The modern Triple Goddess. Gender and Genderfluidity in Shakespeare’s "Macbeth" and Terry Pratchett’s "Wyrd Sisters"

Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2022 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,2, University of Heidelberg, language: English, abstract: Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters is one of the few Fantasy novels in which nothing is as the reader would suspect when picking it up for the first time. One of the many examples is the way the author mocks gender roles and plays with certain stereotypes that are often criticized in the genre. Set in the framework of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where witches have beards and women want to be ‘unsexed’, the witches in Wyrd Sisters show astonishingly few traits of character and behavior that would be seen as typically female or expectable in a witch. This essay will examine Wyrd Sisters and Macbeth from today’s angle, where gender and genderfluidity are a hotly discussed topic. By looking at the representation of manliness and womanhood, as well as the three witches as an old and a modern version of the Triple Goddess, I will show how William Shakespeare and Terry Pratchett treat the topic of gender and how genderfluidity is represented in their works. This will lead me to the conclusion on the question, in how far the representation of gender, genderfluidity and in line with it that of the triple goddess has evolved over the 300 years that lay in between the publication of the two works.