Revenge, Female Agency and Masculinity in Lisa Klein’s Lady Macbeth’s Daughter

Lady Macbeth’s Daughter by Lisa Klein is a young adult novel that re-visions the storyline of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Klein’s text introduces the female voice and perspectives on the power struggle of men wanting to become King of Scotland. She also increases the supernatural elements in her novel, linking nature and the supernatural to the feminine element of life and being. This paper closely analyses and compares two different corpora, the original text and the re-visioned text, in analysing Lady Macbeth and her daughter, Albia’s, desire for revenge from the female perspective by looking at their agency and their longing for masculinity. Through comparative analysis of both the novel and the play, the researcher finds that Lady Macbeth views a crime such as murder as a reflection of manhood. Therefore, she desires to have this masculine characteristic although she lacks agency in completing the task. Albia does not appear to need this sense of masculinity as she has a strongly rooted sense of her inner strength as a woman, thus she has a stronger sense of agency. She is also able to tap into the feminine supernatural due to her clairvoyant ability. This research will conceptualise female agency as an element that will be utilised in other literary texts with female characters who feel the need for a masculine proxy in order to fulfil their desire for revenge.