Calibanic Postcoloniality

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Part I Calibanic Postcoloniality I can imagine The Tempest without Ferdinand but not without Caliban. —Russell Hoban, The Moment under the Moment (1992) he well-known American writer and illustrator Russell Hoban ar- gues about his two-act libretto, “Some Episodes in the History of Miranda and Caliban,” that “Shakespeare didn’t invent Caliban; T 1 Caliban invented Shakespeare....” What he means is that Caliban, like the invention of the “primitive,” preceded and inspired Shakespeare; it was “a necessary idea.” As decolonization proved an absolute necessity by the 1960s, African and Caribbean postcolonial writers as well as European and Latin American dissenting intellectuals came to use the counter-hegemonic idea of Caliban in order to destabilize colonial sets of ideas and call for the deprivileging of Prospero-qua-colonizer. Despite the indignant reluctance of some to “parody the imperialists,” it became necessary to wrest from the Shake- speare canon an emblem of postcoloniality and to rewrite The Tempest from Caliban’s perspective. The corollary to the rise of Caliban, both in its insurrectional and ithy- phallic dimension, is inevitably the deprivileging of the Prospero-figure, which occurred as early as the late nineteenth century, most notably with Renan, Rodó, and Guéhenno. As colonized countries struggled for inde- pendence in the 1950s and 1960s, the Prospero-figure got pathologized with D. O. Mannoni, D. G. James, and Philip Mason; and then ultimately blud- geoned by the emergent nationalism of Sithole, Ngugi, Césaire, Fanon, and Memmi. Their texts outline what I call a Calibanic genealogy ranging from Europe to Africa and Latin America to the Caribbean. 10 Tempests after Shakespeare The rise of Caliban took place in Caribbean literature, with Martiniquan Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête (1969) and Barbadian George Lamming’s Water with Berries (1971). While Edward Kamau Brathwaite, also from Barbados, augurs the move away from the Caliban-Prospero-Ariel troika dear to Cé- saire by retrieving the Sycorax-figure, Guyanese-born David Dabydeen dwells on interracial love between Caliban and Miranda and on the pleasures of permanent exile in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, Caliban and Pros- pero engage in epiphanic metamorphoses in Australia, the Pacific Islands, and Québec..

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The University of Akron IdeaExchange@UAkron Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Literary Magazines Conference November 2014 Extremes of Gender and Power: Sycorax’s Absence in Shakespeare’s The eT mpest Brittney Blystone Northern Kentucky University, [email protected] Please take a moment to share how this work helps you through this survey. Your feedback will be important as we plan further development of our repository. Follow this and additional works at: http://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/spovsc Part of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Blystone, Brittney (2012) "Extremes of Gender and Power: Sycorax’s Absence in Shakespeare’s The eT mpest," Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference: Vol. 5 , Article 6. Available at: http://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/spovsc/vol5/iss2012/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Literary Magazines at IdeaExchange@UAkron, the institutional repository of The nivU ersity of Akron in Akron, Ohio, USA. It has been accepted for inclusion in Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference by an authorized administrator of IdeaExchange@UAkron. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Extremes of Gender and Power: Sycorax’s Absence in Shakespeare’s The Tempest Brittney Blystone, Northern Kentucky University n William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero and Sycorax are extreme ends in the spectrums of power and gender. The I patriarchy that Prospero enforces is not an independent or coherent system; rather, it reacts to its opposite, which Sycorax symbolizes.
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Sycorax's Absence in Shakespeare's the Tempest
Extremes of Gender and Power: Sycorax’s Absence in Shakespeare’s The Tempest Brittney Blystone, Northern Kentucky University n William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero and Sycorax are extreme ends in the spectrums of power and gender. The I patriarchy that Prospero enforces is not an independent or coherent system; rather, it reacts to its opposite, which Sycorax symbolizes. Although some dismiss Sycorax as “long dead by the time the play’s events take place” (Thompson 339), she still shapes the characters’ perceptions of power and gender. While one can analyze male characters directly by their actions on stage, one can analyze Sycorax only by her influence on these characters. With Sycorax absent, Prospero envisions her as his female opposite. Through Prospero, Sycorax symbolizes everything that may question patriarchy. Sycorax exists only in male characters’ accounts; however, Sycorax influences the men’s perception of power because she is absent. In The Tempest, the only woman on stage is Miranda, who is both assaulted and honored for her virginity. The lack of women on stage leads Ann Thompson to wonder, “what feminist criticism can do in the face of a male-authored canonical text [The Tempest] which seems to exclude women to this extent" (339). Women are so utterly missing on stage that Stephen Orgel calls his essay “Prospero’s Wife” merely a “consideration” of “related moments and issues” (1). According to Orgel, The Tempest provides enough evidence about the women in the play for us to speculate about them, but not enough for us to make any justified conclusions or arguments.
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