Macbeth’s Imagination as Fatal Flaw

Abstract

If the general notion of tragedy is still clear in our literary culture despite the challenges to its status as genre by some contemporary literary critics,1 the nature of what tragic flaws afflict some of our greatest tragic heroes and heroines is not always evident. Perhaps the most striking example of this is Oedipus in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King. Most people of my generation came out of school, college, or even university thinking that Oedipus’s fatal flaw was that he subconsciously wanted to have intercourse with his mother Jocasta and that he ignored it. The whole movement of the Freudian assumption that every man wants a sexual relationship with his mother and that every woman has corresponding designs on her father, created the oedipal Oedipus at the same time that it borrowed his name.2 The reality of Oedipus’s fatal flaw is much more realistically apparent in the fact that the gods predestined the course of his life to punish him for wanting to know as much as they did.3 Oedipus’s fatal flaw was his desire to be as knowledgeable as Apollo, and Apollo punished him by letting him discover how some purely circumstantial events that he had created by his arrogance, such as contesting the passage of a king—his unknown father—before him at a desert crossroad and killing him, contrived to create his personal horror. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, we can propose, is another such tragic figure with a misunderstood tragic flaw.