Title: From Caliban and Ariel to Friday: The Evolution of the Identity of the Colonized in English Literature from the Late Renaissance to the Early Eighteenth Century

Abstract: In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, written in the late Renaissance, the barbarous and rude Caliban and the intelligent but obedient Ariel form a set of oppositional slave images. By treating them as archetypes of the colonized, the present paper aims to analyze “the royal slave” Oroonoko in Aphra Behn’s Restoration work and Friday in Defoe’s early eighteenth-century novel. The paper finds that Oroonoko paradoxically unifies the characteristics of Caliban and Ariel, embodying the transitional and ambiguous nature of the colonial issues in the Restoration period, while in Defoe’s work, Friday, as a savage Caliban, is portrayed or constructed as the submissive Ariel. These slaves as literary images reflect that, during the period of nearly two centuries where capitalism and overseas expansion grew rapidly, a radical evolution was under way with the colonial ideology being increasingly intensified and the subjectivity of the colonized continuously collapsing.

Keywords: William Shakespeare, archetype, colonialism, Oroonoko, Friday

Author: Lu Lu, Ph.D candidate, School of Foreign Languages, Peking University, Beijing, China.