Tragedy and Victimhood of Empowerment: A Select Study of Women in Shakespeare’s Tragedies

Abstract

Domestic women having the least little access to power and authority suffer maximally in the hands of patriarchy. But it is an irony that women who seek empowerment and manage to get empowered sufficiently in the patriarchal system also suffer a lot. That is to say, patriarchy never spares a woman, be she obedient and submissive or hyperactive and assertive. This paper aims to examine this ironic aspect with reference to some select women characters in the immortal tragedies of Shakespeare:

1. Lady Macbeth: She stands beside her husband’s ‘vaulting ambition’ by violating her natural feminine self, steps into the patriarchal world of conspiracy, murder, bloodshed, usurpation et al, suffers from guilt, gets estranged from her husband, develops mental degeneration, faints, sleepwalks, kills herself. She attempts to empower herself by sacrificing her femininity, but gets tragically lost in the labyrinth of patriarchal absolutism.


2. Lady Macduff: A typical mother and a devoted wife, doesn’t hanker for power/authority, likes to remain indoors as a protected housewife, but she gets killed with all her children.


3. Cordelia: She refuses to satisfy the absurd demand of her old, choleric father and thus infuriates the patriarch in Lear who banishes her most loving daughter. Her refusal to please patriarchy in a sense empowers Cordelia. The king of France decides to marry her because of her courageous self-assertion. When later in the play the French army comes to rescue the destitute Lear from the clutches of his evil daughters, Goneril and Regan, Cordelia leads the operation only getting killed as a result of a dirty conspiracy masterminded by another degenerate product of power-hungry patriarchy, Edmund.


4. Goneril and Regan: Lear’s ‘pelican daughters’ please their authoritarian father to procure their portions of kingdom. They then betray Lear, drive him out on the storm-tossed heath; compete most lewdly for young Edmund. Both of them grossly manipulate patriarchy; become nasty embodiments of a degenerate patriarchy; both die most ignobly in the suffocating mess of patriarchy’s mad dynamics of power.


5. Ophelia and Desdemona: Both are very innocent and beautiful, and both are victims of patriarchal suspicion, jealousy, violence; both seek feminine fulfillment through love and marriage, but both of them are ghastly betrayed by their lover/husband.