The problem with feminist retellings
A distracted, somewhat tangential review of Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid
Firstly let me caveat here that not all feminist retellings are made equal, and while I may not have enjoyed some of them, that does not mean they are bad, or not worth reading if that’s the sort of thing you enjoy.
Also, this will contain spoilers for Ava Reid’s novel Lady Macbeth, if you have intentions of reading it, and do not want to be spoiled prior to picking the book up, come back another day and read this. This also contains spoilers for William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, though by now I trust most of us at least know the gist of the story.
Every time a ‘feminist retelling’ of a popular, often Greek, or Roman myth hits the shelves, I have to resist the urge to roll my eyes so far back into my head they turn back in time.
Because the problem with these retellings is that by deciding to give an already well known, established figure in the canon of say Greek or Roman myth even more air time, what happens is her agency, her cleverness and everything that made her the way she appears in canon, completely changes. For the worse.
Take Medea as an example. In the Greek literary canon she is not only a powerful witch, (who kills her husband and children, but I digress) she is also related to powerful people. Circe, (the witch who Odysseus spends a year with on his way back home) is her aunt, and Medea herself is related to the sun-god Helios.
In her myths, she has plenty of agency and a voice, because for one, we know about her, and we hear about her. She’s not a voiceless, weak woman whose myths need to be retold from a different angle, because we already know her. We know that she’s super powerful, that she has agency, that she’s in control of her own fate. So really, you don’t need to retell her story except perhaps to expand on the things we know about her.
A more interesting feminist retelling of either history or myth could include either an expansion on a figure who we know, or the story of an unnamed woman, who in history would not have had a voice otherwise. Better yet, what about a woman who we only know existed because of the name inscribed on her funeral stele. The possibilites are almost endless, and while I do think it’s interesting to have a fresh new take on a figure we already know about, most people who write those stories don’t do them justice.
There are a few exceptions, and I think those are mainly because you can tell the author isn’t merely writing it because feminist retellings are popular. They’re writing it because they have a genuine interest in the subject matter beyond surface level, and they studied it to a degree that most people don’t.
A retelling of a myth about a woman, whether she is mortal or not, doesn’t automatically need to be feminist. It can just be a retelling of what we have, with more details based on other versions of the myth. Not everything a woman does, has to be feminist.
When I initially picked up Ava Reid’s Lady Macbeth I was super excited. Here was a seemingly promising retelling of my *favourite* Shakespeare play, and from the perspective of the most unhinged, yet fun villainess.
And what I got was… Well it was a story that not only took most of the things I love about the play and changed them entirely or left them out, but also one that in my opinion undermines most of Lady Macbeth’s power, and cleverness.
The story starts in a vastly different place than the play does. Instead of opening on a windswept, thunderous landscape, with three witches huddled together, and two soldiers passing by them asking for prophecy, it starts instead with a young bride on her way to be married.
Now, this was the first little prickle of irritation for me. In the play, Lady Macbeth is older, perhaps forty or so, and well established in her own castle etc. On the surface, I had no problem with aging her down, and making the events of the play happen when she’s younger, but the biggest thing was that I felt like she lacked agency.
Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth is a fearsome woman who manipulates, blackmails, and masterminds her way into getting what she wants by making her husband do it. She has ambition, she wants to be Queen, wants her husband to elevate her status (and sure, his star can also rise alongside hers). She’s one of Shakespeare’s most famous villainnesses for a reason.
Plus, by making her younger and more naive, we don’t get the most iconic letter reading, where she says her husband is “too full of the milk of human kindness”. Where’s that Lady Macbeth? I want her back.
The Lady Macbeth that tells her husband to look like a flower, but be a serpent, schooling him into getting what they want. She completely disappears from the pages of Ava’s book. Roscille is instead cowed by her own beauty, forced to wear a veil that she might not enscorcell the men around her with her eyes, and hidden in plain sight.
The ghost of Banquo and the use of darkness and the way things that happen in the cover of night beginning to seep into the daylight, and into view was also something I missed while reading. It’s one of my favourite things about the play, the use of nighttime to cover things up, both literally and thematically. It helps the audience understand that the things happening at night are tenuously being kept secret. It’s also possibly the central theme of the play, and it’s used to great effect because it helps differentiate the scenes, it acts as a natural transition, when things that were hidden under the cover of night, are then uncovered in the day. For me, the only time the book sort of uses it, is with the witches in the dungeon where they are kept in the literal dark all the time, because Macbeth is using them for his benefit, to give him prophecy and to give him guidance. But even then, that change feels weak, the idea that they are his other wives, the witch-touched women he married then discarded because they no longer served him. It didn’t give them agency, it yoked them to him in a way that the play doesn’t have and it didn’t really serve the narrative.
I missed the way Lady Macbeth washes her hands, the way that blood as both a literal thing, and a figurative concept weaves its way into how she thinks. In the play, she’s calculated, and then after Duncan is murdered, she talks about blood as an inconvenience. It’s super interesting the way she begins to see it on her hands, the way it seeps into her consciousness, so much so that she begins to wash her hands constantly because she’s scared the blood will show itself. And the way her madness sort of slowly creeps into her being, the way that it starts with blood and handwashing is an integral part of who the character is. Without it, Lady Macbeth feels incomplete, she doesn’t have this character arc where she tumbles from her throne of cunning into the abyss of her own mind.
In the play, there’s a tension that surfaces once Banquo is killed, and blood is spilled that doesn’t show up in the book for me. There’s a moment where you think Roscille might get got, but she sort of just wiggles her way out of it, and it doesn’t feel like she really was ever in real danger.
One of my bigger gripes arose when the book came to a close. If you know the play, you know that the ending is a big, dramatic fight where Macbeth, drunk on the idea that “no man” (when what the witches told him was none of woman born) can defeat him, is ultimately vanquished by Macduff when he declares that he was '“from his mother’s womb untimely ripped”. The play ends on this glorious speech delivered by Macduff as he calls Macbeth a coward, telling him that painted on a pole they will have underwrit “here you may see the tyrant” as their swords clash together before Macduff finally frees Macbeth’s head from his body.
It’s a bloody, tense exchange where one man who has been cavorting about thinking that he can’t be killed, ultimately meets his maker and falls to the ground, merely a man. It’s the undoing of an arrogant man who thought he was untouchable, when really he just didn’t think about what the witches were telling him.
And yet, in the retelling, it’s Roscille who is his undoing, her eyes bewitch him and he falls to the ground as she kills him. It felt like the sort of ending that I was supposed to be rooting for, but because both Roscille and Macbeth were so one-dimensional, it fell flat. It didn’t feel like the ending I was looking forward to, there was no reward for having spent all this time with these characters.
The ending had no real attraction for me, because despite having spent the whole book in Roscille’s head, I didn’t care about what she did. And it wasn’t for lack of trying either. I genuinely did think I would enjoy the book and have a good time reading about one of my favourite Shakespeare characters and her machinations to become powerful, but sadly this was not it for me.
Throughout the whole book Roscille oscillates between someone who could be genuinely powerful and capable to someone who feels underdeveloped and annoying. She was either drunk on her own ideas of how clever she was, or realising she wasn’t as clever as she thought. It almost gave me whiplash the amount of times she flip-flopped between the two.
It felt like a girlboss retelling of a powerful woman who actually in the play has a lot of agency, and is in charge of Macbeth for the most part. Lady Macbeth is the one who says they should kill Duncan, and who in her opening letter reading decides that she will guide Macbeth to fulfil his ambition. Lady Macbeth drives a lot of the plot in the play, and yet in the retelling where she was for all intents and purposes the main character, it felt like she was just along for the ride, and then about halfway through decided she was in love with the dragon man.
And while the side plot romance with Lisander was for the most part fine, it felt shoehorned in there. I thought it was weird to include it because it felt so oddly placed in the narrative. There was no room for it, not when the book had so much of the play to deal with. And the final battle sequence was messy, and weirdly written. The moving of the forest being the dragon ripping it up with his claws felt strange, like it was a throwaway moment, when in the play it’s a big deal because Macbeth thinks too literally about the words the witches tell him, he hinges his fate on taking them at face value.
I did enjoy some things about the book though. I liked the way language was used, as an ever changing thing that shifted. There was a note at the beginning about the names of people and places, and that struck me, because while I knew the play likely wasn’t faithful to the way language was at the time, I’d never really thought about the way it shifts and changes at the drop of a hat, or the plunge of a sword.
I thought it particularly intriguing when names of people and places would shift depending on who was speaking them, it felt like a clever way to convey accents, and dialects on paper, where you can’t hear them.
I thought the way the witches were positioned as almost narrative devices was interesting, and while not my favourite use, was an intriguing concept that worked for the purposes of the story. I did have a gripe that in the play they have much more agency, and are in an entirely different position, they’re more like the three Fates of myth, rather than women chained up in a damp dungeon in medieval Scotland.
I enjoyed some of the early passages of the book, when Roscille was still getting used to Scotland, and the way she thought about language, as someone who was suddenly surrounded by a language that she knew only a little of. I wish the book leaned into that more, I think it would have been a welcome addition to a bit more insight on how her mind worked.
Overall, while passages of it were well written and enjoyable, like the parts in the beginning where Roscille is getting used to the sound of the sea crashing against the rock below the castle the book fell flat. It was fine, not terribly written, but not compelling either.
By the end of the novel I didn’t care about Roscille, which for me is the mark of a book I won’t be picking up again or recommending to anyone anytime soon. I wanted to like it, and to enjoy it, but the book had too much to juggle, and the pieces fell apart a bit for me.
If you want a well written, compelling feminist retelling of a popular female figure and you haven’t picked it up already, I would recommend Circe by Madeline Miller. It tells the story of the witch we know from the Odyssey, and most importantly doesn’t strip her agency, or change a huge amount of what we know of her from myth, it just expands on it in a beautiful way.
rip lady macbeth you would have loved pegging