Images of Caliban in various versions of The Tempest
In The Tempest, Miranda is the most important female character who actually appears on stage, in contrast to Sycorax, who died before the story began and exists for the audience only through the description of Prospero. She plays an important role because he justifies his colonial rule of the island on the basis that she was a witch who worshipped the Devil and mated with demons, producing a monstrous and deformed offspring in the form of Caliban. In this respect, Prospero sees himself as a benevolent king and patriarch who has freed Ariel and the other spirits from the despotism of Sycorax, and uses their powers only for good or ‘white’ purposes. He also protects the virginity and purity of Miranda from the ‘savage’ lusts of Caliban, who he treats only as a subhuman slave and beast of burden. In return, Miranda is a dutiful and loyal daughter who upholds the colonial and patriarchal system and enters into the arranged marriage with Fernando that her father requires for political purposes. He intends for them to succeed him as ruler of Naples and Milan once they return to ‘civilization’ and she is “clearly in a subordinate relationship to her husband-to-be and to her father” (Goldberg 57). Shakespeare may not have intended that his play be taken as a metaphor for European colonialism in Asia, Africa and the Americas, which was still in its early stages at the time he wrote The Tempest. Certainly the charge that the ‘natives’ were cannibals like Caliban, and that they were pagans and devlip-worshippers, was commonly used to justify slavery, colonial rule and genocide. For this reason, Caliban has often been portrayed with African or Native American features, or simply monstrous in the way Prospero and Miranda described him, and whites in the Americas frequently accused nonwhites of harboring rape fantasies and uncontrolled sexual desires for ‘pure’ white women. In this sense, a feminist reading of The Tempest would have to consider the complex interactions and interrelationships between race, gender and patriarchy in a colonial context.
Miranda is the main female character in the play, and like Caliban she can be regarded as a subject of Prospero’s colonial and patriarchal system. They never ally with each other, however, and she remains thoroughly under his father’s control rather than joining Caliban’s comical rebellion. At one point, Prosepro even refers to Miranda as his “foot” or an extension of himself, and in the end she marries than man he selects for her (Goldberg 45). Miranda is property, just as he is, but Caliban attempts to rape her as a way of striking at his enemy and despoiling one of his ‘possessions’. For the oppressed colonial subject, rape was a “weapon of revenge against other men andan infringement on other men’s property” (Donaldson 17). Miranda’s view of Caliban is really no different from her father’s, in that she fears and hates him, and describes him and Sycorax as villains and monsters. In the end, she fully ‘aligns herself with the benefits and protection offered by the colonizing father and husband” (Donaldson 18). For Prospero, Caliban was simply an animal and part of Sycorax’s “litter” rather than a human being, and because he was “hag-born” and “not honored with a human shape” he was fit only to be a slave (Goldberg 46). He repeatedly refers to him as the bastard son of a witch who mated with a demon or perhaps even with the Devil and in a society that literally believed in witchcraft, such assignations were assumed to produce deformed on monstrous offspring.
In the original play, Sycorax and Caliban were not even natives of the island, but had arrived there from Algiers in North Africa, which would also have seen exotic and Oriental to a 17th Century English audience. This complicates the narrative about colonialism and conquest since she and Caliban were actually the “first colonizers” of an island that was otherwise uninhabited, except of course for Ariel and the spirit (Skura 297). Very little was written in English about black or Native Americans at the time, although the audiences would have pictured North African Moors as black or brown in color, as well as being practitioners of Satan worship and ‘black’ magic, combined with unusual cultural and sexual practices. On the other hand, Prosepero was a practitioner of ‘white’ magic, and did not use his powers to kill or physically harm his enemies. In fact, he freed them all in the end, including Ariel and the other spirits on the island, and did not even kill Caliban for his failed attempt at rebellion. As a powerful patriarchal figure, he uses his magical powers only for benevolent purposes, in contrast to the demonically evil Sycorax. Her female and foreign ‘black’ magic “ostensibly contrasts with that of Prospero in that it is remembered as viciously coercive” (Brown 61). For these reasons, Prospero was justified in overthrowing her evil kingdom and enslaving her son, as well as protecting Miranda from being ravished and despoiled by the ‘savage’.
WORKS CITED
Brown, Paul. “’This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge’” The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism”. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Eds). Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. Manchester University Press, 1994: 48-70.
Donaldson, Laura E. Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender and Empire Building. University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Goldberg, Jonathan. Tempest in the Caribbean. University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Greenblatt, Stephen et al. The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd Edition. Norton, 2008.
Skura, Meredith Anne. “Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest”. Gerald Graff and James Phelan (Eds). The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. NY: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008: 286-322.
