We’re often a little too happy to classify as ‘feminist’ anything that presents lead female characters confronting gendered oppression, but we don’t always consider how these narratives might conceal and preserve other systems of oppression. I was recently reminded of this fact while watching William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2017). Oldroyd’s film centres on Katherine (Florence Pugh), a young woman given in marriage to an older man as part of a package deal involving land, and on the effort she expends while trying to change her circumstances. When considering the constraints that Katherine’s marriage places on her economic, sexual and reproductive freedom, alongside her ingenious use of limited resources to escape them, it is easy to see why critics describe the film and its heroine as ‘feminist’. But to focus solely on Lady Macbeth’s engagement with conventional feminist themes is to ignore the film’s greater depths. The use of a “[colour] blind casting” process for all roles, with Oldroyd, writer Alice Birch, and casting director Shaheen Baig seeking the best actors, regardless of their racial identities, offers a rare opportunity to wrestle with hard questions about race, class, gender and feminism.1 Naomi Ackie, a Black actor, was selected to play Katherine’s maid Anna, and Cosmo Jarvis, an actor with a darker skin tone than Florence Pugh, was chosen to portray Katherine’s lover Sebastian. Inspired by archival material documenting the lives of Black families in mid-19th century England, Oldroyd and his team fashioned a period piece that is a corrective to the whitewashing of British history and the national imaginary.2
Previous adaptations of the source material – the 19th-century Russian novella and opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District – have characterised Katerina Lvovna (Katherine in Oldroyd’s film) as a representation of bourgeois society under critique: an overreaching and ungrateful shrew who finally gets what’s coming to her. Adapted by the playwright Alice Birch, Oldroyd’s version places its heroine in northeastern England and does little to acknowledge her backstory. We learn nothing of Katherine’s upbringing other than that she had a mother who taught her about nature. This omission makes her seem more like an abstraction, a symbol of female victory over misogyny, than a fully fleshed-out and complex character. Perhaps this narrative economy is a formalisation of what happens to women in patriarchal discourse when they lack the tools and space to define themselves apart from in relation to men. Katherine is confined to the house and to a daily routine that leaves little space for her agency and self-expression, but plenty of room for the kind of boredom, sexual dissatisfaction, and insatiable sexual hunger Betty Friedan describes in The Feminine Mystique (1963). Her overbearing father-in-law, Boris Lester (Christopher Fairbank), regularly scolds Katherine for her boredom-induced lethargy and what he perceives to be the neglect of her wifely duties. It comes as no surprise, then, when the severely groomed and corseted Katherine begins grasping for more than an existence marked by the slow-moving passage of time.
So far, so conventional – but Oldroyd changes the dynamics of the story radically through the addition of Naomi Ackie’s maid, Anna.3 That many viewers missed or were reluctant to explore how crucial the relationship between Katherine and Anna is to the former’s eventual self-emancipation and the film’s overall message is surprising.4 Another outcome of Lady Macbeth’s colourblind casting is the generation of an unintended but weighty narrative subtext, largely reflected in Katherine’s relationships with Anna and Sebastian. In the first few moments of Lady Macbeth we are introduced to both the inner workings of the Lester household and to Katherine, veiled and turned away from the camera. As she sneaks a peek at the groom, Alexander, standing beside her at the wedding altar (he remains off-screen), viewers are given a glimpse of her face. But instead of showing the object of Katherine’s gaze, and offering a glimpse of her perspective, the editing challenges our expectations through the use of a match-on-action reverse shot that continues to follow her movements. In this new image, Katherine’s head is framed between two characters: Boris and Anna. The significance of this framing comes to light later when Boris tasks Anna with the responsibility of watching Katherine closely to make sure she stays awake until Alexander joins her in their bedroom (although there is much left to be desired when he finally does). Under Boris’s direction, a dynamic arises that privileges Katherine’s pleasure and protection at the expense of Anna’s humanity. Both Anna and Katherine are subject to Boris’s patriarchal authority, but where Anna is able to empathise with Katherine when she is mistreated, Katherine finds Anna’s humiliation to be amusing.5
Katherine’s confinement to the house’s interior is indicative of Western culture’s glorification of fragile, white femininity as the pinnacle of female desirability.
In a sequence adapted from the novella, Katherine discovers that male workers have suspended Anna, naked, in a sow-weighing device.6 She orders the men to release Anna immediately, but instead of seeing the overlaps between the maid’s experiences of male dominance and her own, Katherine flirts with Sebastian, the ringleader. Back in the house, Katherine finds the tearful, visibly distressed Anna in a stairwell, and doesn’t attempt to comfort her. Instead, she asks questions about Sebastian. Once Katherine’s curiosity is satisfied, she leaves Anna and we are left to witness Anna’s attempts to compose herself as she watches Katherine’s retreating figure. Anna is not ignorant of Katherine’s indifference to her suffering, and the camera ensures that viewers aren’t either. Although initiated by the elder Lester, Anna’s surveillance of Katherine takes on a life of its own, outlining both within and beyond the story’s historical moment the limits of her agency. Florence Pugh’s claim that “Anna has more power, in a sense, because she’s allowed to go outside, to walk around…to have a life” rests upon the problematic assumption that the modes of mobility accessible to women weren’t informed by their racial and class positioning.7 Katherine’s confinement to the house’s interior is indicative of Western culture’s glorification of fragile, white femininity as the pinnacle of female desirability. Conversely, Anna’s outdoor excursions are linked to her domestic labour and punctuated by Sebastian’s threatening behaviour.
As the film progresses and Anna’s surveillance of Katherine intensifies, it would be easy to suggest that this activity was warranted given Katherine’s increasingly erratic behaviour during the absence of the Lester men. Left to her own devices and Anna’s ministrations, Katherine explores the wild and wet countryside, relishing the temporary reprieve from male oppression and the pleasures of defying the direct order to stay indoors, while Anna’s watchfulness is presented as her primary way of being in the world. Inflected with a mixture of apprehension, challenge, curiosity, and barely concealed contempt, Anna’s gaze is transformed into a critical mode of looking that recalls the Black female spectatorship theorised by bell hooks. In The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators, bell hooks traces the genealogy of the relation between racialised power relations, in which slaves were denied the right to gaze, and the cinematic apparatus. She describes an interrogative mode of visual pleasure that operates as a site of resistance through its refusal to centre the male gaze, to characterise white womanhood as lack (in relation to white men), and to perpetuate the negation of Black female subjectivity.8 In this way, Anna’s penetrating gaze draws attention to and evaluates Katherine’s behaviour, becoming the film’s moral compass.
In making Sebastian darker skinned than Katherine, Lady Macbeth inadvertently draws on the problematic legacy of brutish Black male sexuality on screen and traces the political contours of its relation to white femininity. As visual shorthand, his skin tone functions as a signifier of difference in a way that surpasses the class difference presented in the source material. Indeed, Sebastian’s sexually-charged introduction to the film (during his suspension of a naked Anna in a weighing device and flirtation with Katherine) is followed by his forcing his way into her bedroom and overcoming any lingering traces of propriety that Katherine still possesses. Their lovemaking is often marked by aggression and presents itself not as a passionate, illicit affair between equals but as an illustration of the old adage wherein one person holds the knife’s handle while the other holds the blade – an imbalance of power.
Anna is witness to all of this and more: we see her in the background stealing glances at Katherine during her interactions with Sebastian, Boris and even the local priest. When Katherine poisons her father-in-law, Anna is present and her shock and grief cause her to become mute. Alexander is also soon dispatched after on a surprise return to the estate finding Katherine in bed with Sebastian. She makes quick work of his murder and enlists Sebastian in the disposal of Alexander’s body and that of his horse. Sebastian soon takes his place as the man of the house, but his enjoyment of this new status is tainted by Anna’s worrisome presence. He fears that through its documentation of this chain of events, Anna’s critical gaze will upend the life he and Katherine have created. These fears are put to rest when Katherine reminds him (in Anna’s presence) that the maid is mute and is therefore unable to reveal their crimes. Most strikingly, this exchange makes explicit Sebastian’s dependence on Katherine, as well as his willingness to oppress others living in precarious circumstances: he might be the one wearing the pants, but he’s clearly not the one in charge. Their conversation shows the way in which Katherine explicitly links her freedom with Anna’s voicelessness and foreshadows a significant change to the story’s conclusion.
In Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Katerina and Sergei’s affair is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Fedya, a young nephew who is heir to her husband’s estate. Katerina kills him, confesses to committing the murder to stay with her lover, and both she and Sergei are arrested. Shortly after Katerina gives birth to their child, their relationship falls apart and Sergei becomes involved with another prisoner whom Katerina kills while simultaneously taking her own life. Along similar lines, in Lady Macbeth, a boy named Teddy (Anton Palmer) arrives. He is heir apparent to the estate of the missing Alexander. And Agnes (Golda Rosheuvel), his grandmother, reveals that Teddy is the result of Alexander’s relationship with another woman.9 With Teddy on the scene, Sebastian must hide in the outhouse (where Anna was assaulted at the beginning of the film) and Katherine becomes desperate for him to return to the house. In the source material, Sergei is aware of Katerina’s plans to murder Fedya, but isn’t actually involved. However, in Oldroyd’s version, Sebastian has an opportunity to kill the boy, but instead rescues him from harm and returns him to safety. Eager to again share her bed with Sebastian, Katherine enlists him in a plot to smother the child. After Teddy’s death, Katherine tells Teddy’s grandmother and the skeptical authorities that he died in his sleep. Tormented by his role in Teddy’s death, Sebastian confesses to the police, a doctor, and the boy’s grandmother that Katherine incited his participation.
What happens next is both a surprise and to be expected: Anna is given the punitive narrative trajectory that Katherine receives in the source material. Instead of confessing, Katherine accuses Sebastian and Anna of committing not just Teddy’s murder, but also the murder of her father-in-law and husband. While this act of self-preservation consigns the two accused to death, the camera’s lingering look at Anna suggests she is impacted most by Katherine’s lies. Unable to speak and reveal the truth, the all-seeing Anna fills the frame, looking from person to person, then shuts her eyes. When we next see Anna, it is after a tracking point-of-view shot of the sky, which is attributed to Sebastian, who is lying beside her, shackled, in a moving wagon. Anna’s face is turned towards the wagon wall, almost as if she no longer wants to see anything. Lady Macbeth ends with Katherine, deserted by household staff, resuming her position on the settee where she previously sat in boredom. In an interview, Alice Birch describes this change to the story’s denouement as a feminist act because its open ending offers Katherine an opportunity to have another life.10 But what does it say that a film heralded as feminist for its depiction of a woman’s self-liberation frames this process as a benefit resulting from its heroine’s silencing of another woman? Birch’s argument is troubling because it privileges the lives of certain women over the lives of others. Furthermore, given the optics of Lady Macbeth’s casting and its accompanying racialised subtext, this conclusion only emphasises the resemblance between Katherine and Anna’s relationship and long-standing antagonisms between white and Black women within feminist circles, wherein white feminists both ignore the specificities of Black women’s lived experiences of oppression and add to these experiences of oppression.11
By emphasising Anna’s reactions to Katherine’s behaviour and criminal allegations, Lady Macbeth invites viewers to shift focus from the film’s more obvious treatment of gender oppression to consider how the women’s racial and class identities inform their relationship and their experiences of oppression. Katherine and Anna experience male dominance differently because of their social classes, but Katherine’s mistreatment of Anna is also charged with this patriarchal economic system. Their lack of female solidarity across class difference is only compounded by the visuals of their racial differences, and exploring their intersections reveals a thematic richness that exceeds the filmmaker’s intentions. As patriarch of the Lester household, Boris manages the ways the women experience themselves, the world and each other. This aspect of Lady Macbeth’s story takes on greater weight through its casting and draws attention to how patriarchal systems provide a basis for gender, racial, and economic discrimination. As a result, a reluctance to engage critically with the ways the racial identities of the actors of Lady Macbeth impact its feminist perspective does the film a disservice and ignores the necessity of understanding how experiences of gender oppression are informed by other intersecting social identities, like class and race.12
1 There are also two other actors of colour in the film. William Oldroyd, Portrait of a Lady, interview by Amber Wilkinson, Eye for Film, March, 2017 (Online) 2 See David Olusoga, ‘Black people have had a presence in our history for centuries. Get over it’, The Guardian, August, 2017 (Online) 3 In her study of the Africanist presence in canonical American literature, novelist Toni Morrison urges readers to consider how Black characters are often used as the reverse images of championed characteristics and narrative themes. She asks that they consider what the addition of blackness or Black characters does for a narrative. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination (New York: Random House, 1993). 4 Also, worthy of consideration here is Boris’s role, as patriarchal head of household, in creating this friction between the women. 5 There is a scene where Katherine rebuffs Boris’s insults and is slapped across the face. Anna, watching this exchange from an alcove in the background, steps forward to intervene. The choreography of their blocking is indicative of the three characters’ relationship. Another scene involves Boris humiliating Anna when she refuses to disclose that Katherine finished the reserves of his favourite wine. Boris orders Anna to crawl on all fours, while an inebriated Katherine, sitting in the background, stifles her laughter. 6 There are major differences between this film sequence and a scene in the source material involving Sergei’s weighing of Aksinya, Katerina’s cook. Where Anna runs naked from the room and is tearful during Katherine’s questioning (about Sebastian), Aksinya is playful and gossipy, sharing tidbits about Sergei’s romantic exploits with her employer. Nikolai Leskov, The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Random House, 2013), p6-8. 7 Florence Pugh, Standing by the monster you created, interview by Chandler Levack, The Review, TIFF, August 2017, (Online) 8 bell hooks, The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), p115-31 9 Both Teddy and his grandmother are played by actors of colour. 10 BFI, Lady Macbeth: Florence Pugh on her dark and dangerous turn in 19th-century drama, filmed October 14, 2016 at 60th BFI London Film Festival, London, UK, Video, 21:14 11 Heidi Safia Mirza, ed., Black British Feminism: A Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). See also, Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York and London: Routledge, 2000) 12 Their misgivings also suggest that there might be a logic underlying colourblind casting that causes it to differ from inclusive casting approaches. Where the latter makes space for the subtext of their actors’ racial identities to create thematic subtext not originally present in the work, the former approach relies on an ideology that suppresses or denies meanings associated with racial differences because it doesn’t ‘see’ race.
Desirée de Jesus is a video essayist, Concordia University Public Scholar and Film and Moving Image Studies PhD Candidate researching representations of marginalised girls in popular culture.
