The Tempest (2): Discourses of Colonization

1
The Tempest (2) Discourses of Colonization

• Nature, Art, Identity and Power in Act I II

2
The Tempest various interpretations

1. Art vs. Nature (Prospero vs. Caliban)
2. Usurpation and vengeance
3. Colonization
4. Initiation of Miranda (the question of sex
   marriage).
5. Authority gained, lost and re-constructed

3
Outline

• A New Critical Reading of Act I Nature vs. Art
• A New Historicist Reading of Act II of Colonial
  Others? Interchangeable roles in discourses
• A Cultural Materialist Reading of the Two Acts
  of Histories and Power Relations ? uncertainties
  and conflicts
• References

4
A Traditionalist Reading by Frank Kermode --Nature

• 1. Natural Man -- Contemporary views of
  primitivism as pure or wicked or the
  natural as corrupted by men, or as defective.
• E.g. Montaigns Of Cannibals and Man -- The
  essay, like the play, is concerned with the
  general contrast between natural and artificial
  society and men, though Montaigne assumes, in his
  naturalist way, that the New World offers an
  example of naturally virtuous life uncorrupted by
  civilization, whereas Shakespeare obviously does
  not. (xxxv)

5
A Traditionalist Reading by Frank Kermode (2)
--Nature

• 2. the Wild Man (Savage and deformed)
• -- Syrocrax belongs to the Old World, but not the
  New. (xl)
• -- Caliban a slave quoting Aristotle and other
  sources those inferior are slaves by nature .
  . .His origins and characters are natural in the
  sense that they do not partake of grace,
  civility, and art he is ugly in body, associated
  with an evil natural magic, and unqualified for
  rule or nurture . . . An inverted pastoral hero,
  against whom civility and the Art which improves
  Nature may be measured (xlii - xliii)

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A Traditionalist Reading by Frank Kermode (3)
--Art

• Seeds of Nobler Race Miranda (compared with
  Spensors The Faerie Queen)
• Prosperos Art two functions
• The disciplined exercise of virtuous knowledge
• Symbolic of the better natures and qualities.
  (since to control nature, it needs virtue and
  temperance) (xlviii) e.g. the importance of
  chastity, self-discipline, learning vs. politics,
  the contemplative vs. the active life.
• In all respects, then Prospero expresses the
  qualities of the world of Art, and of the non
  vile. These qualities become evident in the
  organized contrasts between his world and the
  world of the vile. . . (li)

7
The Tempest A New Critical Reading

• Questions Can you find ex
• ALONSO, SEBASTIAN, PROSPERO, ANTONIO,
  FERDINAND, GONZALO, ADRIAN, FRANCISCO, CALIBAN,
  TRINCULO, STEPHANO, MASTER OF A SHIP
  BOATSWAINMARINERS
• MIRANDA, ARIEL

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Act I different systems of order

• How is Nature opposed to Culture in this scene?
• How are the major characters here, Boatswain,
  Gonzalo, Sebastian and Antonio characterized?
  Why does Boatswain not have a name?
• If an order or a balance is to be maintained
  between Art/Human and Nature, who/what is
  disruptive in Act 1? How do the characters try
  to maintain order?

9
Act I different systems of order

1. The storm and the boatswain (seamanship)
   Boatswain listens only to his master, and
   speaks to the storm (What cares theseroarers
   for the name of king? )
2. Sebastian Antonio (curses), impatient and
   cursing (A pox o' your throat, you bawling,
   blasphemous, incharitable dog! )
3. Gonzalo (fate, legal system, royalty and
   religion, yearning for land.) (the joke about
   drowning and hanging)

10
Act I different systems of order

• 3. Miranda vs. Prospero How does he lose his
  power? Could the story be told otherwise?
• Human compassion (life vs. death) ? ? a)
  fatherly love and b) history
• Frequent addresses to the daughter (ll. 55 78
  95) evoke her repressed memory (l. 132)
• Prosperos account (multiple messages) i.
  management vs. sponging ii. Antonios Falsehood
  vs. conflicting views (Indulgence in knowledge ?
  Political disorder (ll 79 -)

11
Act I different systems of order

1. How is Ariel characterized? And Caliban? In
   what sense is Caliban close to nature? (ll. 323
   338-)
2. How does Prospero defend himself in front of
   them? (ll. 250 345 - )

12
Act I different systems of order

• 4. Ariel vs. Prospero in contrast to Caliban
• Ariel mobile (l. 190) Calibanconstrained and
  rebellious (with both violence and words)
• Arielobedient but expecting rewards (l. 243)
  Caliban
• Prosperos responses using history (of rescuing
  or education), naming (my slave) and his Art
  (threats). ? representative of colonial control

13
Act I different systems of order

• 4. Ferdinand vs. Prospero another imbalance of
  order when Ferdinand assumes himself to be the
  king and the best (l. 430)
• ? More control is needed, but there are seeds of
  compromise (since the marriage of Miranda means
  an exchange of power but not regaining absolute
  power.) ? Alonsos daughter in Tunis ?
  intersection between gender and colonization

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A New Historicist Reading of Act II

• of the Colonial Others

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What New Historicists Do

• 1.Practice They juxtapose literary and
  non-literary texts, reading the former in the
  light of the latter
• 2. Practice They try thereby to 'defamiliarise'
  the canonical literary text, detaching it from
  the accumulated weight of previous literary
  scholarship and seeing it as if new
• 3. Concerns They focus attention (within both
  text and co-text) on issues of State power and
  how it is maintained, on patriarchal structures
  and their perpetuation, and on the process of
  colonisation, with its accompanying 'mind-set'

16
What New Historicists Do (2)

• 4. Theoretical Framework They make use, in doing
  so, of aspects of the post-structuralist outlook,
  especially Derrida's notion that every facet of
  reality is textualised, and Foucault's ideas of
  social structures as determined by dominant
  'discursive practices'
• (From Peter Barry, Beginning Theory, 1995)

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NH Identity

• "self-fashioning occurs at the point of encounter
  between an authority and an alien and what is
  produced in this encounter partakes of both ...
  and hence ... any achieved identity always
  contains within itself the signs of its own
  subversion or loss". (GREENBLATT, Renaissance
  Self-Fashioning, p. 9)

18
Context as texts

• "A play by Shakespeare is related to the contexts
  of its production - to the economic and political
  system of Elizabethan and Jacobean England and to
  the particular institutions of cultural
  production (the court, patronage, theatre,
  education, the church). Moreover, the relevant
  history is not just that of four hundred years
  ago, for culture is made continuously and
  Shakespeare's text is reconstructed, reappraised,
  reassigned all the time through diverse
  institutions in specific contexts". (DOLLIMORE
  SINFIELD, Introduction, Political Shakespeare, p.
  viii)

19
Context as texts (2)

• CON-TEXT -- "Con-texts with a hyphen, to signify
  a break from the inequality of the usual
  text/context relationship. Con-texts are
  themselves texts and must be read with they do
  not simply make up a background (Barker 236).

20
Context as texts (3)

• the historicity of texts the cultural
  specificity, the social embedment, of all modes
  of writing - not only the texts that critics
  study but also the texts in which we study them.
• the textuality of history 1) we can have no
  access to a full and authentic past, a lived
  material existence, unmediated by the surviving
  textual traces of the society in question -
  traces whose survival we cannot assume to be
  merely contingent but must rather presume to be
  at least partially consequent upon complex and
  subtle social processes of preservation and
  effacement
• 2) those textual traces are themselves subject
  to subsequent textual mediations when they are
  construed as the 'documents' upon which
  historians ground their own texts, called
  'histories'". (Louis A. Montrose, 'Professing the
  Renaissance The Poetics and politics of
  Culture', p. 242)

21
Context as texts (e.g.)

• New Critical Approach to History the 'raw
  material' that the artist fashioned. As either
  stable antithesis or stable background
• NH their interaction . . .and hence to the
  permeability of their boundaries. 'When I play
  with my cat', writes Montaigne, 'who knows if I
  am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?'
  When Shakespeare borrows from Harsnett, who knows
  if Harsnett has not already, in a deep sense,
  borrowed from Shakespeare's theatre what
  Shakespeare borrows back? Whose interests are
  served by the borrowing? And is there a larger
  cultural text produced by the exchange?"
  (GREENBLATT, 'Shakespeare and the Exorcists')

22
Context as texts (e.g. 2)

• A traditional reading of The Tempest
• Source Bermuda pamphlets Of Cannibals
• Genre pastoral romance
• Canon important because being written the last
  and placed the first in 1623 Folio.
• ? NH sees the play as being embedded in a
  conflicting field of discourses.

23
Starting Questions

• How do the characters-- Alonso, Sebastian,
  Antonio, Gonzalorespond to being stranded on an
  island?
• How is the island described? In what
  discourses?

24
The Island

• Adrian Though this island seem to be desert . .
  . Uninhabitable, and almost inaccessible . . .
  It must needs be of subtle, tender, and delicate
  temperance, where the air breathes upon us . .
  . most sweetly (II.i.4247
• Gonzalo ll. 145 utopian vision?
• Sebastian and Adrian bantering, but also
  undercutting the over-sentimentalism of the other
  two.
• Alonso unresponsive.

25
The Island (2)

• Their views compared with Calibans
• can find it both a place of terroras when he
  enters, frightened and overworked in Act II,
  scene ii
• and of great beauty as in his the isle is full
  of noises speech (III.ii.130138).
• Their views compared with Montaignes Is it
  proper? The island is on the Mediterranean.

26
Montaign Of Cannibals (1)

• still very close to their original naturalness.
  . . .
• The poets and philosophers could not imagine a
  naturalness so pure and simple as we see by
  experience nor could they believe that our
  society could be maintained with so little
  artifice and human solder.. . .
• no sort of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no
  science of numbers, no name for a magistrate or
  for political superiority, no custom of
  servitude, no riches or poverty, no contracts, no
  successions, no partitions, no occupations but
  leisure ones, no care for any but common kinship,
  no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of
  wine or wheat. The very words that signify lying,
  treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy,
  belittling, pardon unheard of.

27
Montaign Of Cannibals

• . . . everyone gives the title of barbarism to
  everything that is not in use in his own country
  as, indeed, we have no other level of truth and
  reason than the example and idea of the opinions
  and customs of the place wherein we live. There
  where we live is always 'the perfect religion,'
  there 'the perfect government,' there 'the
  perfect' everything.
• Montaigne compares cannibalism, the "barbarous
  horror" of roasting and eating a dead man, to the
  European torture of "tearing a body limb from
  limb by racks and torments." (source)

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The allegory of power (1) sleep and wakefulness

• In both Act 1 and 2, sleeping is a recurrent
  motif. What can it mean in general (e.g. p. 127
  l. 486) and here in 21 (p. 138) Sebastians talk
  with Antonio while the others are asleep?
• The pervasive power of Prospero ? all the
  actions are, in a sense, staged by P, and its
  hard to say how much free will these characters
  have.

29
The allegory of power (2) confusion of
identities

• Sebastians and Antonios attempted murder in
  21 prepares us for Calibans in Acts 3 4.
• Colonial identities are mixed in another farcical
  way Caliban and Trinculos becoming a
  four-legged animal. How are the Calibans,
  Trinculos and Stephenos identities mixed but
  still opposed? (fantasies of monsters vs.
  reality of oppression liquor vs. labor)

30
The network of power
How do Trinculo and Stefano treat Caliban differently from Prospero? Is Caliban a natural slave in being attracted to the liquor and thus submissive to the one that owns it? (ll. 119-)
31
The network of power
Caliban and Prospero
--Prospero initially made much of Caliban (II.ii.336)-- that he gave Caliban Water with berries int (II.ii.337) -- Caliban showed him around the island -- Prospero later imprisoned Caliban, after the latter becomes dangerous.
32
The network of power
Trinculo and Stefanos
-- Caliban initially mistakes Stefano and Trinculo for Prosperos spirits, but alcohol convinces him that Stefano is a brave god and decides unconditionally to kneel to him (II.ii.109110) -- Stefano calls Caliban first shallow, credulous ridiculous monster, and then a brave monster, as they set off singing around the island.-- Stefano and Trinculo give Caliban wine, which Caliban finds to be a celestial liquor (II.ii.109). Moreover, -- Stefano immediately plans to inherit the island (II.ii.167), using Caliban to show him all its virtues.
33
Caliban

• gabble like / A thing most brutish
  (I.ii.359360) upon Prosperos arrival
• he now is willfully inarticulate in his
  drunkenness.

34
Colonial Identities

• Defined in terms of its others.
• Caliban, represented by his colonizers, has no
  other ways to define what freedom is, while those
  he face want nothing but to subject him to their
  powers.

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From New Historicism to Cultural Materialism

• Culture and History

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Greenblatt

• Renaissance Self-Fashioning
• Began with an intention to explore the role of
  human autonomy in the construction of identity.
  
• The emphasis fell more and more on cultural
  institutionsfamily, religion and the Sateand
  the human subject itself began to seem
  remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the
  relations of power in a particular society (qtd
  Dollimore 47)
• Materialist culture is not only made by
  history, but it can also makes history. -gt the
  possibility of subversion, or at least,
  conflictual meanings.
• In a word, it is more political than NH.

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What Cultural Materialist Do (1)

• 1. They read the literary text (very often a
  Renaissance play) in such a way as to enable us
  to 'recover its histories', that is, the context
  of exploitation from which it emerged
• 2. At the same time, they foreground those
  elements in the work's present transmission and
  contextualising which caused those histories to
  be lost in the first place, (for example, the
  'heritage' industry's packaging of Shakespeare in
  terms of history-as-pageant, national bard,
  cultural icon, and so on)
• political agenda 3. They use a combination of
  marxist and feminist approaches to the text,
  especially in order to do the first of these
  (above), and in order to fracture the previous
  dominance of conservative social, political, and
  religious assumptions in Shakespeare criticism in
  particular

(From Peter Barry, Beginning Theory, 1995)
38
What Cultural Materialist Do (2)

• 4. They use the technique of close textual
  analysis, but often employ structuralist and
  post-structuralist techniques, especially to mark
  a break with the inherited tradition of close
  textual analysis within the framework of
  conservative cultural and social assumptions
• 5. At the same time, they work mainly within
  traditional notions of the canon, on the grounds
  that writing about more obscure texts hardly ever
  constitutes an effective political intervention
  (for instance, in debates about the school
  curriculum or national identity)

(From Peter Barry, Beginning Theory, 1995)
39
Starting Questions

• In the network of power the characters form,
  does Prospero, or anyone else, have absolute
  power?
• How do different characters histories (e.g.
  Calibans vs. Prosperos) interact with each
  other?

40
The Tempest Act 1-2Miranda and Prospero

• Is Miranda as innocent, meek and passive as she
  appears to be? Whats her views of knowledge
  and the past?
• --She is sweet, kind, but with a desire to know,
  a memory repressed and some hints of an interest
  in sex and marriage (11. 21, 35 42050 55 119).
  

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The Tempest Act 1-2Prospero and Ariel

• Is Ariel all obedient? (ll. 189 220 242)
  --his use of pains.
• Why and how does Prospero tells Ariels story to
  him?
• By describing once a month in great details
  Ariels past history of tortures, scolding him
  and naming him (my slave). (ll 250 -

42
The Tempest Act 1-2Prospero and Caliban

• Caliban, for sure, is disobedient but needed by
  Prospero (p. 118, l. 310). How is Calibans
  version of Prosperos arrival different from the
  previous two he tells Miranda and Ariel
  respectively? (ll. 30) How is his story
  subversive?

43
The Tempest Act 1-2Prospero, Miranda and
Ferdinand

• How is authority constructed and denied?
• What does Prospero do to achieve what he wants
  (marrying Miranda to Ferdinand)? In his
  intervention, how is his power challenged by the
  other powers? (e.g. pp. 126-27)
• Arent Ariels songs (pp. 122-123) enchanting?
  Analyze the sound patterns.

44
Caliban multiple interpretation

• Kermode the thing unregenerate, ordinary
  nature, the base . . . Ground against and upon
  which the moral battle for civilization is
  defined and played out
• Aime Cesaire the thing given its full dignity
  as the supreme, ordinary good, the good that is
  politically repressed and exploited, yet which
  promises to return in the future.
• Brown an effect of a multiplicity of texts and
  forces he is a native of the Indies, a slave, a
  savage, a cannibal, a woodwo, a masterless man,
  an irish rebel, . . .(Wilson 14)
• Which do you agree with?

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References

• Kiernan Ryan (ed.), New historicism and cultural
  materialism a reader(London and New York
  Arnold, 1996).
• Scott Wilson. Cultural Materialism Theory and
  Practice. Blackwell Publishers, 1995.
• WILLY MALEY. Cultural Materialism and New
  Historicism http//www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESLL/Eng
  Lit/ugrad/hons/theory/CultMaterialism.htm
• Francis Barker and Peter Hulme. Nymphs and
  Reapers Heavily Vanish The Discursive Con-texts
  of The Tempest, in John Drakakis (ed.),
  Alternative Shakespeares (London Methuen, 1985).
  
• Frank Kermode. Introduction. The Tempest
  (Arden Shakespeare S.)
• Robert Scanlan. Shakespeare's NEW WORLD
  FANTASIA. lthttp//www.amrep.org/past/tempest/tem
  pest3.htmlgt
• Michel de Montaigne's "Of Cannibals"
  http//www.victorianweb.org/courses/nonfiction/mon
  taigne/