“The devil damn thee black”: Corporealizing Evil Through Blackness in Orson Welles’s “Voodoo” Macbeth

Abstract

This thesis investigates the role of embodiment in the 1936 adaptation “Voodoo” Macbeth. I suggest that director Orson Welles extracted interiority from the production’s characters to present a racialized performance of black bodies, black magic, primitivized blackness, and moral blackness. Welles externalized interiority and corporealized supernatural power in the black body, aided by theatrical aesthetics, to reconfigure evil as the production’s prevailing power and moral heart of darkness. I examine how Welles manipulated Macbeth’s psyche and, in doing so, I investigate the production’s treatment of the black body, voice, music, and the corporealization of evil within voodoo players. Before turning to embodiment as a framework, chapter one begins with a review of principal scholarship to provide a comprehensive landscape of the existing conversation. Scholars have analyzed “Voodoo” Macbeth through a variety of lenses including socio-religious, political, theatrical, and racial, although this thesis offers the first in-depth analysis that draws upon theories of embodiment. Chapter one explores how Welles corporealized evil within the production by using moral blackness, the black body, and voice to externalize and demonize black selfhood. Chapter two considers Welles’s use of theatrical aesthetics as technologizing Macbeth’s senses, thus fragmenting his character’s mind-body existence, and creating voodoo’s “evil” as a contagious “disease.” Chapter three analyzes violence, pain, and suffering as central forces in Welles’s racist ideological projections. In closing, this thesis shows that the demonization of voodoo rituals underlies the production’s harmful racist attitudes.