SOURCE: “The Miranda Trap: Sexism and Racism in Shakespeare's Tempest,” in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, edited by Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, University of Illinois Press, 1980, pp. 285-94.

[In the following essay, Leininger discusses the oppression of women and non-whites—personified in the characters of Miranda and Caliban, respectively—in The Tempest.]

Shakespeare's Tempest was first performed before King James I at Whitehall in November of 1611. It was presented a second time at the court of King James early in 1613, as part of the marriage festivities of James's daughter Elizabeth, who, at the age of sixteen, was being married to Frederick the Elector Palatine. The marriage masque within The Tempest may have been added for this occasion. In any case, the Goddess Ceres' promise of a life untouched by winter (“Spring come to you at the farthest / In the very end of harvest!” IV.i.114-15)¹ and all the riches the earth can provide (“Earth's increase, foison plenty”) was offered to the living royal couple as well as to Ferdinand and Miranda.

Elizabeth had fallen dutifully in love with the bridegroom her father had chosen for her, the youthful ruler of the rich and fertile Rhineland and the leading Protestant prince of central Europe. Within seven years Frederick was to become “Frederick the Winter King” and “The Luckless Elector,” but in 1613 he was still the living counterpart of Ferdinand in The Tempest, even as Elizabeth was the counterpart of Miranda. Like Miranda, Elizabeth was beautiful, loving, chaste, and obedient. She believed her father to be incapable of error, in this sharing James's opinion of himself. Miranda in the play is “admired Miranda,” “perfect,” “peerless,” one who “outstrips all praise”; Elizabeth was praised as “the eclipse and glory of her kind,” a rose among violets.²

What was the remainder of her life to be like? Elizabeth, this flesh-and-blood Miranda, might have found it difficult to agree that “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep” (IV.i.156-58). The future held thirteen children for her, and forty years as a landless exile. Her beloved Frederick died of the plague at the age of thirty-six, a plague spreading through battle camps and besieged cities in a Europe devastated by a war which appeared endless—the Thirty Years War, in which whole armies in transit disappeared through starvation and pestilence. The immediate cause of this disastrous war had been Frederick and Elizabeth's foolhardy acceptance of the disputed throne of Bohemia. Politically inept, committed to a belief in hierarchical order and Neoplatonic courtliness, the new king and queen failed to engage the loyalty of the Bohemians or to prepare adequately for the inevitable attack by the previously deposed king.

While the happiness of the young lovers in The Tempest depended upon their obedience to Miranda's father, the repeated political and military failures of Elizabeth and Frederick were exacerbated by their dependence upon the shifting promises of King James. Elizabeth experienced further tragedy when two of her sons drowned, the eldest at the age of fifteen in an accident connected with spoils from the New World, the fourth son in a tempest while privateering in the New World. There was no Prospero-figure to restore them to life magically.

The Princess Elizabeth, watching The Tempest in 1613, was incapable of responding to clues which might have warned her that being Miranda might prove no unmixed blessing: that even though Miranda occupies a place next to Prospero in the play's hierarchy and appears to enjoy all of the benefits which Caliban, at the base of that hierarchy, is denied, she herself might prove a victim of the play's hierarchical values. Elizabeth would be justified in seeing Miranda as the royal offspring of a ducal father, as incomparably beautiful (her external beauty mirroring her inward virtue, in keeping with Neoplatonic idealism), as lovingly educated and gratefully responsive to that education, as chaste (her chastity symbolic of all human virtue), obedient and, by the end of the play, rewarded with an ideal husband and the inheritance of two dukedoms. Caliban, at the opposite pole, is presented as the reviled offspring of a witch and the Devil, as physically ugly (his ugly exterior mirroring his depraved inner nature), as racially vile, intrinsically uneducable, uncontrollably lustful (a symbol of all vice), rebellious, and, being defined as a slave by nature, as justly enslaved.

Modern readers have become more attentive than Elizabeth could have been in 1613 to clues such as Prospero's address to Miranda, “What! I say, / My foot my tutor?” (I.ii.471-72). The crucial line is spoken near the end of the scene which begins with Prospero's and Ariel's delighted revelation that the tempest was raised through Prospero's magic powers and then continues with the demonstration of Prospero's ability to subjugate the spirit Ariel, the native Caliban, and finally the mourning Prince Ferdinand to his will. Miranda's concern is engaged when Prospero accuses Ferdinand of being a spy, a traitor and usurper; Prospero threatens to manacle Ferdinand's head and feet together and to force him to drink salt water. When Ferdinand raises his sword to resist Prospero's threats, Prospero magically deprives him of all strength. Miranda, alarmed, cries,

O dear father,
Make not too rash a trial of him, for
He’s gentle, and not fearful.

(I.ii.469-71)

Prospero's response is,

What! I say,
My foot my tutor?

(I.ii.471-72)

Miranda is given to understand that she is the foot in the family organization of which Prospero is the head. Hers not to reason why, hers but to follow directions: indeed, what kind of a body would one have (Prospero, or the play, asks) if one's foot could think for itself, could go wherever it pleased, independent of the head?

Now it is true that Prospero is acting out a role which he knows to be unjust, in order to cement the young couple's love by placing obstacles in their way. Miranda, however, has no way of knowing this. Prospero has established the principle that stands whether a father's action be just or unjust: the daughter must submit to his demand for absolute unthinking obedience.

But might not being a “foot” to another's “head” prove advantageous, provided that the “head” is an all-powerful godlike father who educates and protects his beloved daughter? Some ambiguous answers are suggested by the play, particularly in the triangular relationship of Prospero, Miranda, and Caliban.

When Prospero says to Miranda,

We’ll visit Caliban my slave, who never
Yields us kind answer,

Miranda's response is,

’Tis a villain, sir,
I do not love to look on.

(I.ii.310-12)

Miranda fears Caliban, and she has reason to fear him. The play permits either of two interpretations to explain the threat which Caliban poses. His hostility may be due to his intrinsically evil nature, or to his present circumstances: anyone who is forced into servitude, confined to a rock, kept under constant surveillance, and punished by supernatural means would wish his enslavers ill.³ Whatever Caliban's original disposition may have been when he lived alone on the isle—and we lack disinterested evidence—he must in his present circumstances feel hostility toward Prospero and Miranda. Miranda is far more vulnerable to Caliban's ill will than is her all-powerful father.

Prospero responds to Miranda's implicit plea to be spared exposure to Caliban's hostility with the practical reasons for needing a slave:

But, as ’tis,
We cannot miss him: he does make our fire,
Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices
That profit us. What, ho! slave! Caliban!

(I.ii.312-15)

A daughter might conceivably tell her loving father that she would prefer that they gather their own wood, that in fact no “profit” can outweigh the uneasiness she experiences. Miranda, however, is not free to speak, since a father who at any time can silence his daughter with “What! My foot my tutor?” will have educated that “foot” to extreme sensitivity toward what her father does or does not with to hear from her. Miranda dare not object to her enforced proximity to a hostile slave, for within the play's universe of discourse any attempt at pressing her own needs would constitute both personal insubordination and a disruption of the hierarchical order of the universe of which the “foot/head” familial organization is but one reflection.

Miranda, admired and sheltered, has no way out of the cycle of being a dependent foot in need of protection, placed in a threatening situation which in turn calls for more protection, and thus increased dependence and increased subservience.

Miranda's presence as the dependent, innocent, feminine extension of Prospero serves a specific end in the play's power dynamics. Many reasons are given for Caliban's enslavement; the one which carries greatest dramatic weight is Caliban's sexual threat to Miranda. When Prospero accuses Caliban of having sought “to violate / The honour of my child” (I.ii.349-50), Caliban is made to concur in the accusation:

O ho, O ho! Would’t had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans.

(I.ii.351-53)

We can test the element of sexual politics at work here by imagining, for a moment, that Prospero had been cast adrift with a small son instead of a daughter. If, twelve years later, a ship appeared bearing King Alonso and a marriageable daughter, the play's resolution of the elder generation's hatreds through the love of their offspring could still have been effected. What would be lost in such a reconstruction would be the sexual element in the enslavement of the native. No son would serve. Prospero needs Miranda as sexual bait, and then needs to protect her from the threat which is inescapable given his hierarchical world—slavery being the ultimate extension of the concept of hierarchy. It is Prospero's needs—the Prosperos of the world—not Miranda's, which are being served here.

The most elusive yet far reaching function of Miranda in the play involves the role of her chastity in the allegorical scheme. Most critics agree that the chastity of Miranda and Ferdinand in the fourth act symbolizes all human virtue (“Chastity is the quality of Christ, the essential symbol of civilization”⁴), while Caliban's lust symbolizes all human vice.

The first result of this schematic representation of all virtue and vice as chastity and lust is the exclusion from the field of moral concern the very domination and enslavement which the play vividly dramatizes. The exclusion is accomplished with phenomenal success under the guise of religion, humanism, and Neoplatonic idealism, by identifying Prospero with God (or spirit, or soul, or imagination), and Caliban with the Devil (or matter, body, and lust). Within the Christian-humanist tradition, the superiority of spirit over matter, or soul over body, was a commonplace: body existed to serve soul, to be, metaphorically, enslaved by soul. In a tradition which included the Psychomachia, medieval morality plays, and Elizabethan drama, the “higher” and “lower” selves existing within each person's psyche had been represented allegorically in the form of Virtues and Vices. A danger inherent in this mode of portraying inner struggle lay in the possibility of identifying certain human beings with the Vice-figures, and others (oneself included) with the representatives of Virtue. Such identification of self with Virtue and others with Vice led to the great Christian-humanist inversion: the warrant to plunder, exploit and kill in the name of God—Virtue destroying Vice.

It was “only natural” that the educated and privileged be identified with virtue and spirit, and that those who do society's dirty work, and all outsiders, be identified with vice and matter. Ellen Cantarow has analyzed the tendency of allegory to link virtue with privilege and sin with misfortune, making particular power relationships appear inevitable, “natural” and just within a changeless, “divinely ordained” hierarchical order;⁵ Nancy Hall Rice has analyzed the manner in which the artistic process of embodying evil in one person and then punishing or destroying that person offers an ersatz solution to the complex problem of evil, sanctioning virulent attacks on social minorities or outcasts,⁶ and Winthrop D. Jordan has discussed the tendency of Western civilization to link African natives, for example, with preconceived concepts of sexuality and vice. Jordan speaks of “the ordered hierarchy of [imputed] sexual aggressiveness”: the lower one's place on the scale of social privilege, the more dangerously lustful one is perceived as being.⁷

Thus in The Tempest, written some fifty years after England's open participation in the slave trade,⁸ the island's native is made the embodiment of lust, disobedience, and irremediable evil, while his enslaver is presented as a God-figure. It makes an enormous difference in the expectations raised, whether one speaks of the moral obligations of Prospero-the-slave-owner toward Caliban-his-slave, or speaks of the moral obligations of Prospero-the-God-figure toward Caliban-the-lustful-Vice-figure. In the second instance (the allegorical-symbolic), the only requirement is that Prospero be punitive toward Caliban and that he defend his daughter Miranda's chastity—that daughter being needed as a pawn to counterbalance Caliban's lust. In this symbolic scheme, Miranda is deprived of any possibility of human freedom, growth or thought. She need only be chaste—to exist as a walking emblem of chastity. This kind of symbolism is damaging in that it deflects our attention away from the fact that real counterparts to Caliban, Prospero, and Miranda exist—that real slaves, real slave owners, and real daughters existed in 1613 for Shakespeare's contemporaries and have continued to exist since then.

To return to one of those daughters, Miranda's living counterpart Elizabeth Stuart, at whose wedding festivities The Tempest was performed: it appears likely that King James's daughter and her bridegroom were influenced in their unrealistic expectations of their powers and rights as future rulers by the widespread Jacobean attempt to equate unaccountable aristocratic power with benevolent infallibility and possibly by the expression of that equation in The Tempest. In our own century the play apparently continues to reflect ongoing societal confusions that may seduce women—and men—into complicity with those who appear to favor them while oppressing others. Can we envision a way out? If a twentieth century counterpart to Miranda were to define, and then confront, The Tempest's underlying assumptions—as, obviously, neither the Miranda created by Shakespeare nor her living counterpart in the seventeenth century could do—what issues would she need to clarify? Let us invent a modern Miranda, and permit her to speak a new Epilogue:

“My father is no God-figure. No one is a God-figure. My father is a man, and fallible, as I am. Let’s put an end to the fantasy of infallibility.

“There is no such thing as a ‘natural slave.’ No subhuman laborers exist. Let’s put an end to that fantasy. I will not benefit from such a concept presented in any guise, be it Aristotelian, biblical, allegorical, or Neoplatonic. Three men are reminded of Indians when first they see Caliban; he might be African, his mother having been transported from Algiers. I will not be used as the excuse for his enslavement. If either my father or I feel threatened by his real or imputed lust, we can build a pale around our side of the island, gather our own wood, cook our own food, and clean up after ourselves.

“I cannot give assent to an ethical scheme that locates all virtue symbolically in one part of my anatomy. My virginity has little to do with the forces that will lead to good harvest or to greater social justice.

“Nor am I in any way analogous to a foot. Even if I were, for a moment, to accept my father's hierarchical mode, it is difficult to understand his concern over the chastity of his foot. There is no way to make that work. Neither my father, nor my husband, nor any one alive has the right to refer to me as his foot while thinking of himself as the head—making me the obedient mechanism of his thinking. What I do need is the opportunity to think for myself; I need practice in making mistakes, in testing the consequences of my actions, in becoming aware of the numerous disguises of economic exploitation and racism.

“Will I succeed in creating my ‘brave new world’ which has people in it who no longer exploit one another? I cannot be certain. I will at least make my start by springing ‘the Miranda-trap,’ being forced into unwitting collusion with domination by appearing to be a beneficiary. I need to join forces with Caliban—to join forces with all those who are exploited or oppressed—to stand beside Caliban and say,

As we from crimes would pardon’d be,
Let’s work to set each other free.”

Notes

1. This quotation and subsequent ones are from The Tempest, Arden Shakespeare, ed. Frank Kermode (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958).

2. “The eclipse and glory of her kind” is the closing line of Sir Henry Wotton's poem, “On His Mistress, The Queen of Bohemia,” in The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh … with those of Sir Henry Wotton and other Courtly Poets from 1540-1650, ed. John Hannah (London: Bell and Sons, 1892), pp. 95-96. “A rose among violets” is a paraphrase of the third verse of that poem; the compliment was often quoted.

3. That the spirit Ariel, the figure contrasted to Caliban in the allegorical scheme, is a purely imaginary construct for whom no human counterparts exist helps to obscure the fact that human counterparts for Caliban did indeed exist. A community of free blacks had been living in London for over fifteen years at the time of the writing of The Tempest. The first Indian to have been exhibited in England had been brought to London during the reign of Queen Elizabeth's grandfather, Henry VII. For a full discussion of the historical background see Chapter II of my dissertation, “The Jacobean Bind: A Study of The Tempest, The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, The Atheist's Tragedy, A King and No King and The Alchemist, the Major Plays of 1610 and 1611, in the Context of Renaissance Expansion and Jacobean Absolutism,” University of Massachusetts/Amherst, 1975. For more on the effects of the ambiguity surrounding the definition of Caliban as an abstract embodiment of evil and as an inhabitant of a newly discovered island see Chapter III of the same work, which considers The Tempest in relation to seventeenth- and twentieth-century imperialism.

   Four critics, among others, who have dealt with the colonial aspects of The Tempest and have focused upon Caliban and his enslavement as moral concerns are O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. Pamela Powesland (New York: Praeger, 1956); Philip Mason, Prospero's Magic: Some Thoughts on Class and Race (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 75-97; Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Caliban,” Massachusetts Review, 15 (Winter-Spring 1974), 7-72; and Kermode, “Introduction,” The Tempest. While Kermode observes that Shakespeare, and more generally Renaissance writers, held contradictory attitudes toward Indians, viewing them on one hand as inhabitants of a golden age, with no meum or tuum, and on the other hand as human beasts in whom one could place no trust, he nevertheless arrives at the conclusion that “the confusion of interests characteristic of the subject is harmoniously reflected in Shakespeare's play” (p. xxxi)—a “harmony” more likely to be acceptable to those who are at ease with the historical reality of conquest and enslavement than by those who, like Caliban's living counterparts, have been conquered, enslaved, or colonized. It is puzzling that even an article as sensitive as Harry Berger, Jr.'s “Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare's Tempest,” in Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969), 253-83, in its exploration of the contradictory elements in Prospero's character—his tendency to see himself as a god, his limited knowledge of human nature, his pleasure in dominating others, and his preference for, and success in, dealing with projected embodiments of pure evil—falls short of focusing upon the dramatization of enslavement itself as an ethical concern. I explore this question, posed in general terms, in my “Cracking the Code of The Tempest,” Bucknell Review, 25 (Spring 1979), issue on “Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Approaches,” ed. Harry R. Garvin and Michael D. Payne.

4. Irving Ribner, “Introduction” to Shakespeare's Tempest, ed. George Lyman Kittredge, rev. Ribner (Waltham, Mass.: Blaisdell, 1966), p. xv.

5. Ellen Cantarow, “A Wilderness of Opinions Confounded: Allegory and Ideology,” College English, 34 (1972), 215-16.

6. Nancy Hall Rice, “Beauty and the Beast and the Little Boy: Clues about the Origins of Sexism and Racism from Folklore and Literature,” Diss. University of Massachusetts/Amherst 1974, p. 207.

7. Winthrop D. Jordan, The White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 196.

8. See, for example, accounts of the 1562-68 slaving voyages of Sir John Hawkins (one with Sir Francis Drake) which appear in Richard Hakluyt's Principall Navigations Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1589; facs. rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), Part Two, 521-22, 526-29, 531-32, 553-54, 562-64.