I. Traditional Readings of The Tempest
II. Contemporary Criticism
III: The Tempest as political Act
IV. The discourse of Gender: The Tempest and The Charge of Incest

Traditional Readings of The Tempest.

Since most contemporary receptions of The Tempest from Lamming to Skura are politicised one should attempt to locate them within the Colonial/Post-Colonial dialectics in order to properly apprehend traditional criticism.

Considering the place and moment of the text's actual production - England in the seventeenth century, The Tempest cannot qualify as Post-Colonial, if the term covers "all the culture [outside England] affected by the imperial process." Nevertheless, since The Tempest reflects a "colonial ethos" it can easily fall into the mould of Colonialist literature. This would nevertheless only result in an over-simplification. The question of period still excludes The Tempest `effectively´ from such a categorisation. The Tempest's initial staging took place in 1611 at the Jacobean Court and it was "first printed in the Folio of Hemminge and Condell in 1623". Significantly

Europe's attempt to cast its reflection upon lands and oceans goes back several centuries. However it was in the nineteenth century that the economic supremacy and political authority of Europe, and in particular of Britain, became global. (Boehmer 29).

Boehmer refers to the Indian Historian, C. A. Bayly who insisted that a "`constructive authoritarian´ British imperialism came off age as early as 1783-1820" (30). This suggests that a 'nascent' form of imperialism existed already before the seventeenth century. The bare bones of this can be easily carbon-dated in The Tempest. The dramatic enactment follows the usual pattern of subjugation, domination and rule of a geographical space by a colonising power, rounded off by a rebellion and independence which is only apparent. Caliban after his aborted rebellion against Prospero must still show difference to the later's superior might and accept it as a precondition for his independence:

Pros: Go, sirrah, to my cell;
Take with you your companions; As you look
To have my pardon, trim it handsomely.

Cal: Ay that I will; and I'll be wise hereafter,
And seek for grace[...]

Moreover " 'Difference', 'Power' and 'pleasure' are all the issues which must be addressed in any critique of colonial representation." These are very much present in The Tempest. Prospero imposes a sexual and racial hierarchy upon the difference of Caliban, the Other. A discourse of power develops through this hierarchy towards the purpose of confirming and consolidating that power. Civil society derives a morbid enjoyment from Caliban's dehumanisation and powerlessness. And Prospero derives a voyeuristic pleasure in his reduction of Caliban's sexuality to one of an assumed racial bestiality, as twisted as his physical body, brought to being by renaissance myth-making, which in turn must have given vicarious pleasure to renaissance audiences. Thus it would be appropriate to describe The Tempest as a 'nascent-colonial' literature. Nascent-colonial in an ideological sense because although we have no incontrovertible prove that Shakespear's personal psychology is consciously at work here nevertheless, the psychology of his age is indeed consciously at work, must have been at work through Shakespear's own ideological unconscious.

But one would like to ask how and why it was possible for traditional reception to have overlooked the importance of historical space. Francis Barker and Peter Hulme in rejecting an English past "which is picturesque, familiar and untroubled," have pointed out: "Modern scholarly editions of Shakespear, amongst which the Arden is probably the most influential, have seemed to take their distance from such mythologising by carefully locating the [play]s against [its] historical background". (191)

Such distancing might not be as innocent as it appears. It is instructive that, in the first place, these kinds of myth-making was the site upon which colonialism was established and consolidated. And since the heyday of English Imperialism is over sentiments of faded grandeur might be nostalgically reconstructed in the universalist textual analyses of Colonial or, as in the case of Shakespear, Nascent-colonial literature. A recent article in the Times Literary Supplement has discusses the mixed feelings with which the contemporary Englishman apprehends his Englishness. That is understandable, considering that "The nationalism Empire generated, the race antipathies it provoked, played a crucial part in British society, in particular in creating strategic solidarities within the country. National selfhood in Britain had traditionally been forged in opposition to an Other overseas." (Boehmer 32). It is even more understandable considering the shift of imperial prestige and Global power over to the United States of America in the twentieth century and, Britain's unwillingness to give up its only surviving colonial hold in Ireland.

Contemporary Criticism

Recent criticism argues against a New Historicist approach on the grounds that it is too reductive or that it needs some qualifications. Paul Brown is apparently guilty of such reductionism. He begins his essay by analysing particular stock myths and historical source texts - notably Montaigne's essay on cannibals enabling the stereotyping of Caliban. Declaring that The Tempest is not simply "a reflection of colonialist practices [...] [but a] powerful and pleasurable narrative which seeks [...] to mystify the political conditions which demand colonialist discourse" (48), he goes on to give a concrete example of John Rolf, a Virginia planter, who re-writes his wish for power over plantation land and his carnal desire for the body of Pocahontas, an indigenous American woman, by constituting them as a missionary and noble project towards the elevation of the savage Other to civility.

Presumably Brown considers this one of the examples of colonial practice. He finally draws a geographical model of colonial influence based on rough Wallersteinian terms of 'core' 'semiperiphery' and 'periphery' where each category corresponds to the "English-Welsh mainland (internal colonialism of the core), the extension of British influence in the semiperiphy of Ireland, and the diffuse range of British interests in the extreme periphery of the New World", respectively.

In this way Brown draws parallels to the dramatic enactment of The Tempest. Thus Caliban would become the demonised uncivil masterless Other, like Pocahontas, and his colonisation is the colonisation of the periphery. Prospero is the coloniser, like John Rolf, who through his magic opposed to Caliban's nature is able to master himself and Caliban and manipulate the sexuality of Miranda and Ferdinand as a site for achieving his political goal of reinstatement as duke of Milan. In this way Brown confirms Skura's deductions from her elaborate review of revisionist criticism that The Tempest is a "political act" (223). Arguing that traditionalist criticism had not "entirely ignored either Prospero's flaws or their relations to the dark side of Europe's confrontation with the Other" (222) , she quarrels with the over-emphasis on the single-minded exploitation of indigenous resources by European colonialism and its recourse to propaganda and damaging stereotypes of the Other to enable that exploitation. Although the recent critics

are making important distinctions [...] they are not calling attention to history in general but rather to one aspect of history: to power relations and to the ideology in which power relations are encoded,
[ and adding almost with a gruff indulgence], it is no longer enough to suggest that Europeans were trying to make sense of the Indian; rather the emphasis is now on the way Europeans subdued the Indian to make sense/order/money not of him so much as out him (221-223) [my emphasis]

Skura is rather defensive and apologetic. One wonders why. Is colonialism, demonisation of the Other and exploitation not an historical fact? If this is so, is history not one of the matrixes of any one culture at a particular time? And if this historical aspect of a particular culture is the most prominent in moulding the national psyche and if a text - such as The Tempest with its colonial atmosphere - is the product of that culture, cannot that text submit itself to a criticism with colonialism as its major discursive field? Skura answers these questions, as it were, by insisting that:

recent criticism not only flattens the text into the mould of colonialist discourse and eliminates what is characteristically "Shakespearean" in order to foreground what is "colonialist" but it is also - paradoxically - in danger of taking the play further from the particular historical situation in England in 1611 even as it brings it closer to what we mean by colonialism today.

This is a beautiful piece of liberal sophistry. It does not seem to occur to Skura that 'the historical situation in England' is not necessarily any one particular piece of individual historical fact (there is a long list) or series of facts but the total effect or "synthetic unity" of a series of renaissance cultural manifestations (myths, stereorypes, anecdotes, the Pocahontas story etc) revealing the Phenomenon of Colonialism - or say even witch hunting. He seems to confuse 'history and colonialism today' together in a kind of dualism, falling into that trap which has "embarrassed philosophy" and which modern thought has "tried to replace by the monism of the phenomenon" (Sartre, xlv). He goes on to make an inter-textual analysis of several of Shakespear's plays vis-à-vis The Tempest in order to foreground "what is Shakespearean" in The Tempest. It does not occur to him that by that very inter-textual criticism he re-writes The Tempest on the ground of those other texts, even if there are points of convergence amongst them. The Tempest is still a text autonomous from say Measure for Measure or As You Like it. Moreover, there are recent suggestions for example - backed with arguments - that Shakespear had a ghost writer and was not responsible for some of the plays in his canon.

Yet Skura is right in pointing out Brown's obsession with colonialism in The Tempest. According to Skura "while there are many literal differences between The Tempest and colonialist fiction and practice, the similarities are taken to be so compelling that the differences are ignored" (225). And further:

it is not easy to categorise the links between The Tempest and colonialist discourse. Take the deceptively simple example of Caliban's name. Revisionist rightly emphasise the implications of the cannibal stereotype as automatic mark of the Other in Western ethnocentric colonialist discourse, and since Shakespears' name for Caliban is widely accepted as an anagram of "cannibal," many read the play as if he were a cannibal, with all that the term implies[...] Caliban is no cannibal - he barely touches meat, confining himself more delicately to roots, berries and an occasional fish[...] His name seems more like a mockery of stereotypes than a mark of monstrosity, and in our haste to confirm the link between "cannibal" and "Indian" outside the text, we lose track of the way in which Caliban severs the link within the text. While no one would deny some relation between Caliban and the New World natives to whom such terms as cannibal were applied, what relation that is remains unclear. (228)

Here it seems that Skura has missed the woods for the trees. The significant point should not be a quarrel with the possible misreading of certain details in authorial intention but the general and important ideological implications which are logically derived from the text. Deborah Willis' quarrel with Brown's essay is also one of method.

By representing the play's "ambivalences" as unintended by-products of an attempt to endorse colonialism unequivocally, Brown makes it difficult to see the more qualified endorsement the play is really making; he also makes it difficult to distinguish the play from other texts that do deliver such endorsements. His argument, it seems to me, reproduces an error that has haunted criticism of The Tempest - that is, the conflation of Prospero with Shakespear. (279)

From Willis' perspective such a conflation has led Brown to confuse a colonialism of the core (or the main plot of Prospero's play) with a colonialism of the periphery, which we can then understand as its sub-plot. And the conflict arising from staging both on the same theatrical space becomes Shakespear's play. In her words:

Prospero's colonial project is, for Brown, embodied not only in his "regime" on the Island (periphery and semiperiphery) but also in his dukedom in Milan (core). [...] Shakespear, in fact, plays core against periphery: The Tempest registers tensions between Prospero's role as colonialist magician and his role as duke; it self-consciously explores problematic aspects of Prospero's rule on the Island; and it raises questions about his [stereotypical] view of Caliban [...] At the same time the play declares Prospero's restoration of the Milanese political order as unequivocally legitimate. Prospero works to restore order by gaining back his dukedom, bringing Antonio under his control, engineering Alonso's repentance, and marrying off Miranda to the son of his old enemy. (280)

Thus according to her The Tempest is "more significantly, engaged in arousing the desire for, and displaying the power of, a ruler at the core who can contain a tendency toward oligarchy and division." And the colonialism of the periphery is only an instrument towards this larger aim and is given up when it has served its purpose, i.e. at the final scene in the play where Prospero forgives Caliban, offering him a symbolic independence thereby. Thus Antonio and not Caliban becomes the real threatening Other in this major concern with power at the core, and Caliban is only used to emphasise Antonio's degenerate nature; the threat posed by the former's rebellion only emphasises the latter's earlier putsch, which is recounted to Miranda at the protasis of Prospero's play.

As much as it is helpful to point out other discourses in The Tempest, the fact of Prospero's presence on the Island as a ruler-exile points towards power usurpation on that Island. Prospero is thus not much different from Antonio who had usurped power at the core. Besides Prospero, even if indirectly, behaves like a despot. Apart from usurpation, he defines reality for everybody on the Island by dint of that same magic which is supposed to reflect his masterfulness. This is something equivalent to an abuse of power. Thus "the ensemble of fictional and lived practices, which for convenience we will simply refer to here as 'English colonialism' provides The Tempest's dominant discursive con-texts [and] the figure of usurpation [becomes] the play's nodal point of imbrication into this discourse of colonialism." (Barker & Hulme, 198).

Willis' argument is weak juxtaposed against Barker and Hulme's thesis. According to them The Tempest's truly dramatic moment is Prospero's strange disturbance at the insurrection of Caliban, which brings the masque scene to an abrupt halt. And this only underscores Prospero's "disquiet at the irruption into consciousness of an unconscious anxiety concerning his legitimacy, both as Producer of his play, a fortiori, and as governor of the Island. The by now urgent need for action forces upon Prospero the hitherto repressed contradiction between his dual role as usurper and usurped." (Barker & Hulme, 202).

One must admit that historical space is an irreplaceable constant in the cultural production of a text where the author is more and more a given nowadays, due to critical tendencies like source criticism or the various inscriptions working upon the site of a text, inter-textuality, structuralism and post structuralism. And as Barker and Hulme have suggested discourse analyses would be the most plausible way to approach a text. Discourse is a term more embracing than 'text' but narrower than language and it operates at the level of the enablement of texts, such that focus moves from the problem of meaning to that of 'instrumentality and function'. A text would then not so much contain meaning as being 'performative of meaning'. To quote as a conclusion from Barker and Hulme once more:

Through its very occlusion of Caliban's version of proper beginnings, Prospero's disavowal is itself performative of the discourse of colonialism, since this particular reticulation of denial of dispossession, with retrospective justification for it, is the characteristic trope by which European colonial regimes articulate their authority over land to which they could have no conceivable legitimate claim. (200).

Thus The Tempest should be read across an historical-ideological field, progressively - from the left to the right margin, not only at the centre page of meaning.

The Tempest as Political Act

As a text which reflects a colonialist ethos the dramatic actions in The Tempest could be opposed as dispossession, possession, repossession, and finally estrangement. Since Caliban's Island is significantly nameless we should relocate it on the map of the action by referring to it as Kalibut. The palace coup in Milan by Antonio, which is reported at the protasis of 'Prospero's play' to Miranda results in Prospero's political dispossession by Antonio. In order for Prospero to repossess his dukedom he resorts to the same tactics of usurpation and possesses Kalibut as a vantage point from where he can plan a counter-coup against Antonio, thereby dispossessing Caliban of his kingship.

Conscious of the contradiction in his action Prospero is constantly at pains to justify his legitimacy on the Island. This desire to justify what is perhaps unjustifiable provides the real rather than apparent dramatic conflict in The Tempest as separate from Prospero' own play. The possession of a powerful magic by Prospero imbues him with the character of a playwright such that the other characters becomes just that for him. Thus he colonises not only Kalibut but everybody who happens to be present there, including his daughter, Miranda. Prospero's magic becomes a trope of a super-power, the larger than life imperialist.

Since Prospero is uncomfortable about his invasion of Kalibut, he tries from the first to present a picture of himself as a benevolent harmless man of high breeding. When Miranda says to him during storm:

"If by your Art, my dearest Father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, ally them" (Act i.2.1ff)

he replies with his usual untruthful diplomacy:

"No harm.
I have done nothing but in care of thee, who [...]
Art ignorant of what thou art; nought knowing
Of whence I am, nor that I am more better
Than Prospero, master of a full poor cell" (Act 1.2.15-21)

Then follows Prospero's relation of the events which forced him into exile, namely his brother's, Antonio's, treachery, conveniently avoiding to mention his own dereliction of duty; he abdicates his office to dedicate himself to 'Art'. In this way he begins to order reality. As for his presence on the Island he only says elliptically, "here on this Island we arrived", without the qualification that he has also dispossessed Caliban of his office. Caliban tries to relate his own version of true beginnings:

"This Island's mine, by Sycorax my mother, / which thou tak'st from me. When thou cam'st first, / Thou strok'st me, and made much of me; wouldst / give me / Water with berries in 't" (Act 1.ii.333 ff). Prospero quickly silences Caliban with " Thou lying slave, / Whom stripes may move, not kindness! [...] thou didst seek to violate / The honour of my child. (Act 1.ii. 346ff). In this way Prospero's narrative becomes dominant. As far as he is concerned taking possession of Kalibut was doing Caliban a favour, although his action is aimed at his own private interests.

Accusing him of rape for a start, he further qualifies Caliban with all the negative attributes possible, finally stigmatising him as 'natural' against his own artful cultivation. This leads to one of those processes of occlusions (namely of Caliban's political claims to Kalibut) in literary criticism which Barker and Hulme blame as mistaking of Prospero's narrative for authorial intention. The fact that the Island has no name is perhaps the biggest occlusion of all. Prospero names everything and everybody, in a manner of speaking, by his very magical presence. He gives Caliban his name, but the Island has no name. Thus by a single stroke Prospero erases Caliban through this occlusion of the geographical space defining the latter's ontological condition, while re-defining him through language.

Nevertheless Caliban proves a very stubborn presence. His insurrection is a test of prospero's claim to legitimacy on Kalibut. Prospero is unusually upset by the revolt because it brings back memories of Antonio's earlier putsch and could jeopardise Prospero political agenda for regaining control of Milan if the masque celebration is not concluded (as planned) by the foreseen promise of his dukedom by Alonso. Furthermore, his failure to repress the earlier putsch threatens to repeat itself and his ability as the all powerful, 'artful' statesman is questioned. Nevertheless the revolt was part of the plot of Prospero's play and was doomed to fail according to his magical reckoning. Thus his irrationality only underscores his illegitimacy on Kalibut. Thus The Tempest stages Prospero's anxiety over his claims to legitimacy. But according to Barker and Hulme:

this would be a recuperative move [,] preserving the text's unity by the familiar strategy of introducing an ironic distance between author and protagonist. After all, although Prospero's anxiety over his sub-plot may point up the crucial nature of that 'sub' plot a generic analysis would have no difficulty in showing that The Tempest is ultimately complicit with Prospero's play in treating Caliban's conspiracy in the fully comic mode. (203).

Thus the quelling of the revolt completes the colonialist narrative ( of Prospero) and Caliban's attempt juxtaposed against Antonio's apparent viciousness becomes the "final and irrevocable confirmation of the natural treachery of savages". Prospero repossesses his dukedom, Caliban is forever dispossessed in the statement "this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine" (Act V.i.275) because while the differences amongst civil society is resolved and they prepare to return to Italy, Caliban is not expected to be returning with them or staying on Kalibut as king. He is already forced to promise allegiance to Prospero due to the failed insurrection. We can assume that Prospero's claiming him is a complete and final one. Caliban becomes, even with the foreseen departure of Prospero, a truly political half-ling.

The discourse of Gender: The Tempest and The Charge of Incest

"The textualism of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva defines "woman" as a purely social and linguistic value that radically opposes any positive "natural" value" . This is nowhere more true than in Kalibut. The relationships between the dramatis personae in The Tempest vis-à-vis male/female categorisation is at best an exploitative one. "Woman" redefined in The Tempest is an object of sex and power.

Miranda serves a purely social value as company for her father, Prospero; she is cancelled as a presence but re -embedded into the narrative as merely a linguistic description, whose referent is cancelled by a passive role. She is never responsible for moving the action forward in the play but serves only as a ground upon which the action moves forward. Moreover all other female figures share the same fate. Sycorax is faceless and voiceless. What gives her being is simply a linguistic signifier; a name, an empty name without a signified. She can never give her own account of the true beginnings of things and challenge Prospero's claims. The same is true of Prospero's wife, who is reported to be dead. As a matter of fact death becomes a symbolic ontological condition of women in The Tempest.

The social milieu is such that women are in a binary paring-off into positions of powerlessness and become sites for the further dis-empowerment of other women - and men, in the text. Racially Miranda and Prospero's wife- whose name we do not even know - are paired off against Sycorax, a black woman. And these white women - Miranda more immediately, are further paired off against Caliban on the one hand and Stephano and Trinculo on the other in a power relationship.

The social distance between the white woman and the black woman only emphasises their estrangement from themselves and from the power spectrum such that even their possibility as 'social value' becomes negated and dislocates any meaningful possibility of countering male chauvinism. For example Sycorax's presence within the time space of the dramatic enactment could have put some things straight for Miranda. She probably would have had another account of the true beginnings of things through Sycorax and would perhaps have been able to judge the real exploitative nature of her father's magic against Sycorax's. This could have awakened a sense of the dialogic in her and made her less gullible to Prospero's definitions of 'the truth'.

This vertical relationship in The Tempest has the men on one level in the main struggling against each other for power, with the 'only woman' - since Miranda is the only one physically present - on the other level acting as a ground for the legitimisation of each man's claim. Accused of attempted rape by Prospero, Caliban duely regrets not having actually carried the act out. For him it would have been a way to people the Island with other Calibans and this would have resulted in a numerical strength against Prospero's power-bid. Implored by Miranda to still his magic-induced storm, Prospero declares to Miranda that the storm is supposed to work to her good, prognosticating her future as princess of Naples, although he never asked her opinion on the matter and has already arranged everything magically. Besides, the storm's chief design is only to bring Prospero's old enemies onto the Island by way of a shipwreck, the better to negotiate his own political future on his own grounds.

When the shipwrecked party arrive on the Island a 'gentleman's agreement' is made over Miranda and she is married off without her consent to Ferdinand through a love spell cast by her father. Alonso, King of Naples and Ferdinand's father - in appreciation of Prospero's good deed of saving his son, who was assumed drowned or lost - promises the duchy of Milan to Prospero. Thus The Tempest is a political act predicated upon a sexual discourse. One would like to deconstruct the relationships of characters in the text. To concretise this we should simply formulate a sentence reflecting the main paradigm and conclude by drawing a diagram of the relationships thus :

a. Prospero is Miranda's father
b. Miranda is Prospero's daughter

Prospero is Miranda's father
lover
brother
husband
friend
son

Miranda is Prospero's daughter
lover
sister
wife
friend
mother

We could take this further by simply replacing the terms above with each male character in The Tempest. But the point of emphasis is the Prospero/Miranda relationship. The horizontal and vertical axes correspond to the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axis in a filial relationship respectively. The vertical line shows the other possible relationships which Prospero and Miranda could have. The lexical item "lover" is our point of emphasis.

The dramatic enactment begins with Prospero ordering a storm to a particular purpose, i.e. that of bringing his political opponents unto the island so that he could better manipulate his political future. When Miranda begs him to still the storm a conversation ensues where he refers to himself in the third person, forcing Miranda to ask if he was actually her father. His careful and ambivalent answer insinuates his awareness of her powerful sexuality as a young and beautiful woman and the possibility of the subversion of the role of father to that of lover.

Later on he accuses Caliban of having raped Miranda. This might express a certain kind of jealousy as Caliban does not have to control his desire, if any - since he has no filial relationship to Miranda and as a `monster´ does not have to keep to any socially constructed codes of behaviour (i.e. courtly love) (accusation of rape: Act I, Sc. II, 350).

Caliban's assumed libidinality functions as a site unto which Prospero projects his own frustrated sexuality, and as a reminder for Prospero of the possibility of losing his masterfulness, while Miranda becomes a site for a possible disruption of his civility and correct sexual behaviour. Prospero promptly channels his sexual desire into political energy with the assistance of Ariel, casting a spell on Ferdinand and Miranda so that they fall in love. In this way he is saved from his possible fall from grace and at the same time achieves his future political reinstatement as duke of Milan. His strident warnings of chastity to Ferdinand emphasise his repressed sexuality concerning Miranda.

Thus he controls not only the sexuality of the body politic as Brown maintains but also his own sexuality because he projects his potentially truant and subversive desire unto Ferdinand, who performs for him what he (Prospero) could only do at the risk of losing his position as the masterful as opposed to Caliban, the masterless. He always carried on about civility and primitivity in the Art/nature opposition. "Art" demands that he does not descend to Caliban's "nature" by having carnal knowledge of Miranda.

Thus his function is only voyeuristic, Ferdinand becoming something of a rival for him. Although he instituted the whole proceeding himself he still looks upon the wooing of Miranda by Ferdinand with a more than unusual paternal interest, exclaiming as if in ecstasy `It works´. And later on he becomes unusually angry when he must leave this voyeuristic spectacle of his inverted sexuality and deal with Caliban's rebellion since the dramatic enactment which he set in motion to subvert as well as satisfy his own concupiscence is interrupted. The broken marriage proceedings is the moment of his climax brutally curtailed.

Thus Miranda's sexuality is used as a tool for Prospero's political as well as sexual ends. She is a lone woman in a male world dominated by a powerful patriarch, Prospero. All others are male figures who never relate to her with much consideration for her individuality. Prospero never gives her the opportunity of falling in love out of her own volition. He chooses Ferdinand for her through magic.

Caliban never considers that she might be hurt by his deprecating response on being accused that he had attempted to rape her. Even language is chosen for her by her father. At the point where she berates Caliban, she uses the high-blown imagery and diction of her father. Prospero also decides for her what or who is a man and who is not. In short, she is the centre of a quiet political and sexual male plot - quiet because it is carefully disguised in the text. To quote Donaldson on the matter, Miranda's - the Anglo-European woman's- "textaul selflessness in The Tempest produces the character effect of women's oppression under the rule of their biological and cultural Fathers" (Donaldson, 16). This Donaldson refers to as the Miranda Complex.

The Miranda complex is then not only colonial, it is also sexual. The charge of incest becomes an indirect one, more on the level of carnal desire and of voyeurism.

Sources quoted

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Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Post-colonial Literatures.(Oxford: Oxford UP,1995)
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The Tempest: Arden edition. ed.Frank Kermode. (London: Metheun 1987).
xi Low, Ching-Liang Gail. White Skins/ Black Masks: Representation and colonialism (London: Roughtledge 1992):
Barker, Francis & Hulme Peter. Nymphs and Reapers heavily Vanish: The discursive con-texts of The Tempest
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Skura, Meredith Anne. The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest.
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