Abstract
Whereas chapter 4 outlined the development of the Canadian Miranda from a fatherless, elfish child to a full-grown woman-artist wrestling her way out of patriarchal bounds (husband, lover, father or foster-father), the Caribbean “increments” to Miranda’s story delineate a similar growth, although her wrestling is with the mother. The Caribbean Miranda’s growth from girlhood to adulthood is set against the mother/daughter plot. More so than the Canadian texts, these Caribbean-centered texts downplay the place of men in the story of female development, at times writing men out of the story altogether. Short of being crafty “sequels,” these incremental texts outline change by degrees while simultaneously adding on to the fixed scale of The Tempest and questioning its innate order of priorities.
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Notes
Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (London: Virago Press, 1977), p. 225.
See Elaine Showalter, “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 135.
Gilbert Yeoh, “From Caliban to Sycorax: Revisions of The Tempest in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John,” World Literature Written in English 33:2 & 34:1 (1993–94), 109.
Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John (1983) (New York: Plume/Penguin, 1985), p. 120. Hereafter page numbers are indicated in the text.
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) (London & Toronto: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989), p. 155.
George Lamming, Water with Berries (London: Longman, 1971), p. 70.
Rosemary Manangoly George, The Politics of Home, Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 192.
Oliver Senior, “Colonial Girls School,” in Talking Trees (Kingston: Calabash, 1985), p. 26.
Maryse Condé, “Unlikely Stories. Children’s Invented Worlds in Caribbean Women’s Fiction,” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 15:1 (1992), 73. See also
Evelyn O’Callaghan, Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women (Hong Kong: The Macmillan Press, 1993).
Luce Irigaray, “And the One doesn’t Stir without the Other,” Signs 7:1 (Autumn 1981), 67; trans. Hélène Vivienne Wenzel. Originally Et l’une ne bouge pas sans l’autre (Paris: Minuit, 1979). See also her Corps-à-corps avec la mère (Montreal: Les éditions de la pleine lune, 1981); and
Michèle Montrelay, “Mère et fille” in L’Ombre et le nom: sur la féminité (Paris: Minuit, 1977), pp. 153–154.
Jamaica Kincaid, “My Mother,” At the Bottom of the River (London: Vintage, 1984), pp. 53–54. My italics.
Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 3
Myra Glazer Schotz, “The Great Unwritten Story: Mothers and Daughters in Shakespeare,” in Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Brouer, eds. The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), p. 226.
Elizabeth Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 54.
Judith Williamson, “Woman is an Island: Femininity and Colonization,” in Tania Modleski, ed. Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 113.
Diana Brydon, “No (Wo)Man is an Island: Rewriting Cross-Cultural Encounters within the Canadian Context,” Kunapipi 15:2 (1993), 50.
Aritha Van Herk, “Mapping as Metaphor: the Cartographer’s Revision,” A Frozen Tongue (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1992), pp. 54–68, p. 55 & p. 63. She argues she feels more kinship with Alice Munro, who, in Lives of Girls and Women, maps the country of the interior or even George Bowering who, in Burning Water (1980), re-maps the mapper, than with Philip Grove, Rudy Wiebe, and Robert Kroetsch, who show that “men map the territory of place, history, and event.” Seee
Frederick Philip Grove, Fruits of the Earth (Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1933);
Rudy Wiebe, The Temptations of Big Bear (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1973);
Robert Kroetsch, Badlands (Toronto: New Press, 1975), p. 4;
Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women (New York: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1971).
Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 163.
Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (1987) (New York: Plume/Penguin, 1996), p. 115. Hereafter page numbers are indicated in the text. This passage is originally from
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847) (London: Penguin Classics, 1985), p. 346.
Michelle Cliff, “Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character,” Caribbean Women Writers, ed. Selwyn R. Cudjoe (Wellesley, Mass: Calaloux Publications, 1990), pp. 263–68, p. 264.
Meryl F. Schwartz, “An Interview with Michelle Cliff,” Contemporary Literature 34 (1993), 595.
Margaret Kent Boss, “CLIFF, Michelle,” in Eugene Benson & L.W. Conolly, eds., Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Literatures in English (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 255. Typical examples of the tragic mulatta are to be found in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929).
Nella Larsen, Passing in An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen, ed. Charles Larson, foreword by Marita Golden (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), pp. 163–276. See Michelle Cliff’s poem “Passing,” qtd in Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1980), p. 6. Rpt in The Land of Look Behind (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1985).
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane’s Progress,” in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 348 & p. 360.
In Warren M. Billings, ed. The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), pp. 216–219.
Paul Brown, “‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, eds. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), p.54 & p. 62. See Deborah Willis’s response to Brown in her “Shakespeare’s Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 29:2 (Spring 1989), 277–291, 285. See also Carmen Birkle, “Colonial Mother and Postcolonial Daughter: Pocahontas and Clare Savage in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven,”in Postcolonialism and Autobiography eds. Alfred Hornung & Ernstpeter Ruhe (Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature), 19, eds. C. C. Barfoot and Theo D’Haen (Rodopi: Amsterdam & Atlanta, 1998), pp. 61–77.
This is culled from Jan Rogozinski, A Brief History of the Caribbean (London: Meridian Books, 1992), pp. 272–275.
Charles Kean’s costume book, Folger Shakespeare Library; Folger Art Volume d 49, dated 1853. Qtd in Virginia Mason Vaughan, “‘Something Rich and Strange’: Calibans Theatrical Metamorphoses,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36:4 (1985), 398.
Susan Stanford Friedman, “Exile in the American Grain: H. D.’s Diaspora” in Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, eds. Women’s Writing in Exile (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 89.
See Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York & London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 74–116.
Marina Warner, “Between the Colonist and the Creole: Family Bonds, Family Boundaries,” in Shirley Chew and Anna Rutherford, eds. Unbecoming Daughters of the Empire (Hebben Bridge: Dangaroo, 1993), pp. 199–204, p. 201. Marina Warner had earlier revealed that “as a person who is not Caribbean, who’s white, privileged, middle class, etc, that I didn’t have a right to enter this terrain of postcolonial exploration, but it seemed to me, in relation to The Tempest, ... I did have a right simply because it’s a body of story that is held in common.” In Nicolas Tredell, “Marina Warner in Conversation” (London, 19 March 1992), Poetry Nation Review (July/August 1992), 37.
Alice Fox, “Virginia Woolf at Work: the Elizabethan Voyage Out,” Bulletin of Research for the Humanities 4:1 (Spring 1981), 77. In The Voyage Out, Woolf also employs a lot of allusions to The Tempest. See, for instance, Ariel’s song recited by Mr. Grice (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1948), p. 54.
Marina Warner, Indigo: or Mapping the Waters (London: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 255. Hereafter page numbers are indicated in the text.
Chantal Zabus, “Spinning a Yarn with Marina Warner,” Post-colonial Women’s Writing in Kunapipi 16:1 (Aarhus: Dangaroo Press, 1994), 528.
Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), p. 259.
Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, pp. 259–260. My italics. See also Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976); and Ellen Cronan Rose, “Through the Looking Glass: When Women Tell Fairy Tales,” in Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch & Elizabeth Langland, eds. The Voyage In, pp. 209–227. The Yale lesbian poet Olga Broumas sees the hood in “Little Red Riding Hood” as both “the ‘mantle of blood’ which the infant wears as she emerges from the birth canal and the hood of her clitoris” (p. 221). Before her, Anne Sexton, in her poem “Red Riding Hood,” had compared “the red cape” to Red Riding Hood’s “Linus blanket” “besides/ it was red, as red as the Swiss flag, yet it was red, as red as chicken blood.” In Transformations (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), p. 76.
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899) (London: Women’s Press, 1978), p. 190.
Werewere Liking, Elle sera de jaspe et de corail (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1983), trans. Marjolijn de Jager, It Shall be of Jasper and Coral (Charlottesville & London: University of Virginia, 2000).
See Ruth Berman, “Mermaids,” in Mythical and Fabulous Creatures. A Source Book and Research Guide, ed. Malcolm South (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 133.
Trinh Minh-ha, “Grandma’s Story” in Woman, Native, Other: Writing Post-coloniality and Feminism (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 127.
Ann Thompson, “‘Miranda, Where’s Your Sister?’: Reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest” in Susan Sellers, Linda Hutcheon, Paul Perron, eds., Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), p. 50.
On Ariel as a “hyphen,” see Marina Warner’s unpublished typescript, “Siren, Hyphen; or the Maid Beguiled,” and Tobias Döring, “Woman, Foundling, Hyphen: the Figure of Ariel in Marina Warners Indigo,” Alizés/Trade Winds 20 (July 2001), 9–26.
Peggy Kamuf, ed., A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (New York & London: Harvester Wheatsheaf/Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 33.
Julio Caro Bajora, The World of the Witches (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 18. See also
Samantha Giles, Witchcraft and Misogyny (Nottingham: Pauper’s Press, 1997), p. 5.
See Anne Righter (Barton), ed., The Tempest (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 148, note to 1.2.266–67. In Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb (London: Everyman, 1990), the Lambs, however, do not identify Sycorax as the savior of Algiers (see p. 9).
Abena P. A. Busia, “Silencing Sycorax: On African Colonial Discourse and the Unvoiced Female,” Cultural Critique 14 (1989–90), 84–85 & 101. This article does for the African woman what Spivak did for the “disappearance” of Indian women in British legal history in
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313. See also her “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 262–280.
Helen Tiffin, “Rites of Resistance: Counter-Discourse and West-Indian Biography,” in Journal of West Indian Literature 3:1 (January 1989), 29. See also
Stephen Slemon, “Post-colonial Allegory and the Transformation of History,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 23:1 (1988), 161; and
Eileen Williams-Wanquet, “L’histoire remise en cause: Indigo de Marina Warner,” Etudes britanniques contemporaines 18 (June 2000), 89–105.
Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (1982) (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 24–47.
Joseph Williams, Psychic Phenomena of Jamaica (New York: The Dial Press, 1984), p. 64 & p. 96. See also
Ivor Morrish, Obeah, Christ and Rastaman (London: James Clark & Co, 1982), p. 23.
See Shari Thurer, The Myths of Motherhood (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p. 155. Elspeth Whitney confirms, in the context of European witchhunts, that “the witch was seen as inverting not only the natural order, but specifically the image of the “good woman.” In
Elspeth Whitney, “International Trends: The Witch ‘she’/the Historian ‘He’: Gender and the Historiography of the European Witch-Hunts,” Journal of Women’s History 7: 3 (Fall 1995), 77.
Maryse Condé, I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994); trans. R. Philcox, Moi, Tituba, Sorcière. . . Noire de Salem (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986). For her possible origins, see
Elaine G. Breslaw, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Beliefs (New York: New York University Press, 1997), pp.12–13.
Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (London: WW Norton, 1987), p. xi. See also
Barbara Rosen, Witchcraft (Stratford-Upon-Avon: Edward Arnold Ltd, 1969), p. 8.
Keri Hulme, The Bone People (London: Pan Books/Picador, 1985), p. 51. See Coetzee, Foe, p. 121.
Derek Walcott, Another Life (1973) (New York: Three Continents Press, 1982), p. 69.
Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (New York: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 170. As Neumann is a follower of Jung, see also C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious 9:1 in Collected Works of C G. Jung (New York: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 82. See also
Noel Cobb, Prospero’s Island. The Secret Alchemy at the Heart of “The Tempest” (London: Coventure, 1984), p. 66.
One can suggest a continuum between Miranda and Sycorax through the Medea story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which Shakespeare had in mind in Prospero’s “Ye elves” speech (5.1.33–57). Medea, who falls in love with Jason, gradually turns into an infanticidal sorceress. On the Medea story, see Lillian Corti, The Myth of Medea and the Murder of Children (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998). Along similar lines, the two versions of the “Widow Dido” story illustrate the duality of the Miranda-Sycorax paradigm. The older, historical tradition, invoked by Gonzalo, in response to Adrian’s “Tunis was never graced before with such a paragon to their queen” (2.1.73–74), indeed heralds Widow Dido as an exemplary ruler and a model of heroic chastity, devoted to the memory of her murdered husband. The later, Virgilian account is of a fallen woman desperately in love with the shipwrecked Aeneas and conscious of her sin. In other words, the virgin and the whore rolled in one. 99. On Arawak tools, see
Basil Reid, “Arawak Archeology in Jamaica: New Approaches, New Perspectives,” Caribbean Quarterly 38:2 & 3 (September 1992), 15–19.
Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection (Paris: Seuil, 1980), trans.
Léon Roudiez, Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), passim.
Marianne Hester, Lewd Women and Wicked Witches: A Study of the Dynamics of Male Domination (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 199 & p. 196.
See George Lang, “In Every Clime: Literary Notes Around the Discovery of Srana-Tongo Creole,” Dutch Crossing 44 (Summer 1991), 60–76; and
Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650–1838 (London: James Currey, 1990), p. 15.
Jordan, p. 163; and George Lang, “Voyageur Discourse and the Absence of a Fur Trade Pidgin,” Canadian Literature 131 (Winter 1991), 58.
James A. Arnold, “The Gendering of Créolité,” in Maryse Condé & Cottenet-Hage, eds., Penser la créolité (Paris: Karthala, 1995), p. 37.
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Zabus, C. (2002). Caribbean Increments to Miranda’s Story. In: Tempests after Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07602-1_6
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