Shakespeare's The Tempest

The modernist view of human identity believed that human beings through independent thought and ration developed their ideas, believes, and values. Following the modernists, Postmodernists like the founder of "deconstruction," Jacques Derrida, maintained that all values are a product of culture. To the deconstructionist, meaning is out there but is not knowable through a Western valuation of beliefs, truths, or meaning. From the perspective of the deconstructionist, a text cannot be read as a clear communication from one author with a "distinct message," but must be "read as sites of conflict within a given culture or worldview" (Deconstruction, p. 1).

New criticism might suggest we read Shakespeare's The Tempest as if it were a text that made perfect sense, whereas biographical criticism would urge us to examine the life and experiences of the author to glimpse meaning in the play. Deconstruction maintains that the text will ultimately "contradict itself," while meaning is forged "by binary oppositions, but one item is unavoidably favored or privileged over the other" (Primer, p. 3). For this reason, the unavoidably favored or privileged position of Prospero over Caliban in Shakespeare'r The Tempest lends itself most readily to deconstructive analysis.

As one scholar on deconstruction maintains, "If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying ov

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most brutish (Shakespeare, p. 5). We see how the terminology and meaning associated with it sets up a dualistic reality, in which all things of English origin are considered dominant to anything from the "uncivilized" culture that spawned Caliban. As one deconstructionist explains, "A central deconstructive argument holds that, in all the classic dualities of Western thought, one term is privileged or central over another�[like] identity over difference [or] mastery over submission" (Deconstruction, p. 4). In reality, though Caliban does attempt to rape Miranda, this is not viewed by his culture as a vile or unnatural act, just like cannibalism is not considered taboo among cannibalistic cultures. In this manner, Prospero oppresses and imprisons Caliban and treats him like a brutish and crude human being, primarily because Caliban's culture has forged a contrasting identity and valuation system in him compared to English culture. This is entirely clear in the use of negative imagery and language that Prospero continually uses throughout the play to describe Caliban. In continuing his experience with teaching Caliban, we see that only because he could not adopt English values is Caliban considered inferior or beyond hope, ev

Category: Literature - S