Macbeth is a play written by William Shakespeare and The Bluest Eye is a novel written by Toni Morrison. Both Macbeth and The Bluest Eye deal with human nature and its striving to reach the best possible state of existence. The goal of Macbeth and his wife is to gain power at all costs which deprives them of humanity. Pecola also wants to improve her life which is why she wishes to have blue eyes. There is much suffering and fight for power in these texts as well as the age all problem of evil which affects all people.
Macbeth finds out from the witches that he is supposed to become the king because that is his fate. He says: “if chance will have me a king, why, chance may crown me, Without my stir” (1.3.143). Once he is told about his destiny his wife shows her hunger for power and makes him kill in order to become a king. She seems to be more blood-thirsty than him, but he accepts his wife’s wishes. Lady Macbeth says to her husband: “Thou wouldst be great, / Art not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it” (1.5.18-20). Macbeth is deep down a morally righteous person which is why it is not so easy for him to commit a murder. His wife is different because she believes in killing as a means of achieving power and dominance. Macbeth listens to her and he becomes crueler than her after he begins with the killings. When he is on his way to becoming the most powerful person in the kingdom, there is no stopping him.
Pecola is very young and she is growing up in poor conditions after the Great Depression. Everybody says that she is ugly, including her peers as well as her parents. She gets bullied and she is constantly surrounded with her parents fighting which leads her to believe that everything would be different if she were white and had blue eyes because she associates beauty with whiteness. “It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyeswere different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different." (Morrison 46). She believes that she would change in a psychological way if she changes her physical appearance. This way of thinking leads her to become mad because it begins to dominate her life.
Macbeth and his wife both go mad because of the fact that the evil they commit comes back haunting. People need to pay for their sins and the two of them cannot bear the fact that there is so much blood on their hands. Macbeth says: “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” (2.2.58–59). At first he is reluctant to commit murders, but his wife convinces him that it is the right thing to do because it will bring great privileges to the two of them. However, neither of them keeps their mind sane because they are tortured by all the monstrosities they have committed. When Macbeth and his wife organize a banquet, Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost and reveals his madness. He loses his reason do to fear and the feeling of guilt which he cannot bear. Lady Macbeth also loses her mind and eventually kills herself because of the fact that she feels guilty as well and it turns out that plotting murders and executing them are crucially different. It is not easy to remain human after behaving in an unethical way and doing harm to innocent people, but it is in human nature to wish for more. “While there is no Queen, there are demonic emblems of female power in the witches and Lady Macbeth” (Willbern 522). The witches represent the greed and the wish for power which makes people resort to evil in order to accomplish their goals.
Pecola also goes mad because of her wish to be beautiful and because she thinks that the power lies in being white and having blue eyes. Pecola’s role model is Shirley Temple and all of the women in the novel worship white celebrities which is devastating for their self-esteem since they are African-Americans. “Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would only see what there was to see: the eyes of other people” (Morrison 46-47). Pecola has no respect for herself and she depends on the opinion of others because she is not self-confident. Her obsession with physical appearance is out of control when she wishes to have blue eyes. Being white seems to be the ultimate goal which leads to happiness and it seems as if it were the solution to all of Pecola’s problems which are mostly related to domestic violence. She wants to gain power by changing her appearance although it is impossible for her to make her eyes blue. It is irrational to think that her looks are related to the fact that her parents fight. Pecola is right in thinking that the society has degraded her: “Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live” (Morrison 206). Common people believe that the rape was Pecola’s fault and this makes the situation with her madness even harder. Pecola is the victim in all of the surroundings starting in the society and in school and ending at home with the rape by her father which leaves her pregnant. This makes her insane and she cannot grasp the fact that her father raped her. At this point she believes that she got blue eyes and that it is the reason for the strange behavior of the people around her.
Macbeth and his wife are restless after Macbeth becomes the king because they are aware of the fact that the witches predicted that the heir to the throne would be Banquo’s son and because they know that they have powerful enemies and that they manipulated their way to the throne. Macbeth is ruled by passion and his motives “for regicide are never completely explicit, and because they are not articulated, he remains a problematic tragic hero, one whose actions continue to seem so reprehensible that we may be amazed at whatever sympathy we develop for him” (Carr and Knapp 839). People tend to feel empathy for those who are misfortunate and Macbeth is a person whose ambition drives him mad. He loses everything by becoming a king including his honor and morality because power seems to be the most desirable trait. He is not satisfied with being one of the king’s most reliable men, but he needs to become the king. Lady Macbeth and her husband share the same kind of madness although it is developed in different ways in each of them.
Pecola’s madness is driven by the rejection from the society which is why she ends up talking to her imaginary friend. This friend is supposed to accept her unconditionally which is where all of the other people failed. “Pecola becomes mentally grounded in the experiences of a degenerative childhood, and she never leaves adolescence” (Mahaffely 156). She has no strength to resist feeling ugly because she is not supported by anybody. Her mother tells her that she is ugly and her father rapes her which makes her lose her sanity.
People feel the need to strive for power in their lives which can push them too far and make them lose their honor and morality which happens to Macbeth. Pecola also loses herself and her sanity when she gives in to the effort of the society that promotes whiteness and beauty which she cannot achieve. All of these characters have psychological problems because of their needs and desires. It is important to be fulfilled in life, but not at the cost of someone else’s happiness.
Works Cited
Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Chatham: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1998. Print.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Vintage, 2007. Print.
Willbern, David. "Phantasmagoric "Macbeth"." English Literary Renaissance 16.3 (1986): 520-49. Print.
Carr, Stephen L., and Peggy A. Knapp. "Seeing through Macbeth." PMLA 96.5 (1981): 837-47. Print.
Mahaffey, Paul D. "The Adolescent Complexities of Race, Gender, and Class in Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye"." Race, Gender & Class 11.4 (2004): 155-65. Print.
