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On the Medusa, Vampires, and the Fear of the Female Body

Sadie Frost as Lucy in Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. (Wikimedia Commons)
Sadie Frost as Lucy in Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. (Wikimedia Commons)

CONTENT WARNING

Discussion of Blood and Gender-Based Violence

I recently read Natalie Haynes’ incredible new novel, Stone Blind: Medusa’s Story (which I highly recommend), and that got me thinking about female monsters – and menstruating women. The Medusa is an ambiguous figure: both fascinating and repulsive, aggressive and victimised. While we all know her power to turn men who looked at her into stone, few people know her story. Medusa was a beautiful Gorgon who, when visiting Athena’s temple, was raped by the sea god Poseidon. The goddess’ rage at having her temple defiled was directed at Medusa rather than her attacker (there’s plenty of victim-blaming in Greek myths, unfortunately), and so she turned Medusa into a monster with hair made of phallic snakes, who could petrify men who dared look at her.

Why is this important? Well, Athena was a central part of a matriarchal cult in Athens before society’s gradual shift to patriarchy. There was also a powerful ancient myth that menstruating women could turn men into stone through their looks. See where I’m going with this? Medusa’s transformation not only symbolises a cultural and societal change, but it also hints at the dangers of breaking menstrual taboos. Not to mention the demonisation of menstruation.

Caravaggio’s Medusa (1597) at the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence. (Wikimedia Commons)
Caravaggio’s Medusa (1597) at the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence. (Wikimedia Commons)

But let’s back up a bit. Menstrual blood has long been associated with reproduction – periods were the flowers without which no fruit could be born. Medusa’s blood also had creative properties: both the flying horse Pegasus and the warrior Chrysaor sprung forth after Perseus decapitated her. But menstrual blood could equally be destructive. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder wrote in the first century CE how

‘Contact with it turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, […] the bright surface of mirrors in which it is merely reflected is dimmed, […] and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.’

In Leviticus, there were stark prohibitions around sex with menstruating women, as it would produce monstrous children. Much of this negative Judeo-Christian view of menstruation persisted through the centuries and appeared in popular myths. At the height of the witch craze of the 16th and 17th centuries, for instance, witches symbolised the corruption of religion through perverse femininity: they were said to drink communion wine made with menstrual blood in their demonic rituals.

A modern version of the menstruating monster, Sissi Spacek in Brain De Palma’s 1976 Carrie. (Credit: Everett)
A modern version of the menstruating monster, Sissi Spacek in Brain De Palma’s 1976 Carrie. (Credit: Everett)

But what does that have to do with vampires? Gothic literature is usually bloody, often involving young women’s bodies being violated or murdered. But where does this blood really come from? Vampirism is often a metaphor for menstrual taboos. Menstruation is connected to the lunar calendar, usually composed of 28 days, like many people’s menstrual cycle. Medusa’s image could only be made harmless if reflected in a mirror – a symbolical moon-like object. And vampires don’t cast any reflections in mirrors. Still not convinced? Let’s look at the most famous book about vampires, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). This is how Lucy is described, after having been turned into a vampire herself:

‘… the eyes seemed to throw out sparks of hell-fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the folds of the flesh were coils of Medusa’s snakes […] If ever a face meant death – if looks could kill – we saw it at that moment’.

‘… the eyes seemed to throw out sparks of hell-fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the folds of the flesh were coils of Medusa’s snakes […] If ever a face meant death – if looks could kill – we saw it at that moment’.
Sadie Frost as Lucy in Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. (Wikimedia Commons)
Sadie Frost as Lucy in Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. (Wikimedia Commons)

Lucy is clearly inspired by the Medusa, with blood dripping from her fangs (echoing the fear of the vagina dentata, which could castrate men with its teeth). She is vanquished when her fiancé Arthur penetrates her body with a phallic stake – male virility triumphing over the fear of castration by female voracious sexuality. He also chops her head off, following Perseus’ example. Lucy is then restored to pre-menstrual purity. She returns to her innocent state, as becoming a vampire suggested becoming sexually mature or active. Both Lucy and Mina are menstrual monsters in Dracula, with Mina going so far as calling her bloody body ‘unclean’, echoing ancient fears of polluted, contaminating menstrual blood.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote how ‘the little girl, not yet in puberty, carries no menace, she is under no taboo […] But on the day she can reproduce, woman becomes impure; and rigorous taboos surround the menstruating female’. These taboos can be both protective and oppressive to those who menstruate. For psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud, they stemmed from the repression of an attraction to menstruating women, while for Bruno Bettelheim, menstruation was a source of male envy over the procreative powers of the female body.

Unruly female sexuality: an illustration by D. H. Friston for Carmilla (1872) (Wikimedia Commons)
Unruly female sexuality: an illustration by D. H. Friston for Carmilla (1872) (Wikimedia Commons)

Why is menstruation so important, though? I tend to agree with the philosopher Julia Kristeva, who in her famous book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection wrote that what unsettles us and provokes horror is the abject. By abjection, she means the threat of the breakdown of a crucial distinction. This is the difference between self and other, subject and object. Horror is caused by something that doesn’t respect boundaries or rules, something that threatens our understanding of reality and embodies liminal, in-between spaces. Think of vampires, existing between life and death. In the case of menstruation, menstrual blood symbolically marks a sexual divide, separating men from (potential) mothers. This is gendered blood, dangerous and threatening, repulsive yet fascinating. It reminds us of death, yet also marks feminine creative power. (You can watch an incredible breakdown of Kristeva’s thinking here if you’re interested.)

Vampires are figures of abjection, unnatural beings who seduce and repulse us. Their bodies defy rules and order. In the Victorian age, that’s precisely how hysterical women were described, too. Hysteria was connected to menstrual disorders, with contemporary doctors describing hysterics as ‘vampires wo sucked the life of healthy people around them’. The menstrual and the hysterical bodies were intimately linked. French physician Jean-Martin Charcot, who ‘treated’ hysterics in the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, famously performed exorcisms on his patients in the 1880s, who were sometimes called his ‘vampires’. (This is a fascinating topic in itself – I promise to write more about it some other time!)

The Medusa reclaimed in the logo of luxury brand Versace. (Credit: Versace)
The Medusa reclaimed in the logo of luxury brand Versace. (Credit: Versace)

If in vampire stories there is a fetishization of menstrual blood, there are also ‘dis-ordered’ bodies, ‘unnatural’ people who need to be controlled and contained. Vampires – and older myths such as the Medusa – can subvert patriarchal, heteronormative order. Dracula is not a tale of female vampirism such as Carmilla (one of my favourite stories ever!), but of female vampirization by men, in a project to control and contain the female body and its dangerous sexuality. Bleeding women have long been viewed as both sacred and profane, divine and degraded, with menstrual myths being deeply imbedded in misogyny. Still, menstruation signals the potential for life and creation, and it’s significant that, where gender is concerned, both vampires and Medusa combine sex drive and death drive; a warning against the dangers of female sexuality tinged with a hint of envy of female creative power.

References:

Bruno Bettelheim, Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male (London: Thames & Hudson, 1955)

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

Pliny the Elder, Natural History (London: Heinemann, 1940-63). (Originally written in 77 CE.)

Freud Sigmund, Civilisation and Its Discontents (London: Hogarth, 1975). (Originally published in 1930.)

Further Reading:

Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation, edited by Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb (Berkeley: California University Press, 1988).

Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic, edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith  (London: Macmillan, 1998).

Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993).

The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation, edited by Janice Delaney et al. (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1988).

Menstruation: A Cultural History, edited by Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

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Why Did People Try to Induce Menstruation in the Past?

A Girl Peeling an Apple, by Gabriel Metsu, painted between 1650 and 1657. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
A Girl Peeling an Apple, by Gabriel Metsu, painted between 1650 and 1657. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Imagine that you’re a 16th-century person flicking through the pages of Alessio Piemontese’s best-selling book, which contained everything from how to make invisible ink to how to make strawberries preserve. And then you come across this most interesting ‘secret’:

An other remedie verie good, and well knowen of women. Take a sweet Apple, and make him hollow within, make a pouder of Nutmegs, Mace, Synamon, of each halfe a dragme, Cloves halfe a scruple: put all this within the Apple with a little Suger, and rost it under hote ashes, and give of it onto the woman ever when the paine commeth onto hir. But if the paine increase so much that hir life is in doubt, put to all this two graines of Opium, and sodainly the paine will depart.
Alessio Piemontese, The Secrets of the Reverend Maister Alexis of Piedmont, 1595
A Girl Peeling an Apple, by Gabriel Metsu, painted between 1650 and 1657. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
A Girl Peeling an Apple, by Gabriel Metsu, painted between 1650 and 1657. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

But why would people try to stimulate menstruation? Well, in premodern Europe, the humoral theory was the main framework for understanding the body: the four humours (blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm) needed to be balanced for a person to be healthy. Regular menstruation was the expected purgation of the female body, and so menstruation was believed to be essential for the health of women of childbearing age.

However, one of the main reasons people were so interested in inducing menstruation had to do with conception. Menstruation was thought to ‘clean’ the womb, preparing it for the male seed.  The English midwife Jane Sharp even mentioned that having your ‘flowers’ regularly was what made you fertile and ready for the ‘fruit’ – the baby.

The female body opening up like a flower in Jane Sharp’s midwifery manual. Credit: The Library Company of Philadelphia.
The female body opening up like a flower in Jane Sharp’s midwifery manual. Credit: The Library Company of Philadelphia.

You might be thinking that these recipes to purge the womb sound very much like abortion recipes as well. After all, they’re all meant to make the uterus contract and expel its contents, whether that’s a ‘retained period’ or a foetus. And you’re right. The difference between the two was much blurrier than some people would like to believe. This is why abortions (especially before foetal movement) were not usually condemned in premodern times.

What does that tell us? Well, what made a recipe an emmenagogue (a formula meant to stimulate a retained period) or an abortifacient (a recipe meant to provoke an abortion) was not necessarily the ingredients or the methods involved. Rather, it was the intent of the one using the recipe and – crucially – their bodily state.

Apple varieties in a herbal from the 1680s. Credit: George Bernard (Science Photo Library).
Apple varieties in a herbal from the 1680s. Credit: George Bernard (Science Photo Library).

Let’s come back to the Sweet Apple medicine above. At first, it looks like a recipe to stimulate menstruation. The mention of pain makes us think of dysmenorrhoea, or period pains, as well. Yet opium sounds a bit excessive, doesn’t it? And what about the mention of the woman’s life being in danger? Surely, readers could understand this pain as more than the usual discomfort of menstruation: this was also the pain caused by the purgation itself. If a pregnant person used this formula to provoke an abortion, the opium could help them deal with the pain it caused.

From 1555, when Alessio Piemontese’s Secrets were first published in Italian, to the end of the 17th century, when reeditions and reprints of these recipes started to decline in number, recipes like these multiplied. This allowed recipe books to be marketed as ‘updated’ and ‘improved’ versions of previous editions. But the recipes did not only grow in number. These formulas became more specialised and varied. They included internal medicines (such as pessaries or herbal drinks) as well as external remedies (such as ointments to be applied around the vulva or medicinal baths). The ‘sweet apple’ recipe mentioned above was a less-frequent case of an ‘edible’ remedy. Most of these formats of medicine coexisted in the same book and were offered to readers as different ways of treating the same ailment.

However, these formulas also left ample room for readers to adapt them and personalise them to their lives. People complemented these recipes with their previous knowledge and allowed them to actively manage their bodies. That the same recipe could be used to induce menstruation in the case of amenorrhoea and provoke an abortion is, therefore, not surprising.

Early modern wooden mortar and pestle for making powders. Credit: Science Museum, London.
Early modern wooden mortar and pestle for making powders. Credit: Science Museum, London.

The history of medicine is never straightforward, especially where gender is concerned. Menstruation recipes were rarely just one thing; instead, they condensed and combined knowledge in new ways, encouraging different kinds of moral agency and choice from the reader while at the same time alerting/suggesting that many of these emmenagogue recipes could be used as abortifacients.

Recipes like these could (and surely were) used for different purposes, and with varying degrees of success. Books like Piemontese’s Secrets combined ingredients and methods in new ways, but it was the reader who ultimately had control over how a recipe would be used. It was their body that determined if the ‘sweet apple’ would merely stimulate menstruation or provoke an abortion. People had more agency than historians tend to believe. In this instance, it was the body, the womb itself who decided what this recipe would be about. Besides that, it must have tasted lovely. But please don’t go trying 16th-century medicines at home! Just save the apples for baking a pie instead.

References:

Alessio Piemontese, Secreti del Reverendo Donno Alessio Piemontese (Venice: Sigismondo Bordogna, 1555).

Alessio Piemontese, The Secrets of the Reverend Maister Alexis of Piedmont (London: Thomas Wight, 1595).

Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, Or the whole Art of Midwifry Discovered (London: Simon Miller, 1671).

Further Reading:

Menstruation: A Cultural History, edited by Gillian Howie and Andrew Shail (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Regulating Menstruation: Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations, edited by Etienne van de Walle and Elisha Renne (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001).

Sara Read, Menstruation and theFemale Body in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

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Green Sickness and Virginity

The Faint, by Pietro Longhi (1744). Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The Faint, by Pietro Longhi (1744). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

From the mid-16th century to the early 20th century, young girls described as suffering from bodily weakness, dietary disorders, heart palpitations, fainting spells, paleness, and an absence of menstruation (amenorrhoea), were often given the diagnosis of ‘green sickness’, the ‘disease of virgins’. But what was this medical condition? And what can it tell us about the way that female sexuality and puberty were understood in the past? I believe that social and cultural anxieties around young women’s developing sexuality were behind this disease’s construction, and its treatment ultimately aimed to control this sexuality.

Portrait of a Girl (Anonymous, 1600-1620). Wikimedia Commons.
Portrait of a Girl (Anonymous, 1600-1620). Wikimedia Commons.

But first things first. Medical historians are often asked about the contemporary equivalent of a given condition in the past. But it’s usually a bad idea to try comparing historical sources describing illnesses with how we understand medicine today. Green sickness has been associated with several modern conditions, from anorexia nervosa to pica, malnutrition, or anaemia. However, tempting as they may be, retrospective diagnoses can be misleading. For starters, we can’t assume that all the people described as suffering from the same condition indeed were. But the main issue is that there’s often not a direct contemporary equivalent to diseases of the past.

Our understanding of diseases and the body change more through time than we realise, and green sickness was a disease born out of the humoral understanding of the body, which prioritised fluids over organs as what determined medical conditions. In the case of green sickness, blood (and specifically menstruation) was central. Blockages in the natural economy of fluids, such as menstrual retention, were a serious medical concern. Therefore, it is not surprising that treatments included recipes to provoke menstruation, often using ‘hot and dry’ ingredients, such as onions, ‘red’ sage, betony, or rue. So, where does marriage come into that?

A woodcut depicting betony in John Gerard’s The herball, or, Generall historie of plantes (1636).
A woodcut depicting betony in John Gerard’s The herball, or, Generall historie of plantes (1636).

Let’s take a step back and start by thinking of the name ‘disease of virgins’ itself. How do we name diseases? Naming implies defining a condition and, often, gendering it (‘mother’s thumb’ is a great example). ‘Disease of virgins’ implied that it was mainly young women going through puberty who could develop the condition, although not exclusively. The pale colour of the skin was also central in how it was known and remained an important aspect of the description of the disease of virgins. In the early 16th century, it was called ‘white fever’ or ‘green jaundice’, which became green sickness – a disease in its own right rather than a kind of jaundice. The disease was famously associated with virginity in 1554 by the physician Johannes Lange, taking inspiration from Hippocratic writings as well as contemporary vernacular medicine. In the 17th century, with the rise of Greek names for medical conditions (such as catamenia for ‘menstruation’), green sickness became ‘chlorosis’, from the Greek chloros, a yellowish shade of green. Finally, in the 19th century, it was called hypochromic anaemia, and it disappeared from medical teachings and writings in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Faint, by Pietro Longhi (1744). Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The Faint, by Pietro Longhi (1744). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

This did not mean that patients suffering from green sickness had green skin, although it emphasised paleness. Letting go of the literal ‘green’, it could also symbolise youth and (sexual) inexperience. And that’s where marriage comes into play. Like fruits turned ripe and left on a tree would rot, girls ‘ripe’ for marriage who remained unmarried were at risk of developing this condition. The English midwife Jane Sharp wrote in 1671 how this disease ‘is more common in maids of ripe years when they are in love and desirous to keep company with a man’.

But ‘green’ could also mean other things. In Shakespearean fashion, it could also signify envy, as young girls could envy older women’s experience and their access to the world of sex (think Snow White, but in reverse!). Besides that, green was also associated with nature, and sex itself (prostitutes were often depicted wearing green in early modern imagery).

The Magdalen, by Bernardino Luini (c. 1525). Source: Public Domain.
The Magdalen, by Bernardino Luini (c. 1525). Source: Public Domain.

Menstruation itself was often referred to as the ‘flowers’, which, following the horticultural metaphor, preceded the fruit (a child). However, the absence of menstruation, one of the main symptoms of green sickness, was an ambiguous sign. What if the ‘innocent’ girl had become pregnant? Contrary to today, the absence of menstruation was not always associated with pregnancy, which would usually only be confirmed by ‘quickening’ (when the pregnant person felt foetal movement). Still, it could raise uncomfortable questions, especially in a patriarchal society where property rights followed a patrilineal logic. It’s not surprising, therefore, that if a young girl stopped menstruating, marriage was advised. This allowed socially and religiously accepted sexual activity, which was thought to have medical benefits to women while keeping them firmly in the role of wives and mothers.

So… was the ‘disease of virgins’ just a convenient excuse to police female sexuality? That would be too simplistic, yet it is striking how many conditions would fit this mould. Nymphomania, which became a prominent disorder from the 17th century, was also gendered, affecting women and young girls – coincidentally, particularly when they started menstruating. Masturbation was an important symptom and again, this condition was also best treated by marriage, which kept developing sexuality within a heterosexual and patriarchal institution.

A family, in the Whole Book of Psalms (1563). Source: Wikimedia Commons.
A family, in the Whole Book of Psalms (1563). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

But green sickness patients were described in a very different way to nymphomaniacs. Like many other medical conditions (think of Victorian ‘hysterical’ women), this was a disease of ‘delicate femininity’, which could even make girls more attractive, by underlining their fragility and getting them closer to the feminine ideal. In the construction of the ‘disease of virgins’, the emphasis on paleness was central, and the racial aspect shouldn’t be underestimated. This was a disease connected to whiteness: patients had a pretty ‘rosy and white’ complexion. Physicians described the beauty of their patients, who were often blondes. Besides race, there was a class element at play as well: green sickness was rarely diagnosed in countrywomen, who were thought to be stronger and used to more physical work. Green sickness was a disease of ‘weak’, ‘fragile’ people. It could even affect ‘feeble boys’, although this was much rarer. For instance, Shakespeare mentioned male green sickness in Henry IV Part 2, describing these young men as ‘fools and cowards’. Misogyny meant that a man suffering from this disease was effeminate and fragile, and his masculinity was threatened.

Young girls suffering from the ‘disease of virgins’ were described as passive and submissive by physicians, often in an eroticised way. These inexperienced girls were in sharp contrast to the ‘difficult’ hysterics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries described by Freud and other psychoanalysts. The innocent patient suffering from green sickness was much more pliable than the more sexually experienced, ‘manipulative’ hysterics. However, both conditions were heavily gendered, relied on misogynistic ideas, and could be treated in similar ways (such as with electric shocks).

Hysterical yawning woman. Credit: Wellcome Collection.
Hysterical yawning woman. Credit: Wellcome Collection.

How a society constructs medical conditions can give us insight into how the body is understood. In the case of the female body, it is not unusual for medical discourse to find ‘natural’ ways of explaining women’s inferiority to men, or to justify our role in the domestic sphere, as wives and mothers. The ‘disease of virgins’ was not a stable category: the perception of symptoms, causes, and appropriate treatments varied depending on time and place. Because of the vagueness and variety of how symptoms presented, this diagnosis could mean many different things. At certain points in time, virtually any girl behaving like a moody adolescent could be diagnosed as suffering from green sickness. This was also true for hysteria. Medical categories shift with time, often reinforcing gender norms under the guise of biology.  As its name indicates, the ‘disease of virgins’ was thought to affect primarily pubescent girls, whose sexuality was starting to develop. The easiest ‘treatment’ was therefore marriage and socially sanctioned sexual activity, which ensured the status quo wouldn’t be too disrupted by these ‘desirous maids’.

References:

Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book (London: 1671).

John Tanner, The Hidden Treasures of the Art of Physick, (London: 1659).

Johannes Lange, ‘De morbo virgineo’, in Medicinalium epistolarum miscellanea (Basel: 1554).

Luis Mercado, De mulierum affectionibus, (Cordoba: 1579).

Further reading:

Helen King, The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty, (London: Routledge, 2004).

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(Un)sexing, Violence, and Women

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (John Singer Sargent, 1889) © Tate
Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (John Singer Sargent, 1889) © Tate

CONTENT WARNING

Discussion of issues related to violence/murder, mental health/suicide

As she finds out the witches’ prophecy about Macbeth being crowned king and the current king’s imminent visit to their home, Lady Macbeth invokes evil spirits to help her be rid of her feminine qualities so that, together with Macbeth, she can murder the king:

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,
Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief!
(Macbeth Act 1, scene 5)
Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in a 1955 production of the play. Photograph: ©Bettmann/Corbis
Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in a 1955 production of the play. Photograph: ©Bettmann/Corbis

In one of the most famous soliloquies in the play, Lady Macbeth plans to become a murderess while referencing her female body. However, modern viewers or readers of Shakespeare often overlook these bodily references (blood, breasts, milk), with more attention being given to her psychological changes. Contemporary viewers of the play, on the other hand, would think of physiological and psychological processes as profoundly intertwined. For Lady Macbeth to change her personality and become a murderess, she must also change her biology.

In Tudor times, strict gender roles and expectations associated women with nurture and care; by moving away from her expected femininity, both in mind and body – being ‘unsexed’ – Lady Macbeth exhorts the spirits to make her capable of murder. By asking for the ‘compunctious visitings of Nature’ (menstruation) to cease, she wants to eliminate one of the primary markers of womanhood in the early modern period. Her bodily changes both foreshadow and cause her mental change away from femininity: by blocking compassion as well as the flow of her blood, she can let the king’s blood flow.

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (John Singer Sargent, 1889) © Tate
Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (John Singer Sargent, 1889) © Tate
Saoirse Ronan (Lady Macbeth) washing her bloody hands in ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’ © Marc Brenner
Saoirse Ronan (Lady Macbeth) washing her bloody hands in ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’ © Marc Brenner

In Shakespeare’s time, menstruation was considered a sign of overall female health and a prerequisite to conception. Menstrual blood was thought to feed the growing foetus in the uterus and, after birth, nourish the baby in its concocted form (breastmilk):

…the childe, while it is in the matrice [womb] is nourished with this bloud; and it is as true, that being out of the womb, it is still nourished with the same; for the milke is nothing but the menstruous bloud made white in the breasts; and I am sure womans milke is not thought to bee venomous, but of a nutritive quality.
(Sadler, p. 9-10)

By asking for the milk in her breasts to be replaced with gall (bile), Lady Macbeth hints at the corruption of her body as well as her spirit. In a world where womanhood was often synonymous with motherhood, murdering her femininity is essential for murdering the king: she will have no children but be impregnated with cruelty.

Helen McCrory as Medea in a National Theatre production of Euripides' version of the play. © Richard Hubert Smith
Helen McCrory as Medea in a National Theatre production of Euripides’ version of the play. © Richard Hubert Smith

This move away from womanhood and into violence was preceded in the theatre by Seneca’s Medea, translated and published in London in 1581, which is likely Shakespeare would be familiar with. Medea also invokes evil spirits as she prepares to murder her and Jason’s children, referencing her womb, breast, gall, and bloody hands, just like Lady Macbeth. She lets go of her femininity and motherhood to punish Jason through violence. While Medea murders her actual children, Lady Macbeth destroys the possibility of children by making herself barren. The smell of blood and the bloodstains in Lady Macbeth’s hands evoke, therefore, not only the king’s blood and her guilt but also the loss of her future children through her ‘unsexing’. Moreover, they symbolise the end of Macbeth’s line in a patriarchal society, as she will have no heir to the throne. This murder of her potential children by stopping the flow of blood corrupts her body, just like the stopping of the flow of blood in king Duncan’s body corrupts the nation: both go against nature.

Lady Macbeth’s unnatural amenorrhea (lack of menstruation) could also be understood as the physiological cause for her changes throughout the play, as her mental state deteriorates. The absence of menstruation in women of a fertile age was a serious medical concern, not only because it prevented them from fulfilling their primary social role as mothers but also because it was thought detrimental to their general health. Fainting spells, melancholy, and fearfulness were believed to be connected to amenorrhea, as well as sleep troubles and ‘sorrow, and anxiety, obfuscation of spirits, agony, desperation’.

(Burton, p. 478)

Lady Macbeth suffers from all these symptoms after the king’s murder: she faints as the body is found and is plagued by melancholy passions, fears, and somnambulism for the rest of the play. These are, of course, connected to her guilt, and I do not mean to simplify her psychology but rather to add a medical layer to it, as Shakespeare’s contemporaries probably would. In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton hinted at the suicidal tendencies the women suffering from this condition might develop – and Lady Macbeth’s suicide is implied at the end of the play.

The gender-bending Joan of Arc in military attire in a 1505 manuscript. © Wikimedia Commons
The gender-bending Joan of Arc in military attire in a 1505 manuscript. © Wikimedia Commons

The replacing of femininity with violence through a process of ‘unsexing’ was not unique to Lady Macbeth. Joan of Arc, who appeared in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 1 as Joan la Pucelle (literally Joan the Virgin), also did not menstruate. In a world where women rarely engaged in battle, the female body was thought to be unsuited to war – in no small measure because of its natural functions such as menstruation, seen as a ‘debilitating and weakening’ condition. Joan of Arc’s military prowess is linked to her lack of femininity and even witchcraft as a female warrior. This brings to mind Lady Macbeth’s conjuring demons to ‘unsex’ her and replace one kind of blood, the menstrual one, with another one, the blood of violence.

Condemned for heresy and burnt at the stake in 1431, Joan’s trial was nullified in 1455-56, with witnesses testifying to her piety. Her valet attested that ‘she never suffered from the secret disease of women’, reinforcing her purity as a maid, but also linking her amenorrhea to cross-dressing (as Joan of Arc dressed in male military clothes) and her role in battle. Just like Lady Macbeth, for Joan to embrace violence, she would need to let go of her femininity and be ‘unsexed’.

Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy has long been read as a general invocation to eliminate qualities seen as feminine, such as compassion, and commit murder. But the literal understanding of her ‘unsexing’ in physiological terms would have been clear to most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries: the ‘unsexing’ of amenorrhea was a metaphor but also the medical cause of Lady Macbeth’s psychological change.

References:

John Sadler, The Sicke Womans Private Looking-Glasse, London: 1636

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford: 1621.

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