Caliban’s Body

Abstract

That Caliban is physically repulsive is a given of the play. Everyone who comes into contact with him is repelled by his bodily form and shape. Even Ariel, who is stranger, or more inhuman, than Caliban in his ability to fly and hide and change his shape, and is regarded as quaint and delicate, takes it on himself to side with Prospero in oppressing the ‘monster’ when he and it share a similar fate under the magician’s heavy hand. Most complex, perhaps, of all, is Miranda’s sense of revulsion against Caliban. Having no memory of men or sense of social behaviour other than those learned from contact with her austere and tyrannical father, it is not clear where her feelings of antipathy for Caliban stem from. Whether he attempted to rape or seduce her — ‘violate / The honour of my child’ (I, 2, 349–50) — is not reliably reported; our source for this tale is that most biased of all sexual narrators, the young woman’s own father. She can recall a pristine time when she coddled and nurtured him, taught him to speak English.