| Chapter 1: | Caliban, Shakespeare’s Transformative Other |
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to Ronald Takaki, “Caliban represented what Europeans had been when they were lower on the scale of development toward civilization…Prospero, personification of civilized man, identified himself as mind rather than body” (899). After contact with Caliban, Prospero fears the threat that existed of regressing to a state of savagery. Therefore, there was a stronger incentive for him than to impose his culture and beliefs onto Caliban. This act breaks down barriers that create misunderstandings, prejudices, and stereotyping. Shakespeare shaped the thought process of his time by manipulating any previous perceptions regarding foreigners, usually from less civilized and underdeveloped regions of the world, a relative Eurocentric phenomenon that dictated the way to gaze upon the other. He used his writing to influence views about the world outside of the center, the area that constituted civilization. The Westerner allows himself a certain sense of freedom in his discourse since his culture is deemed superior and phallocentric. This allows him to recreate Caliban’s world to mirror his image and abolish the mysteries that existed in the peripheries (Orientalism 44). This idea by Said, derived from his study on Orientalism, identifies this concept as political, which allows for the differentiation between us/here and them/ there. He states, “Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’)” (43). This dichotomy has allowed for a variety of interpretations regarding the relationship between the Prosperos and Calibans of the world: the study of the superior versus the inferior, the strong versus the weak, the colonizer versus the colonized. It also allows for the manipulation of knowledge by one group that creates a false image of the one being manipulated. As Walder states with regard to the study and analysis of Caliban as an icon of the colonized peoples,