Gendering madness : Shakespeare’s Macbeth re-visited by Verdi

Abstract

Baroque opera is replete with mad scenes. The raving Orlandos and the antics of the various Cardenios, so popular in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera, disappear almost completely at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Now, operatic mad scenes usually fall into three categories – love-madness, guilt-madness, and madness after poisoning. The first one, namely, love-madness is the most prevalent and, for reasons that will be discussed further on in this paper, is almost exclusively the prerogative of women. Sporadic scenes of lunacy for opera’s men are not infrequent, but full-blown mad scenes for them are rare in nineteenth-century opera, and where they do occur, the madness tends to be guiltinduced, as in Auber’s La Muette de Portici (1828) and Verdi’s Nabucco (1842). The obvious inference, therefore, would be that opera engages in a displacement onto women of the dangerous potential essential in its study of emotional stress. Expressed differently, while early nineteenth-century opera has both its men and its women indulge in passions that carry them dangerously close to the edge of sanity, those whom it finally throws irrevocably into the depths of despair are almost always women. Opera of the romantic period fashions the madwoman as both powerless and passive. However, in order for this characterisation to be successful it paradoxically needs to feed upon a scintillating display of powerful female action. Clothing the female body with madness is an activity that is intricately connected to the ways in which females, with what Christoph Clausen calls “their dualistic systems of language and representation”,2 are characteristically placed on the side of the irrational and the physical, adhering to the tropes of nature and silence. Men, on the other hand, are privileged with the Apollonian faculties of culture, discourse, and reason.