Miranda and Sycorax on the “Eve” of Postpatriarchy
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Part II Miranda and Sycorax on the “Eve” of Postpatriarchy Every major character, except Miranda, either wishes, plots or claims to be a “king.” —Robert Wiltenburg, “The ‘Aeneid’ in ‘The Tempest’” hile Caliban has become a readily recognizable symbol for the postcolonial subject and the inevitable “Other” in his dealings with a Prospero no longer firmly in control, Miranda has been W 1 backgrounded to the point of being “a ruin of representation.” The tradi- tional exteriority of women to representation has led critics to reflect on an apparent crossing of the feminist critique of patriarchy and the postmod- ernist critique of representation and, one might add, the postcolonial re- trieval of discourses under erasure. In this chapter, I aim to show not so much how (post-)feminism,2 as a dismantling of authority, overlaps with the postmodern and the postcolonial, as how the Miranda-figure (and the Syco- rax-figure) can body forth an alternative to patriarchy. Admittedly, “patri- archy” has been thought to be ethnocentric in its application or even emptied of all explanatory power3 but I leave it to the texts, whether Mi- randa- or Sycorax-oriented, to voice such nuances. The split between Sycorax and Miranda in The Tempest corresponds to that between the whore and the virgin, the dark libidinous hag illegitimately litter- ing her brood on the island and the white, obedient Miranda, whose virginity is crucial to Prospero’s future political plans. The idea of Miranda as an essen- tial royal bargaining chip in cementing a political alliance between Prospero 104 Tempests after Shakespeare and Alonso could be extended to a “commodified physical body... in a white, masculine, western political and sexual economy....”4 By all accounts, Miranda’s body is a battlefield where men’s wars have been waged. Miranda is thus a rather bland and conventional character, yet another figure of female self-effacement and, therefore, a most unlikely model for female empower- ment. But Miranda entails wonder. In the Latin sense, she is strange and won- derful but in the Spanish meaning, she is “the seeing one,” an active agent of her own vision. Also, Miranda’s virginity has an appeal for women writers in that women’s virginity referred less to their state of sexual experience than to their self-reliance. Being both an object of wonder and a desiring subject, Mi- randa is both a pre-feminist and a “postpatriarcal” icon. As alternatives to patriarchy, the Miranda- and Sycorax-figures embody what we will loosely call “postpatriarchy” not so much in the sense of after as of beyond patriarchy. If patriarchy is, in the words of Adrienne Rich, “a fa- milial-social, ideological, political system in which men... determine what part women shall or shall not play,”5 postpatriarchy then is a step beyond this system of interrelated social structures, which allow the oppression of women by men through institutions and texts. As she engages with the power of the fathers, the Miranda-figure finds herself uncomfortably torn between two types of allegiance or alignment: with Prospero, with whom she is occasionally complicit of oppressive power; and with Caliban, with whom she may contemplate “a marriage of the two margins,”6 defiantly imbricating gender and race. Miranda’s wrestling with the Prospero- and Caliban-figures is an affirmation of “oth- erness,” which helps reformulate the issues of agency, personal autonomy, and self-determination..