Appendix: Lady Macbeth and Goodwife Agnes

Appendix: Lady Macbeth and Goodwife Agnes:

a case of cultural transmission

“It is an accustomed action with her” the Gentlewoman says about the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth in Act 5, Scene 1, lines 23–4 – “to seem thus washing her hands.” What becomes Goodwife Agnes’s “accustomed action” is “washing her white bed-sheet” “in the streamlet,”¹⁵⁷ “from early dawn to late evening,” “every year, all summer, winter.” Yet, as the Gentlewoman’s precise formulation runs, the Lady’s action is “to seem” to be washing her hands, which indicates, compared to Agnes, that the Lady’s rubbing her hands (cf. 5.1.23) lacks the direct materiality of water, while Agnes is standing and washing in the “real” water of the streamlet, the running foams becoming a symbol in the course of the narrative of the ballad-poem. Agnes’s world gradually transforms the two basic liquids, blood and water into metaphors, according to the logic of a narrative, whereas by the time Lady Macbeth makes her dramatic entrance in the sleep-walking scene, Duncan’s blood has moved from her (and her husband’s) hands into her imagination; it has been soaked up by her fantasy, as much as the potential remedy: “all the perfumes of Arabia,” which could “sweeten” that “little hand” (43) have been “absorbed” by her imagination, too. In both cases, however, the metaphorical process, the breaking away from direct materiality, the symbol-creation and myth-construction will not make the blood vanish, as today’s detergents would boastfully claim: for Lady Macbeth, just as for Agnes, the blood dried on the mind is “more real” than ever. In what follows, I will be concerned with what we find in the matrix of the similarities and differences in Lady Macbeth’s and Goodwife Agnes’s respective plots: the sign, the blot, the spot, the smudging, besmirching stain, the stain of blood on the hand, and on the white linen sheet, and the desperate task: to erase the stain, to rub it off, to wash it out, to make it not be. A red or dark stain on a light surface is, as Paul Ricoeur argues in The Symbolism of Evil, one of the first symbols of sin, guilt and evil in the European cultural heritage, to be found in the most ancient Babylonian, Egyptian, Jewish and Greek mythological stories and songs, giving rise to conceptual, moral reflection (to “thought”) much later than the point in time when the metaphorical-symbolic representation was established (cf. Ricoeur 1969: especially 24-53). From Ricoeur’s philosophical point of view one could claim that conceptual-moral reflection becomes possible precisely if the stain does not become a source of obsession and madness, if it is able to break out of the mesmerising, fixating, self-generating, and self-perpetuating process of the mind, and there is enough space for a proper distance from which the meaning of the stain can be assessed not only from within but also from without, from the very distance indispensable for what we call “reflection.”

In the sleepwalking scene Lady Macbeth puts the rhetorical question, referring to King Duncan: “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” (5.1. 33–34). European culture (like Duncan, and, it seems, Agnes’ husband, too) has a lot of blood in it indeed, and in more than one sense, yet it still might seem bizarre to single out a blood-stain which has fastened onto the British and Hungarian cultural memories to celebrate cultural kinship. Is a spot of blood the place where some aspects of cultural heritage might flow together?

I consider the allowing of this possibility justifiable for at least two reasons. First of all, since 1776, when we find the name “Shakespeare” set down by a Hungarian author – namely György Alajos Szerdahely – for the first time, in a text written, ironically, in Latin (cf. Dávidházi 1989: 72). Shakespeare has proved to be a blood-transfusion for Hungarian poetry, drama, and theatre. It is equally widely known that János Arany (1817–1882), one of the most renowned figures of Hungarian literature, made an acquaintance with Shakespeare, first in German and in the early Hungarian translations, both as reader and a strolling player during his college years in the mid-1830s, but then later he also read Shakespeare also in the English original, and produced brilliant translations of it. As Arany himself relates the story of his first encounter with Shakespeare in English in a letter to a friend, he received an English grammar from his first patron and friend, István Szilágyi, in 1842 (Arany 1993: 98)¹⁵⁸ and this grammar contained one of Hamlet’s soliloquies (most probably “To be or not to be”), which he felt inspired to compare with the German translation (cf. Kovács 1993: 98). We may have little doubt that by 1853, when he wrote Goodwife Agnes, working as a grammar-school teacher at the time in Nagykőrös, Arany had read Macbeth, probably even several times (Arany 1998: 308).¹⁵⁹ We also know that Arany himself started to translate Macbeth (although we cannot tell exactly when) but the manuscript was destroyed during the Second World War (Kovács 1993: 74)¹⁶⁰ and the play’s first canonical translation¹⁶¹ was eventually done by Károly Szász (unfortunately a very mediocre poet), for the first complete Hungarian Shakespeare but it was Arany who reviewed Szász’s work, correcting several errors; that review is extant, but was done in 1864, so a good ten years after Goodwife Agnes had been written. As a result, Arany may well have had Lady Macbeth’s blood-stain in his (cultural) memory when writing his ballad, and Shakespeare’s influence on Arany, and eminently the effect of Shakespearean tragedy in shaping Arany’s understanding of what the “tragic” might be, was noted already in Arany’s lifetime.¹⁶² However, the two female figures could of course be juxtaposed without assuming or documenting any direct or indirect influence as well, although then the actual cultural transmission would perhaps lose that “smell of blood” that Lady Macbeth, at least, is apparently still feeling (“Here’s the smell of the blood still,” 5.1.42).

In Agnes’s case, it is precisely the spot of blood which is replaced, in the prison cell, by one single ray of the sun, which Agnes continually fixates on, and which fills one of her eyeballs just as much as her whole day (and here Arany uses a pun in the Hungarian original, which the translator could not render: in Hungarian the same word: nap is used for both the “sun” and for “day”). This ray of sun is richly ambiguous: Agnes’s fixation on it is just as much a sign of her madness as it is the remedy against madness (because if she turns away, spectres start their dance around her), but the ray may also be taken as an emblem of the revelatory technique of the ballad; the ray emblematises the merciless focus into which Agnes’s “parts” are brought: her eyes, clothes, kerchief, hair, tears (also as a pre-figuration of the water in the streamlet), later her “ruffled hair” and its colour, her knees, her cheeks, her face, her wrinkles. Agnes is methodically taken apart, almost mutilated; she becomes an icon of re-memb-rance through dis-member-ment. Towards the end of the ballad, the role of the ray of the sun is taken by the beams of moonlight, which projects her hovering shadow onto the surface of the water of the streamlet, and that shadow is perturbed by the foams of the water, creating an aberrant mirror-image of her gradual disintegration as a self. One image, in a metonymical focus, stands out as a part for the whole: her white mallet, glittering “from afar” (stanza 23) is significant not only for the sight, the vision of the reader but also for the ear: the heavy mallet strikes down with “deferred thumps” or “claps”. Thus the narrator builds our distance from the figure by allowing us to see the mallet earlier than its sound would reach us. We leave Agnes in the vain activity of washing: her suffering seems to be endless, she cannot die, and this is underscored by the poem returning to its beginning, coming full circle. This circle surrounds and traps, as much as it reinforces the endless, straight flow of the streamlet, the narrative flow, which, in turn, is further reinforced by the prayer-like, mechanically returning refrain (“O, merciful Lord, never leave me”), indicating, on the part of perhaps all the characters of the ballad, that kind of helpless astonishment which is represented by the Doctor and the Gentlewoman watching Lady Macbeth.

Goodwife Agnes, who is a good wife in her intentions of cleaning, is a bad wife for washing her dirty linen in public and getting involved in a crime committed against her husband. This scenario is usually read as an emblem of the “crime and punishment” theme.¹⁶³ In connection with the ballad Arany’s contemporary, Dostoyevsky is almost as frequently mentioned as Shakespeare. However, I think that in the story of Agnes, shame plays a far more significant role than the actual crime. To support this, I take one of my clues from the poem itself, and one from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

While we have no doubt that Lady Macbeth is an instigator and an accomplice in Macbeth’s crime of murdering Duncan, what Agnes has actually done remains obscure throughout. This sheds some light on the highly suspicious assembly of the elders. This is not a “normal” court at all: what kind of a trial is it (though it must be painfully acknowledged that such trials are not unheard of in Hungarian history), where the accused has no defence lawyer, where she is not asked to plead guilty or not guilty, where she cannot relate her own interpretation of what happened, where the judges accept the testimony of the murderer himself against the accused, where no investigation is made into the question of why Agnes kept a lover, what her marriage was like, whether she had been sexually abused by either husband or lover, etc. In several interpretations I have read that the elders, who are reminiscent in some way of tribal society, are there to emphasise that earthly justice acquits Goodwife Agnes in order to hand her over to a more severe judge: her own conscience, or Fate, or God, her punishment being precisely that she is not punished “on earth” by having to subsist on bread and water for the rest of her life.¹⁶⁴ But since we do not know how guilty Agnes is, we cannot tell whether what proves to be the eventual punishment is proportionate to the crime committed. There are so many fairy-tale like elements in the presentation of these old, hoary men that it is tempting to imagine that they exist only in Agnes’s imagination: perhaps she has in fact never left the streamlet, and prison-cell and court-scene alike are just as much a part of Agnes’s fancy (though of course the crudest possible reality for her) as the blood-stain in the already spotless linen-sheet. There can be no doubt that her husband was murdered by her mysterious lover (who is never shown but only referred to). Yet it is my view that Agnes’s case is more complicated, and her trauma deeper, than usually assumed.