Miranda's Story

Abstract

The ‘real ancestor’ of the American Dark Lady was Margaret Fuller. In her major feminist treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she wrote about her own experience as the Dark Lady under a literary persona borrowed from another Shakespearean character. She proudly painted herself as Miranda. Fuller's Miranda is an American feminist intellectual, ‘a woman, who, if any in the world could, might speak without heat and bitterness of the position of her sex’. The reasons why Fuller called herself ‘Miranda’, and the relevance of The Tempest in understanding the cultural tradition of American women writers are discussed. American women writers from Fuller to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Katherine Anne Porter, Sylvia Plath, and Gloria Naylor have revised the figure of Miranda in thinking about their relationship to patriarchal power, language, female sexuality, and creativity. The revision of Miranda and The Tempest could be seen as a strategy of legitimation which looks to Shakespeare's sister in order to validate the work of Margaret Fuller and other non-canonical American women writers.