The Lounge

                                             The Proud Pedestrian 

Instead of finding myself in the Ivory Tower (indeed an impossible fortress to impregnate), I walk about the gardens and dip my feet in the moat. And the scholars from their high, glimmering windows may laugh at me (here I mean some professor and many fellow graduate students), but I am coming to peace with the fact that I am not of the intellectual elite and have very bad taste.

Upon reading an article entitled "A.C. Bradley and Those Children of Lady Macbeth" from Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 12, No.3, published in the summer of 1961, I was accused of being a pedestrian by the content, "The question (of Lady Macbeth's children) is somewhat pedestrian... and it verges upon superstition".

If I wonder out-loud about Ophelia's virginity, Lady M's children, or Elizabeth I's influence over Shakespeare's Cleopatra, I have to be very sure of my company. (In a class I participated in last spring on 18th-Century prison novels, I questioned Moll Flanders incest and how it reflects upon her poor mothering skills... I was berated into the dust for thinking in such unscholastic and post-modernist terms. "It was not a worthy question of intellectual devotion" said one PhD student.) I must be careful to whom I divulge my literary interests.

I feel like my questions are fetishes, abhorrent to others but titillating to a small circle of fellows. I want to meet in underground cafes and lounges with like-minded people to discuss all the "unintelligent" questions of literature.

So, I am accused by an article of being pedestrian (an article I am only reading because I am interested in any work done on answering the question that has been at the back of my mind for 5 years... "I have given suck and know how tender tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face have plucked my nipple from its boneless gums, and dashed its brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this" says Lady Macbeth in Act I, scene vii. Immediately you know she's had a baby and you know from the rest of the play that the couple have no heirs. Did the baby die naturally? Did she kill it? Does infanticide add to her soullessness? How would this make Macbeth feel to have his dead child's memory revived so he may kill a man? How can Lady Macbeth be so willing to kill her child (again possibly) for the crown? How does this affect Macbeth and his sentencing to kill all Macduff's "pretty ones"?

In search of research I come upon abuses for looking... it is kind of like going to a minister for prayers of salvation and then getting yelled at because you forgot to take your hat off before entering the church.

If asking those questions and being fascinated by the inner lives of characters as implied by the texts makes me a pedestrian, then I am going to walk all over it.

Above and below is Lady Macbeth's costume for Act I, scene iii. I wanted her in this elegant blue which is non-threatening, because when she got dressed that morning she was not considering herself to be a murderous rival for the Scottih crown. But to hint at her scheming, I gave her the red ribbon underpinning and black lace because those are the colors I often associate with her (demon colors, as they are so called). When she is giving her speech, calling upon the "spirits that tend on mortal thought", Danielle, the lightening director, turns the stage to a burning orange, which made the fabric of the gown glow an unnatural, sickly reddish-yellow, like water being polluted; and the hue continued to darken until the end of the scene.