Make no mistake: Lady Macbeth is fully suited to be a woman. Although she has the ambitions of a man, she has the character of a woman. Beauty, deceit, and manipulation are her weapons. She moves like a serpent, gracefully slithering from one dark corner of the castle to another. Even her words are laden with images of a bejeweled snake; she makes continuous references to tongues (1.5.30, 76), as she apparently views them as the heralds of a poisonous future. Lady Macbeth is presumably in her mid-30s, old enough to have a quick wit and strong mind, but young enough to be seduced by the temptations of evil. Her wicked nature was not randomly spawned by the promise of a higher status; it has obviously been in place for quite a while.
             It does not seem that the Lady loves Macbeth, judging from the many insults she throws at him. She calls him a "coward" (1.7.47) and when he later expresses his fears about killing Duncan, she states that only "the eye of childhood" (2.2.70) fears a dead man. Constantly pushing him to the edge, she seems to care more about the gain of power than the perils facing her husband. An interesting theory of Lady Macbeth's motivations is that she did not marry Macbeth out of love, but only for the rewards associated with his title, in which she would share. In fact, throughout the entire play, she does not express any particular terms of endearment towards her spouse, although in many places, Macbeth refers to her affectionately as "love" (3.2.33) and he further proclaims her his "dear wife" (3.2.42). Lady Macbeth uses her wiles and her charms to manipulate her husband into the gruesome deed of killing Duncan. She breathes ice and speaks stones, making every cold-hearted, evil thing she says seem like the utmost logical thing to do or believe. The idea of how to kill Duncan was entirely hers (1.7.71-82). Although Macbeth most certainly already had the seed planted in his mind, his wife was the one who made it gro...