Prospera’s Whip and Other Props of Bardolatry: Toward an Intersectionalist Re-telling of The Tempest

Abstract

This essay engages in a cross-analysis of four woman-authored “island stories” from both black and white perspectives, employing disparate vocabularies of skin color, and covering a spectrum of attitudes toward Shakespeare’s The Tempest, from the thinly veiled bardolatry of Julie Taymor’s The Tempest screenplay (2010), to a stance I may go so far as to call “bard-blind.” The bulk of the discussion pits Gloria Naylor’s womanist fable, Mama Day (1988), against Caryl Cude Mullin’s young adult novel Rough Magic (2009), two texts which seem to offer a feminist critique of The Tempest by foregrounding the story of Sycorax, but which radically contrast in their attitudes toward Shakespeare, in their ideological underpinnings, and—ultimately—in their degree of artistic coherence. More specifically, I will argue that Naylor’s deconstruction of racial binaries and critique of phallogocentrism stand as the counter example to Mullin’s misguided pseudofeminism and muddled racial politics—both effects of her uncritical approach to Shakespeare’s masculinist-colonialist message. I conclude with a surprising intertext, Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State (2014), whose accidental titular allusion ironically underscores its critical (shall we say) “innocence.” For Gay’s novel, though a rape-narrative set on an island, owes nothing to Shakespeare's dramatization of misogynist violence in The Taming of the Shrew and owes nothing to his colonialist parable, The Tempest. Indeed, the book contrasts point for point with the preceding Tempest retellings not only by virtue of its realism but also by virtue of its unswervingly progressive gender and racial politics.