revealing her seductive nature as, if she picks and chooses her feminine moments, for example, after Macbeth kills the King, this shows the audience that she is manipulating her sexuality and gender for royal gain, and cleverly illustrates her seductive nature. This therefore presents a flaw in Coleridge’s categories of women in gothic literature as he failed to observe the role of the seductive female, one that is extremely important in the progression of the plot.It is clear that Lady Macbeth’s character is paradoxical, making it difficult to slot her into such basic categories, yet it can be instead be argued that due to Shakespeare being proto-gothic, he was able to manipulate the roles of women much more freely due to a lack of genre, and therefore created his own representation of females in gothic literature.

Carter similarly plays with boundaries within her collection and opposes Coleridge’s view of women in gothic texts. In ‘Wolf Alice’, Carter also successfully explores liminal states, similarly to how Lady Macbeth switches between feminine and masculine, Wolf-Alice’s identity in this tale is ambiguous; ‘nothing about her is human except that she is not a wolf’, she is torn between human and inhuman, shown through her hyphenated name, savagery and humanity. This is completed on a much broader scale than Shakespeare’s and with stronger elements of fiction, making the story itself potentially less believable due to the lack of realism, but instead more memorable and hard hitting on the reader. Despite the fact that both authors do not conform with Coleridge’s classification of women in gothic literature, it is important to remember that both texts end negatively. ‘Macbeth’ concludes with L.Macbeth’ descent into madness and apparent suicide, and ‘Wolf-Alice’ ends with the passing of the Duke; potentially presenting a warning from both authors of the implications of opposing the norm, or it may be a technique to heighten the gothic elements and impact on the reader.