Caliban of the Island People

Prospero, once Duke and now master of the seas, wields great power over the inhabitants of Shakespeare's comedy The Tempest, and after many years turns his dethroning into a new opportunity for control, manipulating the characters' environment to control each character's mental state. Miranda, for example, knows no other life outside the one Prospero tells her to live and therefore follows his advice, whim, and fancy. Ariel, Prospero's spirit-slave, knows only the torturous masterdom of Sycorax, who trapped Ariel in a tree for tweleve years before Prospero saved the poor spirit and set him unto new service, which to Ariel seems like something close to freedom after being trapped by his last master for so long. Caliban, a native of the island and bastard son of Sycorax leads a life with just as narrow a view as the others.
Caliban resents Prospero for stealing Caliban's homeland away, enslaving the poor boy, and keeping him "in this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me the rest o' th' island." The postcolonial article points out one writer whose modern views meld nicely into Shakespeare's own: Frantz Fanon "believes that as soon as the colonized were forced to speak the language of the colonizer, the colonized either accepted or were coerced into accepting the collective consciousness of the French, thereby identifying blackness with evil and sin and whiteness with purity and righteousness." Although Caliban resents Prospero for the man's dictatorial tendencies, Caliban refers to his mother's practices only as negatives, such as "plagues," and reveres to Stephano, a man of 'higher breeding'and of distant lands like Prospero, as "a brave god [who] bears celestial liquor. I will kneel to him." Caliban throws himself at the feet of a man simply because of the man's physical appearance and goods. However much Caliban may despise Prospero, Shakespeare shows that Caliban is bound to make the same mistake he did with Prospero again simply because he believes that even a life of freedom holds the prerequisite of some kind of outside 'master.'