Blood and Guilt in Macbeth

In the moment after Duncan’s murder, Macbeth looks at his hands and sees blood. “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?” he asks, not as a literal question but as a confession of horror. He has just killed the man he was appointed to protect, and the physical evidence—the blood on his hands and on the dagger—has become the symbol of something that cannot be undone. Lady Macbeth enters and dismisses his fear. “A little water clears us of this deed,” she says, and in that moment she embodies a dangerous kind of rationality. The murder is done. They can wash the blood away, move forward, consolidate their power. But Macbeth already understands something she does not: blood does not wash away so easily.

The play tracks blood through its many meanings. In the early scenes, blood is honor—the blood of enemies that stains brave soldiers returning from battle. The Sergeant’s “gory” appearance is a sign of valor. But after Duncan’s death, blood becomes a stain that grows larger with every murder. Macbeth kills Banquo and his son Fleance, then murders Macduff’s wife and children. The blood accumulates, and with each new killing, the weight of guilt becomes harder to bear. In the banquet scene, Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost—a vision of one of his victims—and he is shaken. Yet he does not repent. Instead, he becomes numb. By the time he has murdered enough people to fill a castle with ghosts, he claims he has “supped full with horrors” and cannot be startled anymore.

Lady Macbeth’s breakdown comes in Act 5, when she appears sleepwalking with a candle, trying to wash imaginary blood from her hands. “Out, damned spot,” she cries, and the blood she sees is invisible to everyone but her. She has tried to be rational, to accept the murders as the price of power, but her mind has betrayed her. The blood has become real again—more real, perhaps, than it ever was on her actual hands. She speaks of Duncan’s blood, of the old man’s blood that seemed so copious, of hands that can never be clean. The woman who promised that a little water would suffice now insists that all the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten her bloodied hands. Guilt has invaded her dreams and her waking life, and it has unmade her.

Macbeth’s response to blood and guilt is the opposite. He becomes incapable of feeling anything. When he is told that his wife is dead, he responds with a speech about the meaninglessness of life itself. The blood of his victims no longer touches him—or rather, it has touched him so thoroughly that he has become numb to it. The play suggests that blood, once spilled, creates a stain that cannot be washed away, but the stain works differently on different people. For Lady Macbeth, it eats away at the mind from inside. For Macbeth, it hardens him until he becomes something less than human. Either way, the blood changes the murderer. Neither of them can go back to who they were before.