I think we need to have more female* characters who express emotions beyond "violently crashing out"
* I mean the same goes for male characters but let me explain
There's a lot of retellings of classic literature where it is just female characters getting mad at male ones (usually the husband from the original book). In some cases, I think it's valid, like Medea and Clytemnestra, but even then, they are understandably flawed, and that is a good thing. But then you have retellings of R&J and Macbeth or you have people calling Desdemona passive in Othello.
Let's get one thing straight: Juliet, Lady Macbeth, and Desdemona are incredibly complex and well-written characters. But they are also very different characters. Their personalities are distinct from one another and that leads to how they act.
Juliet is a very passionate, clever, and determined person. She wants to have her own life outside her parents' control, and she works to evade them. She marries Romeo out of her own volition. Her parents tried to marry her off to Paris, an explicitly older man who is a creep and jackass. Of course, she's going to go for the boy more likely her own age and treats her with respect. She is upset with her parents and decides to go against them in secret. Her choice to kill herself was not out of vapid lovey-doveyness but out of sheer desperation and grief because she could not both be happy and alive in Verona. If she lived, her parents would just marry her off to the next rich old guy. She killed herself as an escape, and it was neither her nor Romeo's fault, and we need to stop making retellings that vilify him. If there was anyone she was going to scream at, it would be her parents.
Desdemona is kind but not passive. Those are two different things. She does not lie down and accept her husband's new cruelty on her. She is upset and confused and worried. As is her right to be. But Othello is not a villain either. He was manipulated by Iago, and while that did not excuse his actions, he was not a heartless monster. And Desdemona knew that, so she kept trying to plead with him and tried to help him. She does not let her husband kill her and defends her relationship at every turn. First against her father and then when Othello is spiraling himself. She is calm and composed but still self-assured and outspoken. It is her nature to keep calm but firm. We see this in Act 1 with her perfect iambic pentameter and how she refutes her father. Even if she had gotten angry, it would have been at Iago if the truth was revealed earlier. Her response makes sense for her character because she KNOWS something is wrong with her husband and wants to help him. She is worried about him as much as she is hurt that he would act like this
And Lady Macbeth. I've seen takes where people claim that Macbeth "broke her first" and the tdlr of how that's not true is that: paranoia broke both of them. Both were predisposed to violence ("unsex me now" and "stars hide your fires"), but where Macbeth becomes more violent with paranoia, Lady Macbeth spirals into guilt. She DOES have a violent crashout, but that makes sense with who she is. But it isn't because Macbeth was the sole villain in her story. They were equals in the beginning, but Macbeth isn't the pinnacle of feminism. He ignores her after act 3 and the patriarchy/toxic masculinity is a prevalent theme in the play but they were both equally complex. They are both bad people and it's not her being "girlboss" or "pure evil", she is a morally complex character. You can't have Macbeth's murder of Duncan without her encouraging him and you can't have Lady Macbeth's remorse without Macbeth's paranoia that causes things to spiral when Banquo dies and the plan to crumble. They have opposite character arcs and Shakespeare did that for a reason; they were no longer on the same wavelength and their character arcs reflected that. The corruption of power hurt them more than anything
I like the idea of giving female characters more attention, but a lot of the time, it's just girlbossification that creates a WORSE reading of the works as a whole. These are 3 very well rounded characters and to oversimplify that to just "specific man bad" (and usually this take picks the WRONG MAN) (Paris or Iago apologists pmo) ruins how complex their own stories are
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