Supernatural in Shakespeare's Macbeth - Witches as Heroines

The Witches as the Heroines of Macbeth

Traditionally, the witches of Shakespeare's Macbeth have been treated as symbolic manifestations of the potential for evil. Many students and critics of Macbeth enjoy blaming the witches, along with Lady Macbeth, for Macbeth's downfall. Regardless, it may be argued that the witches are the heroines of the play.

One eminent modern literary critic, Terry Eagleton, has addressed the issue of the witches as heroines directly:

To any unprejudiced reader--which would seem to exclude Shakespeare himself, his contemporary audiences and almost all literary critics--it is surely clear that positive value in Macbeth lies with the three witches. The witches are the heroines of the piece, however little the play itself recognizes the fact, and however much the critics may have set out to defame them. (William Shakespeare, p. 2)

For Eagleton, the social reality of the witches matters. They are outcasts, much like feminists they live on the fringe of society in a female community, at odds with the male world of "civilization," which values military butchery. The fact that they are female and associated with the natural world beyond the aristocratic oppression in the castles indicates that they are excluded others. Their equality in a female community declares their opposition to the masculine power of the militaristic society. They have no direct power, but they have become expert at manipulating or appealing to the self-destructive contradictions of their military oppressors. They can see Macbeth's destruction as a victory of a sort: one more viciously individualistic, aggressive male oppressor has gone under.

This suggestion is not entirely serious (Eagleton observes that the play does not recognize the issue he is calling attention to), but it underscores a key point in the tragic experience of Macbeth, its connection to a willed repudiation of the deep mysterious heart of life, the place where sexuality and the unconscious hold sway. This aspect of life is commonly associated with and hence symbolized by women, for complex reasons which there is not time to go into here (but which would seem to be intimately bound up with women's sexuality and fertility, contacts with the irrational centres of life which men do not understand and commonly fear). In seeking to stamp his own willed vision of the future onto life, the tragic hero rejects a more direct acquaintance with or acceptance of life's mystery.