Kill The Masters: Female Insurrection in Lady Macbeth
Nevertheless, she resisted.
One of 2016’s most audacious English indies, Lady Macbeth stars Florence Pugh as Catherine, a 19th-century commoner sold to Paul Hilton’s Lord Alexander who cracks at the confinements of abbey life and mounts a sexual rebellion when her husband is out of town, taking stable worker Sebestian (played by Cosmo Jarvis) as her lover.
Lady Macbeth, written by Alice Birch and directed by William Oldroyd, offers an antidote to the National Heritage cute-ification of British aristocratic property system and the power imbalances it upholded. American culture has attempted, in fits and starts, some introspection over the realities of life on the plantations, in high-profile films like 12 Years A Slave and Django Unchained, but the English landed gentry’s regimes of domination and implied violence have received little comparative attention. In the cross-Atlantic conquering Downton Abbey, for example, the downstairs help is harmoniously integrated into the everyday mechanics of manor life, and the class ideology that goes along with it.
Birch’s commitment to a hostile English rural domestic atmosphere as it would, inevitably, have manifested itself, is matched by William Oldroyd’s detached, veritie direction. The interior life of the house is static and still and lifeless, alienating for the viewer, yes, but so too for the people who had to live and work in it.
The absence of a score means the tedious rhythm of the house is set to the scraping, ticking, locking beats of the environment. Natural lighting relies on candlesticks, and natural lighting of the world outside — the most immediately noticeable aesthetic divergence from something like Downton’s and its use of scalding, artificial soap opera lighting.
As far as the feminine experience goes, the house is a kind of prison. Alexander warns her to stay inside so as to not catch a cold from the bracing air, and this insistence on staying put and paying pious attention to her prayer book is emphasized by the local vicar. The fields and the heaths are sites of authenticity and privacy, the whooshing, chirping natural soundtrack providing some levity to domestic monotony, where Catherine sits like a doll to the echo of a tick-tock grandfather clock. Physical, moral and sexual movement become inter-folded, making a wandering wife is a threat and a potential disruption to established order.
Static shots mean we catch the house in fragments; a bedroom, a corridor, a set of winding stairs. No grand, swooping photography to dazzle with the glamour of the place. We experience it as its residents did: isolating and regimented. The windows, doors and keyholes forming architectural economy of surveillance and coercion.
The central violence of the landed gentry system, the aggression and paranoia of an enforced hierarchy of masters and servants seeps into all relations, producing the micro-aggressions of hostile hair-brushing, bath time scrubbing and corset tightening. The House Master treats Catherine like a prisoner of war, ordering her to strip, or face the wall while he masturbates. Other times violence is more explicit and brutal, like when the father-in-law, having heard of Lady Catherine’s eventual affair, beats Sebastian with a stick, leaving him crumpled and wheezing on the dirty stable floor.
Violence and domination are the logic of the system, and the internalisation of that logic means that masters and slaves, perpetrator and victim, can become slippery roles.
Catching the estate’s help humiliating maid Anna (Naomi Ackie), by weighing her in a sheet like a sow at the market, Catherine orders them to ‘face the wall’, recycling her husband’s commandment, and when she berates them about wasting his precious time and money she does so with the faint revelry of someone realising she’s now in a position where she can tell people what to do.
Alexander is, in his own way, a sort of victim. He’s had to resort to buying himself a wife, unable, we have to assume, to court one in conventional ways. When his father cracks on with other moneyed men at the table, he stands off to the side. His shame and embarrassment manifests in a kind of impotency, jacking off instead of using Catherine for the sole reason she’s there, to provide offspring.
When he returns late in the film, he bristles with contempt for her whoring, and the gossip that it has generated. A culture which prizes reputation means that her shame becomes his. A piece of property with a will of her own is a dangerous thing, and makes him vulnerable.
Catherine succeeds at the game of the privileged by turning their violence against them, dispatching first with the father-in-law via some poisoned mushrooms in his breakfast, barricading a door so he flails and perishes off screen, his shouts ignored. Then she sees off her husband with a poker to the skull, when he reacts to her provocation by attacking Sebastian.
Both are sympathetic murders, but the final one is the most wretched, and, in the way, the most honest. With the house under her control, a bump brewing under her nightdress, Catherine is set to re-order manor life around her newfound romantic autonomy. But the arrival of a cute little boy named Teddy sired by Alexander and his entitled grandmother throws a spanner in the works; as the legally binding ward of the estate, he’s set to inherit it all, with the master still missing and very much presumed dead.
So, in the blood-thirsting pleading of the title’s Shakespearean namesake, who spoke of smashing the heads of smiling infants, Catherine convinces Sebastian to sneak into the house in the night and help her suffocate the child, just after Sebastian has saved him from the watery pneumonia of the estate’s waterfall. It’s ruthless act, and too much for the essentially moral Sebastian, who breaks down and confesses their deed to the authorities, sick with guilt and resentment at Catherine’s spell.
A cool-headed Catherine denies all knowledge, and lobbies the blame back at him and Anna, framing them for the deaths and securing her future prosperity, a turn of ruthless pragmatism and, in the grotesque logic of hereditary capitalism, really the only reasonable thing to do. Sebastian and Anna are literally carted off, a grief-stricken Agnes departs with her things and Catherine is left, finally, alone, to move through and out the house as she pleases, enjoying the spoils of radical liberation.
A pitiless triumph for pitiless way of life.
