I’ve adapted the Lady Macbeth-focused parts of Ava Reid essay for a review of this book alone. It casts Lady Macbeth as Roscille, a French teenager and unwilling bride to Macbeth. She has to use her intelligence to try to carve out her survival in the violent world of the patriarchy while generally following the beats of the original story. She is also notoriously beautiful and has to wear a veil because people believe that if men look into her eyes, they will go crazy and fall under her complete control. It turns out that this is actually true and she sometimes uses this power throughout the book, such as when she kills the king of Scotland at Macbeth’s command. I haven’t been this actively irritated by a book in a long time, and so much of that has to do with the chasm between what this book thinks it’s doing and what it actually achieves.
It’s clear that Reid is interested in female characters struggling to find their agency in patriarchal worlds, and each of her characters goes through some kind of empowerment arc related to her trauma. Unfortunately, these developments often happen in the form of a sudden revelation at the end of the book after marginal, messy characterization throughout. One of the main things Roscille does throughout the book is attempt a variety of machinations/“plots” to gain power in her new home and avoid consummating her marriage. A lot of reviews have gone into depth about how incoherent and nonsensical her plans are, and I do agree with their points, but that is actually not my main concern. I am more interested in how she vacillates throughout the book between passivity and agency on different occasions.
I think that this point, especially regarding her not using her magic to protect herself from men’s violence and control, could veer into the dangerous territory of victim-blaming – “Well, why didn’t she just control or kill Macbeth? Why didn’t she just use her magic to stop him from X/Y/Z?” It is necessary to remember that Roscille is a young girl in an unwanted marriage and a strange land; there are of course massive psychological barriers that can prevent a victim/survivor from taking steps that feel obvious to those looking in from the outside.
What complicates this, though, is that we DO see plenty of occasions where she is actively plotting and resisting and effectively using her magic to get men to do what she wants. And while it could absolutely make sense to show an abused character fluctuating in her ability to resist or feeling limited in what she can do due to the force of her oppression, the issue is that there is basically no internal consistency or psychological exploration regarding any of this in Lady Macbeth. Roscille, as a character trying to interact with her world, does not feel real to me at all.
I was taking notes as I read, trying to understand what determines when Roscille acts and when she does not, and I ultimately feel that the story spends very little time thinking about the complexities therein, and it doesn’t even really feel that interested in doing so. At the end of the day, the results leave me feeling that her instances of passivity and agency are somewhat arbitrarily determined by what is necessary for the plot – killing the king, trying to assassinate Lisander so that the dynamic of their relationship changes, etc. There is no effective character work to show anything to the contrary in her state of mind or decision-making or development, and the result makes Roscille feel extremely vague and incoherent as a character; any exploration of resistance and female agency in traumatic situations ends up feeling befuddled at best.
The other thing that convinces me that this is weak writing is that Roscille is lacking in internal consistency and depth in several other regards. She feels guilty about her actions on and off but seems to completely forget about some of the things she’s done – for example, when she is feeling guilty about being responsible for people’s deaths, she thinks about a stable boy who died because she kissed him and not the swathes of people who died in the campaign she just convinced Macbeth to wage against another clan. While he is gone on this raid, she starts panicking about whether or not he will die and what that will mean for her fate as war spoils, but in the scene where the war party returns and she is looking for him, she doesn’t think about this at all. At one point she tries to complete suicide by throwing herself off the castle roof and Lisander saves her, and then there is only a brief, passing mention of suicidality on one other occasion after that. The sum of all of this is very strange.
Perhaps most disappointing to me is not even that we see these random oscillations and this lack of depth throughout, but that Roscille’s big Female Power Breakthrough happens literally at the 94% mark – I checked in my ebook!!!! While imprisoned in Macbeth’s dungeon, she suddenly has this massive epiphany that she contains multitudes as a complex woman <3 <3 and her power cannot be constrained by the patriarchy. She knows exactly what to do to regain her freedom and escape; she quickly kills Macbeth and becomes Lisander’s queen.
To be clear, I don’t think huge breakthroughs are impossible, but I also do not think they are the most narratively interesting option most of the time, nor the choice that will be most resonant for readers looking for character-driven narratives or grounded explorations of trauma. At least in my case, I value stories that show incremental growth and setbacks that are psychologically coherent instead of sudden Empowerment Climaxes that leave out how messy and interesting and gradual these things often are. That choice combines with everything else I’ve described to create a character who is not a subversive reframing of an infamous villain but an incoherent mess that does not bring anything new to the table with any amount of success.
The other thing I’ve noticed about Reid’s take on feminist stories is that the male love interest is almost always the primary means of any positive growth, and he is usually the only significant character who is not horrible to the protagonist. If there are any relationships between female characters, they are usually minor or overwhelmingly negative throughout, and any female relationships intended to be positive or show feminist sisterhood only happen very rapidly at the end of the book.
Lisander, the half-English, half-Scottish dragon prince, is Roscille’s lover here, and he pretty much instantly starts giving her these feminist pep talks despite knowing that she murdered his father and tried to murder him too (?): “All your life you have been muzzled…so as not to disturb the architecture of the world…they may rob your body of its power, but they cannot take your mind.”This is very consistent in their dynamic throughout, while every other man is violent, abusive and sexist. There are inexplicably no other women in Macbeth’s castle (not an assumption on my part as a reader – this is directly stated in text!) until Roscille gets a servant to replace the one killed at the start. They bond at the very end of the book and Roscille fights to protect her, and Roscille joins her power with Macbeth’s witches/former wives who have been imprisoned so they can all break free. I’m so bored by these books that declare themselves feminist but give only the most superficial lip service to the importance of female relationships and the realities of finding solidarity.
There are also number of explicit statements about the nature of men and masculinity being inherently violent and cruel and selfish and depraved: “The nature of a man is not such that it can be undone entirely by simple affection…the king still had a man’s desires, his hungers, and his vices,” etc., etc. I’m not one to go around indignantly yelling #NotAllMen – quite the opposite as anyone who knows me can say with certainty – but I do think that this is very basic and boring and I’m not particularly interested in the radfem notion of an inherently vile masculine nature, which these statements sometimes stray towards instead of effectively demonstrating that the influences of patriarchal masculinity are damaging and widespread but not baked-in. In any case, I’m looking for a lot more from an author who is regularly acclaimed for their feminist themes.
What’s also really annoying is that I can see exactly how this retelling could have easily been so much more!!! It has gotten a lot of hate for turning the Ultimate Evil Girlboss Queen into a disempowered teenage girl struggling with abuse. I’m was initially less bothered by this than most, I think; I don’t believe that it’s automatically anti-feminist to write a story about a disempowered woman/a woman who is raped/a woman who struggles in a patriarchal world (this IS an opinion I see regularly, and I talk about my thoughts regarding it here) and I think reimaginings can be very different from their original inspirations. But!!!!! I do think you have to actually do something interesting to pull this off, either by having something to say other than Patriarchy Bad or by exploring the complexities of survivorhood with a character who feels real and dynamic in some regard…or maybe even BOTH! The more I think about it the less chill I feel about Reid’s choices, and I want to highlight a comment by my friend Emma that does a great job of explaining why many feel this way beyond the fact that I think the book is badly written and doesn’t have anything interesting to say regarding feminism/trauma:
I think I sympathize with the complaints about the premise of Lady Macbeth more than you do, specifically because she is a badass girlboss in the original. I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with writing books about disempowered or abused women, but it does strike me the wrong way to declaw an existing powerful character in that way. It’s so stereotypical to write a “villain retelling” that turns a dynamic villain who by the way is a grown-ass woman into a victimized (and beautiful because obviously) teenager. And I find that trend boring and tiring, but also problematic. Let women be adults and not these eternal teenagers. Let female protagonists be messy without first having to be raped, abused, witness their family murdered, etc etc. I think the constant use of young age and extraordinary trauma to justify even everyday imperfect behavior winds up creating this narrative that women who are over the age of 21 and/or have had relatively normal lives are supposed to have it all together and lack any character flaws. It can also be emotionally manipulative, putting the character through hell as if daring the reader not to sympathize with her, rather than giving her interesting or admirable qualities that would make us sympathize without a hammer needing to be dropped. Some people mentioned that this one might’ve made more sense as a Bluebeard retelling, which would have averted this whole issue.
EVEN WITHIN the concept of Lady Macbeth as a disempowered waifish teen, there are still so many interesting – and incredibly obvious – choices that Reid could have made to make her version much better. Isn’t there the space for something really fascinating in Roscille being a terrified girl clawing for survival who, through gaining safety and agency, is then villainized in her legacy as a callous ballbusting monster who controls her husband to gain power? How could you write a Lady Macbeth retelling with Reid’s premise and not explore that at all? I’m also baffled by how little thought there is surrounding Roscille’s magic and the messaging around it. The concept of a woman so beautiful she makes men go mad and fall into her power leads very clearly into an exploration of victim-blaming (you’re so beautiful, you make me crazy, look what you made me do) and the evergreen idea that women actually control men in the patriarchy via manipulating men’s desire and love for them. Once again, Lady Macbeth does not seem interested at all in exploring any of this in any meaningful way whatsoever, which is just deeply bizarre to me.
I’m grateful for the reviews by readers who are knowledgeable about the original play as well as Scottish language, history and culture. They’ve been able to explore the book’s issues in those areas comprehensively. I stuck to my areas of strange hyperfixation passion, which are feminism and trauma, especially their representations in spec fic. I hope what I’ve said here makes sense in those regards.
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