With every sunset, the clearly contoured world of daylight again falls into darkness; therefore, Christian mythology casts the night as the devil’s realm of influence, where his evil is at its most powerful. Although God created the world out of darkness, its light must incessantly be wrested from the night over and over again. The magical thinking of superstition, however, not only conceives of the night as a force that destroys the sun and daylight, with each twilight devouring the world only to release it again unharmed each dawn; the power struggle between day and night also decides whether goodness or moral darkness will prevail in the battle Satan fights for the souls of men. Yet nocturnal darkness itself contains a light that promises redemption, not least of all because the Virgin Mary gave birth to Christ during the night. She thus resembles the Nyx of antiquity, who, along with death and sleep, is the mother of light and the day. Indeed, Renaissance artists often represented the Holy Virgin as a queen of the night, standing on a crescent while crushing the satanic serpent with her foot. If our vision is impaired in darkness, the nocturnal side of psychic and moral life is nonetheless illuminated with a different light. The spiritual vision that night privileges can either culminate in demonic madness (a psychic nocturnality of sorts), or in divine epiphany. It can bring forth either ecstatic visions or horrific nightmares. Although the night facilitates clairvoyance and a spiritualistic contact with the dead, its darkness is often equated with the onslaught of harmful pagan forces; with demonic temptation, psychic confusion, and human fallibility. Yet it also serves as the site of divine wrath and punishment of the very transgressions demonic temptation produces.
Well into the nineteenth century, despite the invention and steady dissemination of artificial light, the night belonged to spirits and magic creatures that use the cover of darkness to carry out their mischief. As the topic of
Part III, gothic culture was particularly known for its tales of dead brides searching for their lost grooms, and mermaids hoping to enchant a clueless lover and abduct him to their magical realm. At night, witches brew magic potions or celebrate infernal rites with fellow demons, while Satan himself performs his subversion of divine law. Until the rooster’s first crow, vampires and werewolves can prey on their victims while evil spirits torment guilty sleepers, much as death prefers to make his appearance in various shapes at night. Superstition, however, also casts the night in a benign light. Precisely because Christian mythopoetics conceives of the achievement of moral perfection as a successful struggle against those malign forces that privilege the night as their scene of action, the time after dark can also harbor redemptive powers. Midnight is conducive to spiritual visions of future events; along with the Virgin Mary, saints also make nocturnal appearances, usually as dream visions, so as to announce their will. From the depths of a psychic night of abandonment in which they, like Milton’s Adam, have survived all the terrors of death, mystics achieve an inner illumination that will culminate in spiritual rebirth.
Thus, although Christian mythopoetics declares holy nights such as Christmas Eve and the Easter Vigils to be a time of revelation and salvation, by inversion it also imagines nights of calamity and harmful temptation. During Walpurgis Night, the devil and his consorts rule supreme, drawing those who have not protected themselves against their onslaught into damnation. The next chapters focus on a gothic sensibility of the night and illustrate how the struggle
between night and day transforms into a struggle between good and evil, carried out in the night. If the world after dark encourages an erotic desire for the pagan love goddess Venus and her lethal sisters, it also sustains the solace of a cathartic yearning for God. However, in the gothic inversion of Christian mythopoetics, the night proves to be a site of passage from a portentous to a redemptive psychic condition. In the struggle this calls forth between blindness and insight, moral failure and atonement, temptation is perceived as the work of the devil, whereas salvation is ascribed to God’s divine power. If the night can disperse the light of day and with its darkness cast shadows over the soul, then Christ, as Christianity’s spiritual light figure, represents a different sun. He brings an eternal light into the darkness of a psychic night, eliciting devotion from those who are willing to follow him. In gothic imagination, night thus emerges as the stage and scene for both the demonic danger of a fall from grace and a divine promise of redemption. In its imaging of the night, the magical thinking that the Enlightenment project seeks to banish into eternal darkness comes into its own again.
Indeed, the world plunged into darkness perfectly corresponds to a gothic thinking that, because it cannot thrive within diurnal law, must depart from this strict order so as to bring forth new knowledge. Lucifer, having fallen from heaven into hell’s darkness, gathers about him the other fallen angels; in assembling his demonic army, he seeks to take back the world and blemish God’s omnipotence. For those whom this demonic light bearer seduces, the night, in turn, becomes the arsenal of repressed, banished, and forbidden powers. As the following reading of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth illustrates, the night is both the scene of an erroneous belief that must be cleared up and a surmounting of evil. This early modern play is a precursor of the gothic sensibility that came to thrive at the acme of the Enlightenment project. My reading focuses on the way any agent of moral illumination (in Shakespeare’s play this is Macbeth’s adversary, Malcolm) must invariably imitate the tragically deluded rebel who uses the cover of darkness to forge the subversive plans with which he might challenge the dominant order. The night may be considered conservative in the sense that it harbors an earlier magical thinking that modernity, with its trust in the light of progress, seeks to surmount. Yet it is also revolutionary in the spirit of Romanticism, because the world destruction that its darkness performs whenever sunlight disappears is also the precondition for the creation of new worlds, whether benign or malign. Demons and conspirators are not the only ones who meet at night. Scientists seeking to create life out of dead matter such as Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, but also psychoanalysts such as Breuer and Freud. who seek to restore psychic health to those haunted by inner demons privilege the night because their experiments are illuminated by a different light than that of diurnal rational thinking.
Significant for the chapters that follow my discussion of the nocturnal battle between good and evil in Shakespeare’s Macbeth is the way that, at the acme of the Enlightenment, gothic texts embellish the uncanny aspect of the night. Here, the time between dusk and dawn is both a familiar place of security during which the most intimate truth of the self can come to be revealed, and a world turned strange by the recognition that, owing to human mortality, all earthly inhabitation is a fragile affair. The moral battles fought out in the homes of gothic texts such as Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman,” and Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” thrive on the anxieties that were successfully repressed during the day, but that burst out at night with renewed intensity. Indeed, if at night those phantoms appear that daytime’s rationality fears and forbids, those afflicted by this haunting find themselves irrevocably caught in a logic different from that of the daytime. Decisive about the gothic texts to be discussed, which German Romanticism pointedly calls Nachtstücke (night pieces), is that their recourse to magical thinking is of a psychoanalytic kind. The spirits against which the afflicted heroes and heroines can find no protection give shape both to an external demonic force and to their own fantasy. In each case, the nocturnal phantom haunts the home so as to convey an important message that, during the day, is either unperceived or screened out. The harm they cause ultimately proves to be both necessary and restorative. If, in gothic imagination, Satan and his consorts return from the world of early modern superstition as displayed on Shakespeare’s stage, the battle between good and evil they call forth around 1800 is not only fought for the soul of the possessed hero; it also takes place inside his mind.
In
Macbeth’s world of magical thinking, with which this discussion begins, the night serves as the point of intersection between earthly existence and the hereafter; between actual events and those realized in fantasy. In it, the dead can return to the living to give them prophetic knowledge of things still to come, whether just punishment or salvation. What the gothic texts, as well as Breuer’s case history of hysteria (discussed in subsequent chapters), retrieved from the image repertoire of magical thinking is an order of the world that, rather than banning spirits and ghosts to the world beyond, locates them in the night side of psychic life; here they are conceived of as uncanny doubles of the day. Reading a set of gothic texts alongside a psychoanalytic case history illustrates how the gothic night, a dangerous chronotopos, transforms a moral battle between damnation and salvation into a battle between psychic illness and its therapy. The disturbance of vision, associated with the absence of light at night, is negotiated as a disturbance of moral judgment.
Part II of this book, focusing on nocturnal journeys and dreamscapes, discussed the night as a stage and state of mind for a playful detachment from the realities of the day leading to flights of fantasy, dream work, and insomnia, which are scintillating even when the outcome is tragic.
Part III now examines the seduction by evil and its resistance, focusing on hallucinations experienced in the real as the external manifestations of the night side of the psyche. In the gothic night texts that revolve around psychic derangement, the time between dusk and dawn emerges as a war zone or frontline. It not only represents the inversion of the day, reflecting, contesting, and transforming its logic, but also serves as privileged site for a doubling of the day by the night, in which the unsolvable antagonism between good and evil can be staged as a perennial struggle for power over the soul.
Put another way, because the gothic night discovers the time after dark as the stage and state of mind in which hidden, forbidden, and repressed knowledge can be brought to light (whether harmful or redemptive), the night it performs not only doubles the day, but is itself doubled. As an uncanny chronotopos, at once strange and familiar, the night is not only divided, but also sustains its own negative dialectics. It is unsettling because it liberates the everyday from its ordinary securities. The void that comes to reveal itself at night, as Hegel puts it, can only be sublated when those who expose themselves to this dark abyss either transgress the boundary into an eternal night of madness or, by favoring the ordinary everyday, screen out once more the fascination for night’s darkness. The spirits who appear in the uncanniness of the night operate against the day’s reason in two senses. As phantoms of evil, emanating from a supernatural principle, they perform the nocturnal side of Christian faith. As symptoms of a return of repressed knowledge from the unconscious, they put the nocturnal side of the psyche on display. Gothic narratives thus imitate the cosmogenetic pattern discussed in the first chapter, given that they too play through the birth of a reclaimed morality. As in Schikaneder’s
The Magic Flute, such recuperation of psychic and moral order is staged as an act of vanquishing a powerful agent of seduction who has returned from the darkness of the past, from oblivion or exile.
Milton’s Satan serves as a paradigmatic figure for the interplay between moral and psychic demons at issue in the gothic sensibility discussed in this chapter. Given that he had initially been the brightest angel in heaven, he signals with his reappearance in the world the return from exile of a force that is utterly familiar to God’s divine principle. Furthermore, given that Satan has only become harmful because of his exile into eternal hell, a correspondence can be drawn to the manner in which psychic material, which was initially familiar, only becomes uncanny once it has been repressed and banished to the unconscious. Satan represents that aspect of divine power that embodies and enacts evil only by virtue of having fallen from grace. His demonic seduction has a divine origin, like the night itself, where he unfolds his force. It is his fall from heaven that first produces the difference between good and evil. Comparable to the way in which Sarastro needs the Queen of the Night to cement his enlightenment project, Christian mythology needs Satan and his children, so that in the struggle against them, good can ultimately prevail again. If, in gothic narratives, such as Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw,” the demonology of superstition is brought into dialogue with an exploration of the psyche, this conversation attests to the afterlife of a magical thinking at the heart of the Enlightenment. At issue is a twofold reversal, or return of a previous mode of thinking. The aesthetic pleasure that audiences take in tales of horror thrives on the reappearance of mythic figures from a bygone era that, having been repressed, again return. These figures, furthermore, are engaged in performing a perpetual transition between evil to good, much as nocturnal darkness and daylight, but also the morality of reason and a magical belief in spirits, are mutually implicated.
These gothic specters are manifestations of something that has returned, changing whomever they encounter. They put on display the way that each side of the duality good and evil, day and night, reason and superstition incessantly reverts back into its opposite. After all, Milton’s God creates the light bearer Lucifer so as to bring forth Jesus Christ as a second, redeeming figure of light amid the psychic darkness the fallen angel spreads once he has been cast out of heaven. The gothic narratives to be discussed in the following chapters articulate how transgressions of the Christian moral law have traditionally been understood as the work of the devil; as the effects of a seduction by demonic forces, corresponding to forbidden notions of ambition, thirst for knowledge, and lust for violence. Psychic nocturnality (in the sense of mental derangement) emerges as the work of inner demons. Within the ego, they assert a night side of the soul against the censorship exercised by diurnal reason. The contest between Christian salvation and eternal damnation, which in gothic texts is repeatedly fought out on the stage of a moral night, is echoed in the notion of psychic healing as an averting of the subject’s fall into eternal derangement. Although stories about the seduction by external or internal demons revolve around issues of guilt, they do not involve the issue of destiny. The law of fate that declares the death of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers to be a necessity instead finds its most prominent cultural survival in film noir, Hollywood’s most prominent imagining of the night, which is discussed in
Part IV.
In gothic culture, neither coincidence nor fortunate circumstances compel the hero or heroine to stray from the path of diurnal regularity. Instead, the transgressions these narratives relate involve a disposition toward demonic seduction that can be traced back to Adam and Eve’s original sin. Literary texts repeatedly invoke and embellish this primal scene of moral temptation so that the conditions of redemption can be refigured as a salvation from the night. If in the world of film noir, individual and collective corruption can be disclosed but never eradicated, gothic narratives always culminate in an act of vanquishing evil, in the course of which all embodiments of demonic powers are again driven back into the night, even if only temporarily. Such closure, of course, calls for a return of the repressed, even if only as an uncanny aftereffect in each new literary or cinematic text that once again addresses the devil’s work of madness and poetry. At issue in the gothic celebration of moral and psychic nocturnality is not the night of the classical Nyx from which light and the world emerge, but the night first created by God in Lucifer’s fall from grace. It is the image repertoire of all hauntings.
MACBETH’S BATTLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL
Because this chapter treats Shakespeare’s Macbeth as the point of departure for a set of gothic battles between good and evil, it is fruitful to return to his contemporary, Jakob Böhme, who in his treatise, Aurora, compares his grand spiritual illumination in the year 1600 to a bolt of lightning coming to him in a night of spiritual distress. In his mythic cosmogony, Böhme describes a world in which God contains both darkness and light within himself. In his writings about the great enigma of the world, figurations of evil make up a real power whose actual purpose, however, consists in revealing God’s splendor. Evil is just “an instrument of God, whereby He maketh His good conceivable that the good may be known. For if there were no evil, the good would not be known” (Ch. 71. Par. 17). Böhme’s doctrine recognizes darkness to be as much a principle of metaphysical formation as good precisely because both represent manifestations of God. In so doing, he draws on the medieval mysticism of Meister Eckhart, who in his response to the papal bull of John XXII explains, “In every work, even in an evil, I repeat, in one evil both according to punishment and guilt, God’s glory is revealed and shines forth in equal fashion” (78). Eckhart’s God is “one in all ways and according to every respect so that he cannot find any multiplicity in himself, either in intellect or in reality. Anyone who beholds the number two or beholds distinction does not behold God, for God is one, outside and beyond number and is not counted with anything. There follows: no distinction can exist or be understood in God himself” (79).
Böhme develops the dynamic dualism that Milton has recourse to in his epic
Paradise Lost, but that will also experience a particularly rich cultural revival in gothic culture. His mystical cosmogony is based on a mutual implication of light and darkness. In Milton’s epic we find this interrelation manifested in the figure of Lucifer who, upon returning to the Garden of Eden, elicits the capacity for sin contained as a potential in all human beings. He not only creates the precondition for psychic suffering and divine punishment, but also for divine mercy in the face of human guilt. Böhme’s insistence on acknowledging the mutual implication between evil and all questions of redemption, thus informs the cultural background for my reading of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth. Contemporaneous with Böhme’s mystical writings, the tragedy brings the nocturnal battle between good and evil into focus at a historical moment, in which modern subjectivity found itself entering into a state of moral and psychic confusion and was compelled to experience the night side of the soul before salvation could be found. By rewriting the biblical story of the fall of an angelic warrior, this tragedy about the moral and psychic delusions of a valiant war hero depicts a shift from the magic thinking of the medieval period into a thinking dominated by the laws of Renaissance rationality. Like Satan in hell, one might argue, Macbeth uses the darkness of a night forsaken by God to gather together his power for evil and unleash a wave of destruction that will bring him eternal damnation. In so doing, he not only proves that even the most righteous and valiant warrior can be seduced by evil; his murder of King Duncan, imitating Satan’s rebellion against his divine sovereign, also results in a new, centralized form of kingship. At the end of Macbeth’s reign of terror, political power will once again be in the hands of the son of the murdered king, even while his story functions as the foundational myth of the Stuart dynasty. If fateful temptation brings Macbeth to perform the nocturnal side of a warrior’s political ambition, his uncurbed violence emerges as an articulation of evil that is necessary if the forces of good are to contest it. What relation, one might thus ask, do the various players in this battle between good and evil have toward the night as the stage and state of mind for moral transgressions? Who is to be saved and who must be damned? To whom will light appear in the darkness and what does the goodness look like that will ultimately prevail?
In
Macbeth’s opening dialogue, the third witch warns her weird sisters that they will meet before the setting of sun; indeed, they will appear before the two thanes, Macbeth and Banquo, shortly before dusk, after the decisive battle in which the Norwegians have been driven back and the faithless traitor, the Thane of Cawdor, has been deposed. The appearance of the three bearded women not only brings on the night, but also calls forth a vision. They address Macbeth with prophetic greetings as “Thane of Cawdor” and future king before they dissolve into the darkness of twilight. Initially, Banquo is uncertain whether or not their appearance should be taken for the incursion of psychic confusion. But the moment the king’s messenger confirms the first part of the witches’ prophecy by calling Macbeth Thane of Cawdor, Banquo asks “can the devil speak true” (1.3.105). A prophecy that proves true is thus not only immediately taken to be the work of the devil and its speakers considered demonic helpers; the fortuitous turn of events they have foreseen is also immediately transcoded into an instance of danger. Banquo continues by claiming, “often times to win us to our harm / The instruments of darkness tell us truths, / Win us with honest trifles to betray’s / In deepest consequence” (1.3.122–124). Macbeth himself is far more uncertain about how to understand “this supernatural soliciting” (1.3.129). As he explains to himself, it cannot be ill, given that the weird sisters have foreseen his success. Yet their spectral talk can also not be good, because their interpellation has called forth in him a “horrid image” (1.3.134).
They had not prophesied regicide and yet, before night has actually fallen, they have evoked precisely this dark fantasy in his imagination. The witches thus correspond to the nocturnal spirit the Thane has been carrying within himself as a potentiality all along. As we discover later, they had not been commanded to act as they do and thus they represent a contingent principle of seduction, comparable to Robin in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They call forth in the two thanes precisely the relation to the power of their king that has always been dormant in them. The fact that the witches’ temptation only prompts repulsion from Banquo allows us to recognize that evil, whose alleged representatives they are, is engendered only once Macbeth responds to their vague intimations with the precise fantasy of killing the king, so as to become king himself. Even though, up to this point he had never been aware of these dark thoughts, the three weird sisters have allowed the image of murder to arise, which, even though it is pure imagination nevertheless “shakes so my single state of man that function / Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is / But what is not” (1.3.139). Macbeth’s intact self-image is shattered. He has become a stranger to himself. His agency has been overwhelmed by spectral speculation. Even before he begins to plan the murder of his king, let alone enact this regicide, the prophetic interpellation of the witches has established in him the notion that the only certainty that remains in this uncertainty is a sense of nothingness.
A blacking out of the spirit is externalized. The stage, on which Shakespeare’s tragic hero moves, corresponds more and more to his psychic condition. The figures he encounters transform into players in the enactment of his terrible imagination. As soon as he discovers that Duncan has named his son Malcolm the Prince of Cumberland, Macbeth forges a correspondence between the world he inhabits and his darkened soul, turning the former into a stage for the performance of his violent ambition. He begs the stars to hide themselves: “Let not light see my black and deep desires; / The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be / Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see” (1.4.52). In the same manner, his lady gives free reign to her dark imaginings once she has read the letter in which Macbeth relates to her what the three weird sisters told him. She, too, translates the future they only intimated into a concrete vision of the “fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements” (1.5.37). If her husband turned to the stars for help, she calls upon the lethal spirits of the night, and asks them: “Make thick my blood, / Stop up th’access and passage to remorse, / That no compunctious visitings of nature / Shake my fell purpose nor keep peace between / Th’effect and it” (1.5.43–45). These nocturnal creatures are to transform her body into an instrument of pitiless violence. They are to darken all human kindness, indeed to take her “milk for gall” (1.5.46).
Only after having addressed them does she directly apostrophize the night, hoping that her demonic darkness might hide the horrible deed she hopes to perform from others. “Pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,” she asks, “That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, / Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark / To cry, ‘Hold, hold!’” (1.5.49–52). In her imagining of the murder, it is not only she herself who holds the dagger; she is also equivalent to the sightless substances she explicitly addresses as the agents of the moon goddess Hecate, meant to assure God’s absence from the scene of the crime. In contrast to her husband, however, she does not become strange to herself after acknowledging her murderous desire. Rather, she experiences the nocturnal side of her ambition as the revelation of her true being. “You shall put / This night’s great business into my dispatch,” she explains to Macbeth, “Which shall to all our nights and days to come / Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom” (1.5.65–68). Whereas Macbeth continues to wrestle with his unconscious, fearing that he will be haunted by his “bloody instructions” (1.7.9) and for this reason wishes to break off his murder plans, Lady Macbeth insists on turning their dangerous desire into an act that cannot be undone. Indeed, once the nocturnal side of her soul has revealed itself to her in an uncensored form, she abandons herself unconditionally to a transgression of the law of hospitality.
The night in which King Duncan fatefully enters her castle emerges as a chronotopos of liminality, in which a demonic scenario is enacted that will draw the entire world into its dangerous force field. Nevertheless, one can distinguish three different attitudes toward the temptation of evil that unfolds itself. Banquo, still awake at midnight, calls upon his guardian angel to protect him against all external and internal spirits: “merciful powers, / Restrain in me cursèd thoughts nature / Gives way to in repose” (2.1.7). Macbeth, who is also vigilant that night, gives himself up to his phantasmagoria and sees before him a bloodied dagger, leading him to the murder scene. Even though he knows this illusion has sprung from his own distraught mind, he reads the nocturnal world under the sign of a portentous magic, assuring himself, “Witchcraft celebrates / Pale Hecate’s offerings, and withered murder / … towards his design / Moves like a ghost” (2.1.51–56). He cannot only not resist the sacrifice that the moon goddess allegedly requires of him, but in giving in to her power, he also compares himself to a ghost. It is only Lady Macbeth who does not feel threatened by the night. She doesn’t need to protect herself against its magic, nor is she spurred on by it. It was she who declared this night to be the scene of death, not only by arranging everything so that her husband’s murderous act would succeed, but also by talking him out of all his doubts and uncertainties.
After killing his king, Macbeth immediately hears a spectral voice, warning him: “Sleep no more, Macbeth does murder sleep” (2.2.34). One might read this voice as an incorporation of the guilt he can only suppress with difficulty. His lady, in turn, initially seems protected against all spectral agents, given that she acts under the auspices of a pure will to power, beyond good and evil. She resolutely returns to the scene of crime with the daggers Macbeth had been carrying, smears blood on them and places them next to the murdered servants, so as to make them seem the perpetrators of the crime. The night cannot harm her mind because she has come to fully recognize herself in her own death drive. Macbeth, however, seeks to ban all thoughts of his terrible deed in the darkness of his soul. At the crack of dawn, he hears the pounding on the castle gates. He explains to his wife, who warns him that he must not lose himself in his thoughts, that he would rather lose his consciousness completely than cede to an acknowledgment of the act he has committed: “to know my deed ‘twere best not know myself” (2.2.71). Once the king’s corpse has been discovered, the day not only turns into night. The same thane who brought Macbeth the news of his promotion now notes the strange change in the appearance of the day: “by th’ clock ‘tis day, / And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp. / Is’t night’s predominance or the day’s shame / That darkness does the face of earth entomb / When living light should kiss it?” (2.4.6–9).
Once the day, like Macbeth’s consciousness, has been cloaked in darkness, there can be no more peace at night. The new king of Scotland complains to his wife that the prophetic spectral voices have once again foretold the truth. At night he is plagued by terrible dreams, forcing him to remain in a state of restless vigilance. Thane Lennox reports that a collective insomnia has befallen Scotland. As long as the demonic Macbeth is in power, he claims, no one can sleep quietly. This nocturnal day, which has submerged the entire world into moral darkness, emerges as a chronotopos in which phantoms are able to appear. They render the home of the murderous couple uncanny by bringing to light what their clandestine behavior seeks to preserve in the dark. The blurring of the boundary between the living and the dead that set in with the appearance of the three weird sisters in the first act (as though they were the collateral damage of the war) now results in the appearance of several different types of spirits. These enact a nocturnal battle between good and evil fought for the salvation of Scotland and the destruction of Macbeth. The ghost of the murdered Banquo, whom Macbeth alone can see, embodies another murder that the new king seeks to obliterate from his consciousness, much like the murder of King Duncan. Shortly before his accomplices killed his former friend, he notes, “Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, / While night’s black agents to their preys do rouse” (3.2.53–54). Not even his wife is privy to his secret pact with these agents of the night.
By revealing to Macbeth that he cannot successfully repress the knowledge of his guilt, Banquo not only represents a light in the darkness that has befallen the world since Macbeth came to power; he also represents a counter-figure to the new king. He allows goodness to be recognized precisely in contrast to evil. Like the supernatural appearance of the three sisters, his return to the living results in Macbeth’s sense of self-alienation. “You make me strange / Even to the disposition that I owe” (3.4.112–113) Macbeth explains, once Banquo’s ghost disappears. Yet as Lady Macbeth correctly surmised, this spectral appearance is indeed “the very painting of your fear, this is the air-drawn dagger” (3.4.60–61). Although night’s black agents were able to destroy Banquo, who successfully resisted the temptation of evil, they were not able to prevent his return from the dead. This suggests that nothing can prevent Macbeth from being confronted with knowledge he would like to avoid but simply cannot
fail to know. He is damned in his battle against goodness. His heart is guilty, and his fidelity stained with disgrace. His only way out of the night is to ask for mercy.
Shortly before sunrise, Hecate, goddess of the moon and magic, finally intervenes into this spectral play. She not only accuses the three sisters of acting on their own accord, but also faults them with choosing a wayward man as the object of their magic, who “Loves for his own ends, not for you” (3.5.12–13). She serves a demonic power, making sure that Macbeth will feel no remorse and instead fully succumb to his psychic nocturnality. The magic potion she brews for him is meant to awaken spirits that will drive him further in his delusional ambition: “He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear / His hopes ‘bove wisdom, grace, and fear” (3.5.30–31). Indeed, three specters will emerge from the cauldron of the “secret, black and midnight hags” (4.1.63), whom Macbeth seeks the next morning to find out what the future holds for him. The first of these, an armed head, warns him of the Thane Macduff, thus giving a name to a fear of which Macbeth is already cognizant. The second apparition, a bloody child, proclaims, “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth” (4.1.96–97). Finally, the third, a crowned child with a tree under his arm, offers a description of his demise: He will be vanquished only when the Great Birnam Wood comes to his castle.
These apparitions are significant in that they point to an ambivalence inherent in Hecate’s appearance. Precisely because the moon goddess has committed herself to Macbeth’s damnation, she functions as a figure who reveals light in the heart of darkness. After all, the third apparition that emanates from her cauldron proclaims the salvation of Scotland. The last spectral image Macbeth sees in this cauldron shows him a bloody Banquo, posing as the father of a long line of future kings. The ambivalence Hecate thus brings into play can be formulated as follows: She reveals to the delusional king the light at the end of his night; however, not before engendering in him by virtue of her magic powers precisely the dark arrogance of which she claims, “security / Is mortals’ chiefest enemy” (3.5.33–34). She knows that Macbeth, unhealthily sure of himself, will blindly embrace his own destruction, even though—or rather precisely because—he knows that his own family has no future. After his second encounter with the witches, he will no longer heed his internal demons; he will no longer pay attention to his doubt and his anxiety. Instead, he will simply act upon all violent imaginings. He will withdraw from his wife, who with her words sought to convince him of the necessity of their mutual act of murder. Abandoned by all internal and external spirits, Macbeth transforms into a pure instrument of destruction.
The fact that, in the final act, Lady Macbeth finds herself haunted by ghosts need not necessarily be taken for a theatrical inconsistency. Instead, one might read the play Macbeth as the nightmare vision that unfolds before her inner eye, while she wanders at night through the dark corridors of her castle. If Macbeth fulfils his demonic nocturnality by succumbing to an all-encompassing drive for blind destruction, her psychic nocturnality contains a moment of revelation. As her doctor and her servant note, “her eyes are open / … but their sense are shut (5.1.21–22). The spectral figures that emerge before her inner eye do not lead her to expect murder. Instead, this inner gaze is directed toward the consequences of giving in to a fatal temptation. If her husband imagined himself led to the first murder scene by a ghostly bloodied dagger, she sees the blood stains on her hand that she cannot wash away as a spectral sign pointing to the fact that she cannot avoid taking responsibility for her actions. As on the night of the murder, she now soberly utters, “what’s done can’t be undone” (5.1.57–58). Lady Macbeth is thus positioned on the one hand between Banquo, who represents fidelity toward a king ordained by God, and Hecate on the other, who foresees Duncan’s triumph over evil even while making sure that his opponent Macbeth will fall. If, at the beginning of the play, her pure will to power served to draw the forces of the night unto herself, the revelation she receives during her nocturnal sleep walking in the final act unfolds the naked recognition of her guilt. This acknowledgment lies beyond all moral notions of good and evil. Like the magic creatures of the night, whose witchcraft she herself pursued, she disappears from the play at this point. It is as if her figure dissolved into thin air, whereas Macbeth remains alone in his castle and indulges in a final, prolonged night of a pure death drive.
Macbeth rids himself of all spirits evoking in him doubt, memory, or fear, even while he still holds their prophecies to be true. In his theatricalization of the world, he has arrived at the position of pure nothingness: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (5.5.23–27). The point Shakespeare’s tragedy makes is that if all nocturnal theatricalization of the world ultimately veers toward pure nothingness, then it is sustained by precisely those phantasmagoria that emerge from nothingness, even while they also serve as a protection from it. As long as the prophecies do not come to pass, Macbeth believes in his invincibility. The moment they prove to be true, he is deprived of his demonic spirits. Macbeth is killed at dusk by Macduff who, having at birth been torn from his mother’s womb, is indeed “not of woman born.”
Although Lady Macbeth willingly and consciously accepts the temptation of a demonic power only to perform the ineffaceability of her guilt during her nocturnal sleep walking, her husband gives himself up to his murderous madness completely. Malcolm, in turn, represents the figure of the sovereign who can carry light into political darkness precisely because he knows about the nocturnal side of his ambition. In his discussion with Macduff, he also focuses on the mutual implication between good and evil: “Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell” (4.3.23–24), he explains, as if Lucifer’s fall merely confirmed the glory of God’s creatures. He is concerned with acknowledging his own fallibility. He reminds his friend that even the tyrant Macbeth was once honest, using this as a way to speak about his own potential for sinning. His avarice, he claims, knows no bounds. To the astonished Macduff he asserts: “had I power I should / Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell, / Uproar the universal peace, confound / All unity on earth” (4.3.98–101). In contrast to Macbeth, who found he was a stranger to himself once he began to listen to his dark murder fantasies, Malcolm’s discussion of the black scruples residing in his soul ultimately serves to prove his moral strength. Devilish Macbeth, he explains, “By many of these trains hath sought to win me / Into his power” (4.3.119–120). However, God above has intervened in the design of a black Malcolm, and brought the son of Duncan “to abjure / The taints and blames I laid on myself / For strangers to my nature” (4.3.124–125).
Even though Malcolm thus proves to be guiltless, and for the first time speaks falsely when he paints himself as one who has been tempted to do evil, in so doing he addresses the significant difference between himself and Macbeth. He does not deny his internal demons. Rather, he insists on treating them as foreign bodies inhabiting his psyche. If one acknowledges the fact that dark fantasies reside in one’s soul, then as his argument goes, one has the fortitude to resist them. Only the confession that one is capable of doing evil assures the victory of moral goodness. Claiming that “The night is long that never finds the day” (4.3.242), Malcolm returns with his army from England. In Scotland he intends to introduce a new day and change a world that, owing to Macbeth’s destructive fury, is now ruled solely by night.
The political solution, which requires the execution of the rebellious warrior, encodes the resolution of this power conflict as a salvation from evil. If Malcolm’s decisive character trait is not giving in to the temptation of dark fantasies he carries within, the night side of politics is neither screened out nor repressed. Instead, it is accepted as part of the very system of sovereign power that triumphs in the final battle with Macbeth. With the severed head of the rebel in his hand, Macduff greets his new sovereign in the same manner that the three weird sisters once greeted Macbeth: “Hail, King, for so thou art” (5.11.20). The new day that this battle makes possible also determines a new political order. To his fellow warriors Malcolm declares, “My thanes and kinsmen, / Henceforth be earls, the first that ever Scotland / In such an honour named” (5.11.28–31). King Duncan’s feudal rule, with its unreliable alliances, was dissolved in Macbeth’s night, like the spectral creatures that called upon him to rebel. Macbeth’s political night of evil has served as the foundation for a new form of sovereign rule under the auspices of a unified body politic.
