How 'Bringing Up Baby' and 'Macbeth' Portray the Chaos Caused by the Subversion of Gender Roles. Anonymous College

Howard Hawks’ 1938 film Bringing Up Baby and Shakespeare’s Macbeth both demonstrate the chaos that occurs as a result of the subversion of convention and gender roles. Bringing Up Baby follows the expected trajectory of a screwball comedy as it follows the eccentric and seemingly unlikely pairing that is David Huxley and Susan Vance. Arguably, the film explores themes of disorder, love and gender. Macbeth is thematically similar in the way that it too explores the implications of gender binaries and queerness along with chaos through Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s relationship and Shakespeare’s use of the weird sisters. Judith Butler’s work ‘Gender Trouble’, which explores ideas of hetero-normativity and the construction of gender, can be used to challenge the themes seen in the works of Hawks and Shakespeare.

It could be argued that both Bringing Up Baby and Macbeth twist and upset the conventions of binary gender roles. In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth appears to dominate her relationship with her husband, thus defying the expected boundaries of a woman in the 17th century. In ‘Gender Trouble’, Butler addresses the historical idea that “being female is a natural indisposition”[1] which is a sentiment that Lady Macbeth clearly seems to...