But since the middle of 20th century, with the feminist literary criticism and psychoanalysis criticism being applied into the analysis of the female characters, the evil image of Lady Macbeth is challenged and the comments on Lady Macbeth becomes more objective and persified. Researchers have tried to redefine the image of Lady Macbeth from multitude views and reevaluate the role of Macbeth plays.
Under the viewpoint of feminist criticism, Lady Macbeth is a common woman indulged in patriarchal ideology, doing everything for her husband but loses everything in the end.
As a tragic protagonist, Lady Macbeth is in fact the victim of patriarchy and a scapegoat of Macbeth’s political ambition. The tragedy of Lady Macbeth results from her gender role-being a wife-who spares no efforts to help her husband (Yang, Wu).
Lady Macbeth is a brave woman who is courageous enough to compete with the oppressing views about woman and successfully wins equal power of discourse to that of men. Though she loses her discourse power eventually and pursues that power in a wrong way, she is still praiseworthy in trying to be independent (Wang).
From the review of some critics’ comments, it is clear that more objective approaches have been adopted in interpreting the image of Lady Macbeth, taking into account of such social factors as context, women’ s status, ideology, but little focus is put on the psychological analysis of this character. This thesis attempts to study Lady Macbeth from the perspective of Carl G. Jung’s analytical psychology.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), one of the most influential psychologists of the age, is the founder of analytical psychology. His theory has not only gained much attention in the field of psychology, but also influenced some related humanistic disciplines such as biology, literature, linguistics and etc.
While Freud maintains that “the unconscious mind is entirely personal and peculiar to the inpidual” (Stevens 22), Jung insists that beneath the personal unconscious, there is a deeper and more essential level which he called the collective unconscious. 《麦克白》麦克白夫人形象分析(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_24386.html