“My Foot My Tutor” – Miranda

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Prospero asks an unanswered question in act 1 scene 2: “My foot my tutor?” when Miranda deplores him to “make not too rash a trial of” Ferdinand (Shakespeare 127). By deeming Miranda as his “foot”, Prospero plainly thinks of her as an object that is under his power. Yet, as the play proceeds, evidence can be found to contest and answer Prospero’s question: Miranda is certainly not Prospero’s “foot” (though he will like to think so) and is, indeed, arguably his “tutor”. Through an examination of Miranda’s interactions with Caliban, Ferdinand and Prospero, her childhood ‘friend’, love interest and father respectively, this essay contends that Miranda could most probably be the true “god of power” (101) that she imagined herself to be in her first speech of The Tempest. The analysis of the relationship between Miranda and Caliban can be divided into two stages: before and after Caliban’s attempted rape. In both stages, Miranda wields great powers over him. Before his attempted rape, she is his self-appointed teacher, “endow(ing) (his) purposes/ with words that made them known” (120). She subordinates him to an inferior position by deeming him to be “a thing most brutish” (120) that should be “pitied” and subjected to the nurturing of her superior education. Miranda forces her will upon Caliban, boisterously teaching “each hour/ One thing or other” to her obviously unwilling student, who wishes upon her “red plague” for making him learn her language (121). His attempted rape is no doubt caused by his own evil desires, but it is also indirectly provoked by Miranda, who although has “taught (him) language”, but his only “profit on’t / is (that he) know how to curse” (121). Hence, Caliban’s attempt “to violate (her) honour” can be rationally seen as an attempt to reverse the power dynamics – for rape is the most obvious physical manifestation of one’s urge to exert power
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