but kept ambiguous. Roscille acknowledges the different stories, all created by men, about her own magic and its origins, and she recognizes that the common construct of the witch differs between Scotland and Brittany: Though the witches’ existence is literal, it is also shaped by local beliefs. Reid presents magic as real but shifting, reflective of belief, environment, and culture. This parallels Roscille’s struggle to orientate herself and her identity in this new setting. Facts are not fixed: For instance, Roscille doesn’t know Hawise’s fate or even the exact nature of her own power.

Reid’s exploration of magic and witchcraft builds on her source material, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, while adapting it to explore her themes. The witches’ role is shifted, as they are no longer agents of Macbeth’s ascent and downfall but victims of his power, chained and doing laundry underground. This creates suspense and horror, but it also highlights the gender relations in Reid’s narrative, in which women are confined in archetypal roles and are passive players while men exercise agency. This is true of Roscille as well, and Reid foreshadows her connection to the witches via the water imagery that unites them: They are surrounded by water just as Roscille is constantly immersed in the sound of the sea. Likewise, Roscille observes that Macbeth keeps all his women chained, the witches literally and her to the marriage bed.

Reid uses setting and atmosphere to support her themes, painting medieval Scotland as cold, gloomy, harsh, and brutal. Little grows there, and both the castle and the men are huge and rugged, without any softening decoration. She highlights Roscille’s culture shock in the wedding, which contains violent versions of the rites Roscille knows: She is not gifted a living bird but one that Macbeth kills, and her feet are doused forcefully in icy water rather than washed gently. It is therefore not merely through the presence of magic that Reid fictionalizes medieval Scotland to support her themes. Other elements, though not fantastical, are still fictional, including the idea that Scottish masculine culture was more physically and sexually violent than elsewhere in Europe and that the land was inherently barren and inhospitable. Such characterizations support Roscille’s lens of fear and distrust with its xenophobic undertones.