Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

The early modern period gave rise to a new concept of the conflicted individual, who struggles between reason and base, bodily instincts. This struggle is exemplified by Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which Prospero, who symbolizes human reason, defeats Caliban, a witch’s monstrous son who represents the unruly body. Internal conflict between reason and the body reflects early modern reality. Europe’s powerful elites struggled to dominate the disorderly masses who succumbed to bodily urges, like idleness. These lower bodies, however, were also integral to the generation of wealth. They were “the container of labor-power” (137), thus explaining the intelligentsia’s focus on the body.

Mechanical philosophy approaches the body as a machine that can be dissected, understood, and manipulated. The philosopher René Descartes’s perspective made the human body a useful “tool” of capitalism that is “divorced from the person” and “dehumanized” (139-40). The rise of rational thought dismantled the medieval idea of the “magical” body “that did not admit to any separation between matter and spirit” (141). According to this medieval perspective, work was not essential to bettering one’s existence. Early modern elites’ desire to destroy this “magical” thinking fueled witch-hunting because “the very existence of magical beliefs was a source of social insubordination” (143).