Abstract
As a literary artifact, The Tempest affords unparallelled latitudes of misreading. The play has been distorted—contracted, abstracted, detracted—in sundry ways, but it is still possible to unearth as yet unnoticed episodes of creative misconstruction. Consider Henry James’s The Awkward Age (1899), the story of a deceitfully naïve girl called Nanda who is harassed by unscrupulous and corrupt young men and finally, somewhat magically, rescued by an elderly benefactor. Her name a fusion of Ferdinand and Miranda, Nanda reinstates Prospero’s ‘more braver daughter’ (The Tempest 1.2.443) to her primal domestic scenario of sexual exposure. The part of the right Duke of Milan is shared by Mrs Brook, the guilty mother, and Mr Longdon, the kindhearted protector who ends up fathering the girl. The novel’s psycho-social drama unfolds in a mental-allegorical space, more specifically in ‘the desert island’ where Mitchy fancies himself ‘[dancing] about with the thrill of it’ in an ‘exhibition of ludicrous gambols’ (266). In this logic of inter-textual equivalence, Mitchy and Vanderbank are jointly cast in the role of Caliban, with Nanda’s mother fully awake to the unnatural condition of both suitors: ‘You’re a pair of monsters and your monstrosity fits’ (186). The term ‘monster’ and its cognates appear more than ten times in a novel not casually described by its author as—bingo!—a ‘monster’.1 This recurrence, we may surmise, spells some mode of semantic trouble. And yet, my intention in registering it is merely to produce a symptom. The centrality accorded to the text’s guest-monster is in keeping with the central part Caliban is given in the successive episodes of The Tempest’s hermeneutic afterlife.
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Having satisfied himself by this profound experiment, that the natives were an honest, social race of jolly rosters, who had no objection to a drinking bout, and were very merry in their cups, the old commodore chuckled hugely to himself, and thrusting a double quid of tobacco in his cheek, directed master Juet to have it carefully recorded, for the satisfaction of all the natural philosophers of the university of Leyden—which done, proceeded on his voyage, with great self-complacency.
Washington Irving, A History of New York
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© 2015 Julián Jiménez Heffernan
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Heffernan, J.J. (2015). Monster. In: Shakespeare’s Extremes. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137523587_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137523587_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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