In “Escaping the Matrix: The Construction of Masculinity in Macbeth,” Janet Adelman argues that Shakespeare's tragedy is intensely concerned with the reconstitution of the male subject, a reconstitution that can only take place “through the ruthless excision of all female presence” (259). Adelman describes the various strategies that the male characters employ in attempting to banish female power, in particular maternal power. Macbeth's beheading and splitting open of Macdonwald is thus constructed as the ultimate feminization of the latter's character, and is the first and one of the most vivid examples of Macbeth's attempt at a “bloody rebirth, replacing the dangerous maternal origin through the violence of self-creation” (294). War and single combat become primary modes of this brutal subjugation of female power.

    Adelman describes Lady Macbeth as the central monstrous woman of the text, a witch-like figure whose “unsexing” in the play functions on several different levels, first of all as “unnatural abrogation of her maternal function” (300). But Adelman makes clear that “latent within this image of unsexing is the horror of the maternal function itself (300). The image of “perverse nursing” becomes the trope by which Shakespeare fuses Lady Macbeth and the witches as purveyors of male castration fears.

    Interestingly, Adelman locates the initial reconstitution of masculinity in the character of Duncan, whose quasi-androgynous status is introduced as a possible idea that could circumvent the threat of maternal power. However, the polarized crisis and natural threat that the play opens with makes it clear that Duncan has failed as a male fetish object. Shakespeare instead works dramaturgically to divest the female characters of their power and presence, resulting at the play's end in an all-male world. The character of Macduff at once functions as a denial and affirmation of Macbeth's male fantasy of “not of woman born,” as the androgynous subject of Duncan is reintroduced in Macduff, whose status as a powerful male agent is located at the site of his birth, where he was brutally ripped from this mother's womb. The threat of maternal power and the reproductive origin are directly related to the male characters' fear of their own mortality and subject-hood, and it is only through a culture of violence and a re-imagining of birth that a masculine idea can emerge. Adelman exposes the often overriding misogyny of Shakespeare's tragedies, and their apparent inability to envision a world where male and female principles coexist.