Single Parenting, Homeschooling: Prospero, Caliban, Miranda

This essay explores Prospero’s unconventional parenting of Miranda and Caliban. First, the essay takes up the relationship between parenting and education and compares Prospero’s treatment of Caliban and Miranda in The Tempest. It takes a view of Caliban not only as a colonial subject, but also as Prospero’s adopted child, servant, pupil, and household slave. While Prospero is successful in bringing up Miranda, he fails in educating Caliban. Prospero’s reliance on verbal and physical punishment toward Caliban is disturbing, but Prospero was initially presented as Caliban’s loving surrogate father and teacher until Caliban’s attempted rape of Miranda, which postcolonial criticism has described as a pretext for seizing and annexing colonial power. The essay takes up the issue of women’s education, evidenced in Prospero’s unconventional upbringing of Miranda, beyond the postcolonial perspective which has dominated discussions of The Tempest in the past generation. Contrary to Renaissance humanists’ advocacy of the same-sex mentor system, Miranda’s education lies in the hands of her single father. Despite the period’s bias against this style of education, Prospero’s unorthodox education produces a very modern and well-balanced human being who turns out to possess not only feminine but also masculine attributes.