[In the following extract, I.vii 36 - 59] How does Lady Macbeth use language to manipulate her husband?

In the play, Lady Macbeth is a huge catalyst for Macbeth’s downfall and subsequent evil actions. Her powerful use of persuasive language reveals her as an ambitious character who is motivated by aspirations of power. Macbeth is subordinate to his wife, and at the beginning of the play, her words have a particularly strong impact on his actions. She emasculates him and belittles his manhood, and with every insult that she throws at him, he gradually succumbs to the idea that the murder of Duncan will prove his masculinity to her. She uses rhetorical questions, accusing him of ‘look[ing] so green and pale’ and asking him ‘art thou afraid?’ which manipulatively probes Macbeth’s insecurities and influences his behaviour. She questions his ambition and courage, using the adjectives ‘green’ and ‘pale’ to suggest that Macbeth is to weak to commit murder. The long list of rhetorical questions ‘Was the hope drunk / Wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since?’ directly appeals to Macbeth’s desire to prove his manliness to his wife, and he begs her to stop, ‘prithee, peace’. Lady Macbeth continues to psychologically manipulate Macbeth by insisting that ‘When you durst do it, then you were a man; /And to be more than what you were, you would / Be so much more the man’, laying bare the challenge to Macbeth’s manhood, that will only be achieved ‘when you durst do it’, i.e. commit the murder. She also uses hyperbole to emphasize her own courage in comparison to Macbeth, exclaiming that ‘I would [...] have pluck’d my nipples from his boneless gums / And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you / Have done to this’. By making the very traditionally female act of breastfeeding monstrous, Lady Macbeth encapsulates her masculine ambition for power as she would be willing to murder her own child, rather than go back on a promise as Macbeth intends to do. She distances herself from traditional notions of femininity to foreground Macbeth’s weak, emasculated character.