Macbeth Act II – Act III

Macbeth Reminds me of Jack Torrance

I’m currently in a horror literature class and we just finished reading Stephen King’s The Shining. Macbeth very much reminds me of Jack Torrance as he’s losing his mind. In Act II, before murdering the King, Macbeth sees the dagger that he uses for the murder and begins to speak to it. Macbeth says “I have thee not, and yet I see thee still./Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible/To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but/A dagger of the mind, a false creation,/Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?” (Act II, Scene I, 35-39).  Later the reader finds out that Lady Macbeth actually placed the dagger there so that Macbeth would see it and use it to commit the murder, but before this is revealed Macbeth’s conversation with the dagger was similar to Jack Torrance. Macbeth thinks that the dagger is an apparition and that he is going crazy and hallucinating. In The Shining, when Torrance goes into the ballroom he believes that he sees bottles of liquor at the bar. It is so believable to him because he is being possessed by the hotel, that he actually gets drunk. Although the dagger is actually real and the liquor is not, the objects have the same effect on the characters.

 

Later, after murdering the King, Macbeth begins to hear voices. Unlike Torrance hearing the voices of the previous clients of the hotel, the voices Macbeth hears are actually his conscience. Readers can tell that the voices are his conscience because he initially did not want to harm the King and as soon as he does this voice shames him for his actions. If the voice was a possession, then it would encourage him and endorse his evil deeds because it would have been the driving force behind his action. However, the voice is clearly Macbeth’s conscience because no one other than Lady Macbeth is privy to the crime he committed and she isn’t in the same space as he is when he hears the voice.  When he tells Lady Macbeth about the voice and what it is saying, she writes it off as Macbeth being a coward. She tells Macbeth, “Who was it that thus cried? Why, worthy thane,/ You do unbend your noble strength to think/ So brainsickly of things.” (Act II, Scene II, 44-46). Because Macbeth’s descent to madness (so far) is similar to Torrance, and the other grotesque mentions such as the horses eating each other (Act II, Scene IV, 18), I would categorize Macbeth as horror.