Lead, Kindly Light

From an assignment I entitled, “The Collateral Effects of Exile and Immigration”

In examining Prospero’s exile in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, many interpretations focus on the deposed duke and how the consequent expulsion influences him. However, deeper exploration leads one to examine the additional effects of exile on Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, whom one may appropriately view as a collateral victim of the dislocation because though she did not provoke the exile, she endured the consequences of it. Through Miranda, Shakespeare makes a profound comment on the theme of involuntary separation from one’s home by illustrating its effect on her, a bystander: it hinders one’s ability to establish a complete and sure sense of self identity. The consequent, adverse effects of this problem manifest themselves in one’s incomplete perspectives of reality. In reexamining my own experiences as a second-generation Chinese immigrant who struggled with uncertain identity, I find that Shakespeare’s insight helps me understand that troubling aspect of my childhood as he illuminates the source of the alienation and confusion I often felt but could never articulate.

Shakespeare’s portrayal of Miranda as a rootless girl without a strong sense of self or identity due to an insufficient connection with either her ancestral past or present community is one that mirrors my own struggle with identity as a child. An early conversation with Prospero clearly testifies to Miranda’s rootlessness as a collateral victim of his exile. In the midst of Prospero’s explanation of his personal history as duke, she says, “You have often begun to tell me what I am, but stopped and left me to a bootless inquisition, concluding ‘Stay. Not yet’” (1.2.42-45). Because she left her home at a very young age, she has no memory of her past; thus, any understanding she has of her native culture stems not from her own experience but from her father’s declarations of who she is. Consequently, she bases her connection with her ancestral past on the subjective evidence her father provides rather than on her own experiences as part of that heritage community, which would have exceedingly more credibility to her surety of self–and therefore, heightened foundational value. Furthermore, Shakespeare highlights the negative results of her unsure sense of identity in her reactions to various circumstances. In one such instance, Miranda protests mightily at Prospero’s maltreatment of Ferdinand. “Why speaks my father so ungently?…Pity move my father to be inclined my way” (1.2.534, 537). By portraying Miranda as unable to appreciate the ill will her father has towards Ferdinand and his father due to her weak and unsatisfactory connection with her past, Shakespeare demonstrates its adverse effect on her. I see a parallel between this and my own life as an American-born Chinese who never experienced life as a Chinese youth in a Chinese environment. I did not regularly interact with Chinese people apart from my parents; therefore, like Miranda, my connection to my ethnic heritage was limited to ideals and experiences that my parents passed on to me. These failed to constitute a strong groundwork for my sense of self-identity because they were not truly my own experiences. I did not feel fully–or even primarily–Chinese because of so many things I lacked: mastery of the language, interaction with other members of the Chinese community and its inherent cultural enrichment, and an upbringing under the constructs and constraints of Chinese society.

In addition to Miranda’s deprivation of her historical culture, Shakespeare also reveals her lack of adequate connection with her present community; moreover, the play shows that Miranda’s—and my own—uncertain sense of self-identity is a natural consequence of the combined effects of deficient ties to both past and present. As Miranda later relays to Ferdinand, she had no prior contact with anyone she considers human apart from her father on Sycorax’s island: “I do not know one of my sex, no woman’s face remember, save, from my glass, mine own. Nor have I seen more that I may call men than you, good friend, and my dear father” (3.1.59-63). The only other creatures with whom she has interacted are Caliban, a black native, and Ariel, a spirit. Because Miranda cannot commune with either one on a personal level because of her father’s restraint and their stark differences, she does not have anyone in her present community with whom to relate. Thus, she is destitute of roots, unable to establish a self based on her own vision of her heritage or current society. Again, I relate fully to Miranda’s plight as I recall feeling entirely out of place throughout grade school. My social community as a child consisted of predominantly Caucasian children. Because I looked physically different from my peers, some of them often ridiculed and made fun of me. Furthermore, although I had Caucasian friends, I did not ever feel that I was truly part of their community. For instance, my immigrant parents’ relative isolation from the broader, Caucasian community was the source of my ignorance about many of my friends’ activities. The value systems upon which we were raised were very different: one evident manifestation was the way their parents lavished frivolous gifts and privileges upon them in ways that my frugal parents would never consider. Though the differences did not disturb me greatly, I was aware of them and they only served to increase the chasm of cultural difference between my peers and me. Moreover, many of the customs and traditions they observed—such as large family gatherings for Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve—were not ones that I could relate to because my extended family celebrated neither holiday, nor were they geographically accessible for reunions. Therefore, like Miranda, I struggled with establishing an identity based either on the past or present, as I felt sufficiently tied to neither. Until I examined the parallels that bind my own experiences to Shakespeare’s construction of Miranda’s life as a victim of involuntary separation, I did not recognize the causes of my alienation so clearly and was therefore unable to articulate them, much less understand them fully.

Besides ascertaining the causal relationship of Miranda’s dislocation at a young age and her ambiguous self-identity, Shakespeare tackles the consequences of this inadequacy by demonstrating how it narrows her perceptions of reality and leaves her ignorant of insights essential to her understanding of events occurring around her. For example, because she is completely insensible of Prospero’s perspective towards the King of Naples and the new Duke of Milan, Miranda does not understand why he brings the tempest upon Alonso’s ship. She protests and claims that she would never subject the ship and its men to such a terror at the start of Act 1, scene 2. Moreover, even after Prospero explains how Alonso and Antonio betrayed and deposed him, she still asks, “And now I pray you, sir—for still ‘tis beating in my mind—your reason for raising this sea storm?” (1.2.209-211), demonstrating her persisting inability to understand and appreciate her father’s acts of vengeance. Because she neither identifies herself with his past nor views her own heritage as inseparable from his, she cannot develop a perception that coheres with his. Likewise, as an American of Chinese descent, I often could not understand many of my parents’ firmly-held convictions regarding education, diminished autonomy in the event of conflict with tradition, a seemingly overwhelming duty to family, and other ideals. Thus, Shakespeare’s comment on Miranda’s life corresponds to my own in that, had my parents raised me in a Chinese society, I would have formed a definite and desirable sense of Chinese identity. Therefore, my struggle to conform my perception to that of my parents’ would not be so difficult because my perception would be completely informed, corresponding fully to my own sense of self. Furthermore, I could have avoided a cultural limbo and thus would have been able to identify with one culture fully and own its values and traditions confidently.

Though riddled with references to ancient Greek gods and saturated with language of sixteenth-century England, aspects of Shakespeare’s The Tempest are nonetheless relevant to me, a student studying his work in twenty-first century America. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Miranda’s character as resultant of her circumstances of childhood displacement provides me with a remarkable understanding of my own history as a child who often wondered about which identity to embrace. His analysis of the collateral consequences of involuntary separation shows why I often found myself confused as to whether I was truly American or Chinese. It also proves to me that, given my circumstances as an American-born Chinese in a predominantly non-Chinese society, it was natural not to feel part of either culture nor grasp the ideals of Chinese or American society. Now that I am older, I have accumulated enough experience to glean from and synthesize parts of both cultures to form my sense of self, but Shakespeare’s Miranda sheds an insight into my life that helps me come to terms with my oft-confounded childhood.