SIMILARITIES WITH THE DARK LADY

The concept of the Dark Lady has been created by William Shakespeare. It appears in his
literary compositions, such as The Sonnets from 127 to 152. The Dark lady is a woman
described by Shakespeare with dark features and a dark nature. The poet is in love with her,
even if he hates her darker and less attractive qualities. He despises himself for constantly
staying with her, and he knows how toxic the relation between the two is. In his sonnets he
describes her as a temptress or as a bad angel, but almost always described with bad
characteristics, except when he admits he loves her. She is linked with the young man or as
Shakespeare calls him: "Fair Youth" and some sonnets suggests that she is having a
passionate affair with him. The Dark lady is the representation of the sexual love and in
opposition, the Fair Youth represent the platonic love (non sexual).

Speaking of "not healthy" love, another example can be analyzed in La Belle Dame Sans
Merci, by John Keats. In this poem the similarity with the Dark Lady is found in the figure
of the Femme Fatale. As a concept the Femme Fatale is a carefree woman, which in general
does not hide the evilness and the typical desire of annihilation of the Dark Lady. In Keats's
poem the Femme Fatale is described as a faery's child and supernatural creature, which
slowly enchants a knight with her magic and tempts him with her beauty causing his
destruction. The author underlines how dramatic the love is and how the passion destroys
the hero until the extreme experience of death comes.

The Dark Lady appears also in the figure of Lady Macbeth, in the homonym Shakespeare's
drama. In this case Macbeth allows the Dark Lady to twist his mind, and finally she pushes
him to commit an act of violence on the king just for her lust for power, which makes her
step on human values. Murder after murder Lady Macbeth would start to recognize the
weight of the crime she had committed for her own desires. For this reason it led to her
insanity, which eventually drew herself to the desperate measure of the suicide.

A similarity with the madness and the suicide of Lady Macbeth is visible in the character of
Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bront's novel, Jane Eyre. Bertha Mason is the
violently insane first wife of Edward Rochester, locked in the attic of the
castle. Due to her state of mind it has been precluded her the world
outside the attic, but sometimes she manages to escape, and for two
times she starts a fire in the house which one of them would eventually
kill her. Bertha represent the alter ego of the main character: the bestial
side that should have been repressed but it comes out and upset
everybody's balance. Under a certain point of view Bertha is a mirror for
Jane, that symbolize all the feelings and desires that she has to repress in
order to fit the mold of Victorian womanhood.
When Jane met Bertha for the first time, she describes her as she was
looking savage and she compares her to a vampire which is a similar
concept of the Femme Fatale's nature usually described as a vampire.