Caliban: The "Other"

Interpreting texts has evolved to a point where one can choose to look for the “right” interpretations of a text, or analyze how the reader, time period, and author’s influence together compose a text’s central message. I believe that Shakespeare’s The Tempest can be read with several different perspectives, as postists (those who believe literature is a from of discourse and that the language used to compose work is relevant) would agree. From this standpoint, my interpretation as a reader may be used as argument towards Shakespeare’s main idea. With my current knowledge of the novel, I believe that the author portrays Caliban as a savage, inferior individual, and therefore reveals that Shakespeare does not oppose colonization. However, I also think that Shakespeare wrote with outside influences and his own’s cultural hegemony weighing on his thoughts. No one is free of their culture’s influence, and Shakespeare may have written this play in a manner that he thought would please the audiences of his times, and thus may have written his play to further his career more than to broadcast political and cultural messages. As Bressler states, “All people in a given culture are consciously and unconsciously asked to conform to the prescribed hegemony.”

Shakespeare points out that Caliban is unhappy that Miranda taught him the language that she and Prospero speak, because he now expresses himself through the influence of the offending culture he so dislikes. By doing so, the author provides evidence that Caliban in not just a single character, but a symbol of other natives that may have been colonized and forced to conform to a new culture. Bressler supports Caliban’s thoughts on the idea of learning a new language by describing Fanon’s thoughts on the matter. “Fanon believes that as soon as the colonized…were forced to speak the language of the colonizer…the colonizer either accepted or were coerced into accepting the collective consciousness of the French [the colonizers].”

Alone and forced to provide for his master, Prospero, Caliban serves as a symbol to any race or group of peoples that have been oppressed or colonized. As Bressler calls these unlucky individuals, Caliban is one of the “Others.” Although Shakespeare appears to give hope to Caliban’s cause of freedom by providing him with a new “master,” Stephano, he is indeed not sympathetic towards Caliban, and what Caliban represents in The Tempest. Instead, Caliban meets his new master with an unflattering display of affection, thus portraying him, and those who have been colonized, as desperate and pathetic. “How does thy honor? Let me lick thy shoe,” Caliban grovels. Shakespeare thus paints the colonized as he portrays Caliban: pathetic and subservient.