Elizabeth on Tempest

Miranda Essay (Elizabeth Kirsch)

Jessica Watts, an Australian artist, released a gallery of floral, feminist themed pieces representing a woman’s connection with nature, her natural empowerment, and her beauty apart from male eyes. These paintings reflect Jessica Slights’s argument in her essay “Rape and the Romanticization of Shakespeare’s Miranda.” Slights reveals that many Shakespeare critics discard Miranda as a one-dimensional plot device and having no autonomy of her own under the shadow of her father. However, she provides evidence that Prospero’s daughter is anything but subservient through her directness toward Ferdinand and her loathing of Caliban’s actions. This lack of personality granted to Miranda also robs her human value for the sake of her own person rather than her father’s household. Slights uses analyses of Caliban’s attempted rape of the woman to demonstrate the case: examiners often acquit Caliban of the crime in light of his master’s cruel treatment, placing the blame instead on the victim or her father. Miranda’s virginity is portrayed as being an asset of her father’s economic and socio status rather than a virtue of her own keeping. Slights challenges future Shakespeare readers to read The Tempestconsidering Miranda as her own independent and headstrong woman.