56 pages • 1 hour read
Ava ReidLady Macbeth
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaThemes
The Truth of Myth and Magic
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses misogyny and xenophobia, physical and sexual violence (including rape), and ableist language.
Ava Reid presents a world in which myths and magic have literal truth but are not totally objective. Rather, Reid frames magic as culturally and socially subjective, suggesting that beliefs have real power but blurring the line between the literal and symbolic truth of myth and magic.
The implied differences in the way magic functions between cultures offer a particularly dramatic example of this phenomenon. Roscille notes that different laws of nature apply in different cultural environments: In Scotland, practices like the blood ritual, cruentation, have real power and produce material results, though back in Brittany these would have been dismissed as superstition. Nor is this the only supernatural force to be proven physically real and have a quantifiable impact on the narrative. For example, a unicorn that Macbeth is hunting gores two dogs. Having doubted his ability to find a real unicorn, Roscille sees its pelt and horn, her uncertainty annihilated in the face of Macbeth’s belief. In Reid’s fictionalized Scotland, myths have literal reality for those who believe in them completely.
Reid’s treatment of witchcraft similarly renders folklore literal to suggest the power of belief. The witches and their environment have supernatural qualities (such as their strange eyes) but are also presented as real women (former Lady Macbeths). Moreover, the association of their prophecies with the domestic action of washing laundry, traditionally women’s labor, bridges the gap between the world of myth and the physical everyday. Reid thus makes the historically widespread belief in witchcraft reflective of reality to suggest how this belief intersected with real gendered social structures.
Reid’s exploration of how belief impacts Roscille’s magic serves a similar purpose, illuminating misogynistic ideas about women as temptresses and destroyers as well as the fear of women’s agency that such ideas stem from. The stories about Roscille give her power: She has status and allure due to the mythology around her eyes. However, these myths also create fear, which impacts her in a real and detrimental sense—e.g., in the veil she must wear and in Macbeth’s efforts to use Roscille’s power for his own ends. Roscille herself is unsure whether her power is defined by her father’s narrative or whether it exists independent of others’ beliefs. However, when she exerts her magic despite Macbeth’s dismissal of its literal truth, it destroys him, highlighting the power of self-belief. Reid’s depiction of magic thus hints at the fragility of oppressive social systems like patriarchy, which, like magic, hinge on belief. Once Roscille has implicitly rejected such belief by claiming her own agency, the primary representative of this system crumbles before her.
Agency in a Violent World
Roscille’s struggle to assert agency in a violent world informs the book both thematically and narratively. Both physical and mental agency are important to Roscille: Her greatest fears are marital rape (a societal norm in her world) and “madness,” both of which she takes action to avoid. However, the violence she experiences challenges her efforts to maintain her bodily and mental autonomy. She is raped by Macbeth, her legs are scarred when she is beaten, and the veil and then the blindfold impede her sight. She also experiences self-doubt, wondering if she is powerless or wicked, and has intrusive thoughts, imagining her hands covered in blood.
Sexual violence in particular is central to the book: Roscille’s personal fear of rape reflects her awareness of its systemic nature, showing how violent social structures undermine personal autonomy. However, Reid also associates Roscille’s fear of rape with descriptions of other types of violence, such as martial conquest, linking the imagery of blood on bedsheets to the blood spilled in ransacked villages. This suggests an underlying culture that facilitates both war and rape. It also connects Roscille’s quest for agency to the violence she indirectly causes in seeking to protect herself, suggesting that in a violent world, is it hard to assert agency in ways that are not also violent.
Indeed, as Roscille tries to assert agency amid the various assaults on her autonomy, her goalposts for survival shift, showing that the violence around restricts her options for asserting her selfhood. Sometimes she seeks to extend each moment without pain or abuse, choosing to enact the role of the passive wife sewing in her chair, but she also exercises her agency through revenge on others, such as Banquho and Fléance. Roscille wonders what level of responsibility she has for the violence she causes. Though she feels she is just trying to protect herself, she is aware of the damage she’s doing and does not absolve herself of it.
Ultimately, Roscille succeeds by taking control of her own narrative and breaking free of the cycle of violence. Rather than merely pursing safety, she acts out of love and with the aim of tempering societal violence. After the witches highlight that she still has agency, she goes on to free them and to assert her agency through mental rather than physical strength, without directly enacting violence: When she looks directly at Macbeth, a physical embodiment of violence with his battle scars and enormous form, he disintegrates. The novel ends with Roscille governing fairly alongside Lisander, suggesting that reducing societal violence allows the exercise of individual agency, but also that agency can be exercised to reduce violence.
The Origins of Individual Identity and Humanity
Through Roscille, Lady Macbeth explores the different ways society and environment shape the individual’s view of their identity and even humanity. Ultimately, Roscille’s character arc involves defining the former for herself while reclaiming the latter in the face of persistent dehumanization, which suggests that as powerful as social roles and constructs are, they are never the full truth of who a person is.
One of the first aspects of Roscille’s identity to come into question is her cultural identity as a lady of Brittany. As she leaves her homeland, she hears varying versions of her name in different places, foreshadowing the culture shock she will experience in Scotland and the ways exposure to this foreign culture will challenge her sense of who she is (e.g., through her adoption of violence). Conversely, Lisander’s use of her name in her mother tongue helps her to reengage with the self she feared she had left behind in Brittany.
Even more than ethnicity or nationality, gender informs Roscille’s experience of selfhood. Her world involves extreme, bifurcated gender roles in which men are perpetrators of violence, often sexual, and women are victims. Roscille has internalized this, frequently using archetypal language, characterizing men as warriors and women as wives, “whores,” and witches. She therefore struggles to recognize her identity and humanity beyond gendered societal roles. For example, when she finds out about the previous Lady Macbeths, she feels that she is just one of many wives and may ultimately be one of many witches, exploited and demonized by Macbeth and the male-dominated society he is part of.
Indeed, these gendered constructs are so powerful that whether Roscille ever breaks free of them is open to interpretation. On the one hand, her eventual triumph reflects her society’s gendered structures. She defeats Macbeth by using her magical female beauty, and she attains the life she wants by marrying a king who has the same structural and physical powers as Macbeth but happens to be nicer. At the same time, it is significant that Roscille ultimately finds power in her sense of shared identity with other women, as when she and the witches combine their magic to free themselves from entrapment. In this reading, she repurposes the archetypes of witch and wife to defeat Macbeth and marry Lisander, not fully rejecting them but rather reconciling them with her identity and humanity.
A similar tension permeates Roscille’s struggle to work out who and what she is on a personal level. She characterizes herself as clever, proactive, and morally just, but her sense of her personality shifts when her father sends her to marry Macbeth. Realizing that her father only sees her as a pawn, Roscille questions whether she really has the crafty ermine qualities of his crest and—if so—whether that is the morally dubious legacy of a father she now rejects. Likewise, she wonders whether the magic of her eyes comes only from the narrative he created. However, through the triumph of Roscille’s stratagems and magic, Reid shows that Roscille’s identity is her own; whatever she might have owed to her father has been transformed by Roscille herself.
Reid also uses the underlying premise of the book to explore this. By selecting a famous character and naming the book after her, Reid highlights Roscille’s status as a myth rather than a human. However, Reid changes many elements of the well-known story and calls her Lady Macbeth “Roscille” in the main narrative, differentiating and humanizing her. Through these techniques, Reid suggests that a person’s identity is an amalgamation of societal and individual influences but gives precedence to the latter.
