Shakespeare’s play The Tempest has long been a subject of postcolonial criticism. Paul Brown’s famous essay “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism” and Francis Barker and Peter Hulme’s work “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest” have both articulated a postcolonial response to the play. Paul Brown, influenced by the work of Edward Said, focuses on how “colonialist discourse voices a demand both for order and disorder, producing a disruptive other in order to assert the superiority of the colonizer” (280) and how, in its attempt to do so, the ideological discourse devolves into self-contradiction and erosion. Barker and Hulme, reacting against what they see as New Critical blindness, insist on the importance of intertextuality when evaluating texts, and go on to identify usurpation as The Tempest’s point of entry into its colonialist context. They try to demonstrate how understanding The Tempest as part of a colonialist discourse can “offer an explanation of features of the play either ignored or occluded by critical practices” (306). Brown and Barker and Hulme share many postcolonial assumptions about texts, including an emphasis on intertextuality and Marxist and psychoanalytic ideas of the political unconscious, though they differ somewhat in how they apply them. Barker and Hulme make a distinction between Prospero’s approach to colonialism and The Tempest’s approach to colonialism that Brown does not make. But even as these writers implement the Postcolonial method, they unintentionally highlight what I perceive as certain of its weaknesses, primarily a narrowness of view that, in its eagerness to use a text to identify and accuse colonialist ideology, sometimes blinds itself to key details—and even the work’s larger significance and meaning.
Central to both Brown and Barker and Hulme’s arguments is the idea of imperialist guilt manifesting in psychoanalytical ways. In his chapter on postcolonial criticism in How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies, Robert Dale Parker describes how “when colonizing people mimic colonized people, the mimicry can suggest the colonizers’ vulnerability, expressed as a desire for what they also suppress” (285). Parker demonstrates that part of colonialist behavior is suppression and displacement (by way of mimicry). The parallels with Freud and psychoanalysis are evident, and so it is no surprise that Brown and Barker and Hulme use psychoanalysis overtly in their essays. Brown and Barker and Hulme place this suppression within the context of colonialist discourse in The Tempest, arguing that the discourse’s own ambivalence toward colonialism is unsuccessfully suppressed within the play. Brown asserts, “The masterful operations of censorship are apparent everywhere in The Tempest,” and he goes on to use explicitly Freudian terms to identify this censorship (289). Similarly, Barker and Hulme argue that, “at the level of character, a psychoanalytic reading would want to suggest that Prospero’s excessive reaction [to Caliban’s plot] represents his disquiet at the irruption into consciousness of an unconscious anxiety concerning the grounding of his legitimacy… as governor of the island” (304). The difference between Brown and Barker and Hulme here is that Brown places this imperialist political unconscious and its manifestations within The Tempest as a whole, while Barker and Hulme attribute it more specifically to Prospero, even arguing that there are two parallel plays at work: Prospero’s, driven by imperialist ideology, and the actual play The Tempest. Incidents such as Caliban’s plot interrupt the smooth unfolding of Prospero’s play, intervening in his colonialist narrative (301). They thus allow for the possibility that The Tempest is not as dominated by a political unconscious as Prospero himself is. They place more distance between Prospero and Shakespeare than Brown does, but nevertheless maintain that the work is enmeshed in, enslaved, even, by a colonialist ideology that manifests in the text (or its characters) psychoanalytically.
And this belief that a text is not autotelic, but rather situated within a discourse, is another key assumption shared by Brown and Barker and Hulme. They respond to earlier critics, especially Kermode and others in the New Critical tradition, who seek to isolate the text from outside history and the influence of other texts and analyze it as a self-sufficient and unified work. They state that “each individual text, rather than a meaningful unit in itself, lies at the intersection of different discourses. . . Strictly speaking, then, it would be meaningless to talk about the unity of any given text” (Barker and Hulme 299). The direct attack on New Criticism here couldn’t be clearer. Sharing this general understanding of a text, Brown frames The Tempest in a particular historical and social context, as an ambivalent work caught in a historical crisis: “This crisis is the struggle to produce a coherent discourse adequate to the complex requirements of British colonialism in its initial phase” (269). Thus, for Brown, The Tempest is not a unified, independent text, but rather a contradictory piece, the result of historical, cultural, literary, and ideological forces at work around it. This fits neatly within the postcolonialist lens: as Parker explains, a key idea of the method is that “[i]n an economy and cultural life that depend on colonial and neocolonial exploitation, colonialism is woven through the literary self-portrait of imperialist nations” (310). We see this ambivalent self-portrait, the postcolonialists would argue, in The Tempest. The work is torn between the colonialist power’s narrative of justification and an undercurrent of self-doubt and accusation (Brown 289-91). These forces are partly a result of the history and discussion occurring at that time. The play cannot, therefore, be viewed independently of the wider discourse surrounding it.
I disagree with this approach on several counts—at least as it is used here. I appreciate the attention to historical setting and intertextuality, an important move for any critical method. But the trouble with Brown and Barker and Hulme’s approach is that, though they draw attention to the importance and power of discourse and context when evaluating a text, they fail to move beyond that point. Rather than seeing colonialist discourse as one of many possible influences on the work, they see it as the only influence, or at least the only one worth mentioning. They reduce the text to an automatic, dependent work, chained by the imperialist ideology surrounding it, unable to do anything but repeat and enact imperialist language while displaying a good deal of imperialist angst. They fail to see that The Tempest might be about more than politics and power dynamics; they ignore the ways in which the story of The Tempest isn’t a story about colonialism. In the words of Deborah Willis, who, in her essay “Shakespeare’s Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” responded quite negatively to Paul Brown’s assessment:
“Some of these [postcolonialist] critics reproduce the very reductiveness they want to avoid. Literature…now too often passively repeats a single, all-consuming discourse. . . In the course of [Brown’s] arguments, Shakespeare’s play becomes almost wholly engulfed by colonial discourse, retaining little separate identity of its own.” (322-23)
I would argue that such an engulfment is unjustified. The play refuses to fit neatly into the colonialist box that the postcolonialist critics have constructed for it.
To begin with, Prospero’s takeover of the island does not mirror the historical colonialism of European powers. Propsero does not come to the island for economic gain or for the increase of power—he is an exile, a castaway. He doesn’t even come by choice. He does not set up industry on the island. His “colony” on the island consists of himself, his daughter, Caliban, and possibly Ariel and the other spirits, although it is unclear how subservient the spirits are to him. Rather than being an expansion of Prospero’s “core” power to a “periphery,” to borrow Marxist terms, Prospero’s island “kingdom” is a replacement for that core power. If it is a colony, then it is a colony with no referential homeland. From this perspective, Prospero’s “project” resembles a ramshackle camp of misfits and outcasts more than it does a despotic colony.
Much of postcolonial criticism, including the work of Brown and Barker and Hulme, centers on Caliban, who is seen as representative of the native peoples that European colonizers abused. “Caliban, scrambled ‘cannibal,’ [is] savage incarnate,” writes Brown (284). According to Brown, the play portrays him as “other. . . the wild man and savage, the emblem of morphological ambivalence” who is “nakedly enslaved to the master” (283). But here again, the analogy does not hold up as strongly as Brown and Barker and Hulme have suggested. For Caliban is not a native to the island—he is only slightly more native than Prospero and Miranda. His mother, we might well argue, was the original “colonizer.” In terms of ancestry, Caliban is Algerian, not of the bloodline of the mysterious island. He and his mother are as much castaways as Prospero and Miranda. Is the Prospero/Caliban relationship really the pattern of colonialism, or is it simply one powerful individual governing a weaker one in a dynamic that could just as easily occur between two people of the same race? It is a question worth exploring further—and without glossing over the details in the way that some postcolonialist critics do.
More features of The Tempest that do not fit with its alleged imperialist “self-portrait” could be explored, but for the moment, the point I wish to make is simply that the postcolonialist method has a tendency to fixate on colonialist discourse and its effect on texts to the point that it ignores details that do not tally with the overriding analogy, and even misses the larger point of the work. The Tempest’s commentary on virtue and vice, natural and supernatural, on what makes someone truly civil or not, seems much more central to me and universally applicable. Shakespeare depicts good and bad “natives,” and good and bad “colonizers,” and it is not their place on the dominance scale but their acts that define them as such, suggesting that Shakespeare has a more complex and realistic view of human nature than the black and white imperialist ideology that supposedly informs his play.
Works Cited
Barker, Francis an Peter Hulme. “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest.” The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, edited by Gerald Graff and James Phelan, Bedford/St. Martins, 2009, pp. 292-309.
Brown, Paul. “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Ideology.” The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, edited by Gerald Graff and James Phelan, Bedford/St. Martins, 2009, pp. 269-292
Parker, Robert Dale. How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. 2nd ed., New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011.
Willis, Deborah. “Shakespeare’s Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism.” The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, edited by Gerald Graff and James Phelan, Bedford/St. Martins, 2009, pp. 321-333.