Heterotopian Disorientation: Intersectionality in William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth

Marlena Tronicke

doi:10.3390/h11010013

Abstract

This article reads William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2016) through the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia to explore the film’s ambivalent gender and racial politics. The country house that Katherine Lester is locked away in forms a quasi-heterotopia, mediated through a disorienting cinematography of incarceration. Although she manages to transgress the ideological boundaries surrounding her, she simultaneously contributes to the oppression of her Black housemaid, Anna. On the one hand, the film suggests that the coercive space of the colony—another Foucauldian heterotopia—may threaten white hegemony: While Mr Lester’s Black, illegitimate son Teddy almost manages to claim his inheritance and, hence, contest the racialised master/servant relationship of the country house, Anna’s voice threatens to cause Katherine’s downfall. On the other hand, through eventually denying Anna’s and Teddy’s agency, Lady Macbeth exposes the pervasiveness of intersectional forms of oppression that are at play in both Victorian and twenty-first-century Britain. The constant spatial disorientation that the film produces, this article suggests, not only identifies blind spots in Foucault’s writings on heterotopian space as far as intersectionality is concerned, but also speaks to white privilege as a vital concern of both twenty-first-century feminism and neo-Victorian criticism.

Highlights

The unorthodoxy of Lady Macbeth (2016), directed by William Oldroyd, as a period film stands out from the very first shot, which shows the protagonist Katherine Lester (Florence Pugh) in her bridal veil at the altar, captured from the side
In contrast to Leskov’s source text, whose engagement with heterotopian structures restricts itself to the confines of gendered domesticity, Lady Macbeth is heavily invested in the entwined politics of gender and race in nineteenth- as well as twenty-first-century Britain, both of which are negotiated spatially
The film’s gender and racial politics are negotiated via highly symbolic spatial structures that, on their own terms, challenge previous representations of Victorian domesticity and magnify the interlinkage between British imperialism and ostensibly ‘innocent’ domesticity

Summary

Introduction

The unorthodoxy of Lady Macbeth (2016), directed by William Oldroyd, as a period film stands out from the very first shot, which shows the protagonist Katherine Lester (Florence Pugh) in her bridal veil at the altar, captured from the side. In contrast to Leskov’s source text, whose engagement with heterotopian structures restricts itself to the confines of gendered domesticity (and, to a lesser extent, class), Lady Macbeth is heavily invested in the entwined politics of gender and race in nineteenth- as well as twenty-first-century Britain, both of which are negotiated spatially. The critical depiction of restrictive Victorian gender roles, the dullness of provincial life, and the (unjust) stigmatisation of female adultery makes Lady Macbeth typically neo-Victorian It invites comparison with canonised depictions of oppressive Victorian and early twentieth-century domesticity other than Leskov’s I reflect upon the latter in relation to the genre of neo-Victorian film, which has long tended to neglect systematic reappraisals of imperial politics and ideologies, mostly centring on white characters and operating with predominantly white casts

Framing Katherine’s Domestic Imprisonment

Reclaiming the Heterotopian Space of the Colony?

Conclusions