Caliban and Miranda after empire: Postcolonial appropriations of "The Tempest"

• Main Author: Sparrow, Jennifer Ruth
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-1999
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; British and Irish literature; Bronte, Charlotte (1816-1855); Caribbean literature; Cesaire, Aime (1913-2008); Cliff, Michelle; Dario, Ruben (1867-1916); Defoe, Daniel (1660-1731); Fanon, Frantz (1925-1961); Lamming, George (1927- ); Literature; Modern literature; Naipaul, V S (Vidiadhar Surajprasad) (1932-2018); Rhys, Jean (1894-1979); Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012); Said, Edward; Shakespeare, William (1564-1616); Theater; Walcott, Derek
• ISBN: 0599582375; 9780599582378

This dissertation traces the trajectory of responses to The Tempest by postcolonial writers, arguing that male writers of the independence era who championed Caliban as a figure of colonial resistance reversed the manichean opposition of Prospero and Caliban, posited by D. O. Mannoni, but left the essential colonizer/colonized binary intact. More recently, female writers have attempted to displace, rather than merely invert, this opposition via the character of Miranda, recast as a Creole figure through whom divisions of race, class, and culture are mediated. Part I shows how Mannoni's “Prospero/Caliban Complex” was used to account for colonial uprisings in the 1940s and 1950s. The colonized's “dependence complex” and the colonizer's “inferiority complex” are illustrated through reference to Caliban and Prospero. Mannoni portrays Europe's rise to global hegemony and the subsequent loss of its colonies as a psychodrama played out between two different but complementary personality types: “Prosperos” who were predisposed to be colonizers and “Calibans” who had permitted themselves to be colonized. Part II examines the work of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and George Lamming, writers who took up Prospero's weapons in defense of Caliban. While these writers heralded Caliban as a figure of colonial resistance, they often privileged racial oppression over sexual oppression, reading Caliban's wish to “people the isle with Calibans” (via Miranda) as a reasonable means of usurping Prospero's power. The works analyzed in Part III write back not only to the racism and Eurocentrism that subtended the initial colonial venture, but also to the sexism found in the works of male writers who viewed Caliban as the victim of Prospero's will-to-power, and were often blind to the ways in which both daughter and slave are subject to Prospero's authority. In the works of Jean Rhys, Michelle Cliff, and Marina Warner, a new relationship is given precedence: one in which Miranda and Caliban ally themselves to escape what they come to recognize as their common subjugation to Prospero.