This is also used against the three witches in Wyrd Sisters, since they pose a threat to the theoretically male dominated monarchy, while Pratchett uses it as a tool of bringing humor into his work. Since the three are women, the concept stands against the patriarchal gender hierarchy, which “has been a mode of life and is considered ahistorical, eternal and endorsed by God” (Wood 2019:2). The concept of the Triple Goddess applies to Shakespeare’s Macbeth as well as to Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters, as both of them feature three witches that are more or less seen as a unified power and an image solidarity. She is “neither three separate goddesses nor a single amalgamanted individual” (Dell 2012: 21) and is mostly associated with different trinities, such as “the moon, earth, and underworld and the mother, maid, and crone” (ibid). The Triple GoddessĪnother name for Hecate, an ancient Greek goddess, is the Triple Goddess. 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. 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 essay will examine Wyrd Sisters and Macbeth from today’s angle, where gender and genderfluidity are a hotly discussed topic. 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. 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. 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. Gender and genderfluidity in Wyrd Sisters
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