Purgation, Exorcism, and the Civilizing Process in Macbeth

This essay explores the national obsession with purgation in early modern English house-holding theory as it contributes to the building of national identity and the civilizing process. Macbeth provides a window on this obsession, for the imagery and conceptual presence of purgation, in both their natural and supernatural matrices, dominates the play. Via the cultural phenomena of possession and exorcism, the essay interrogates the binaries of the sacred and the profane in Macbeth, arguing that Macbeth's brutal actions are both fair and foul because they are inscribed within a near-fungible economy, flexible ideology, and a politics of the holy and unholy.