The Silenced Witch in "The Tempest" by William Shakespeare. Unvoiced Female Alterity in Popular Culture

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Münster, language: English, abstract: The paper is about the silenced Witch in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and reinterpretates the unvoiced female alterlity in popular culture. The thesis is that the witch Sycorax transcends gender boundaries by baring similarities to the male character in the play and therefore showing that men and women are equal or can potentially be equal if certain immutable traits like race and gender are not seen hierarchically in terms of power and superiority. Taymor, by claiming to perform a feminist approach, merely omits presenting Sycorax at all: She selects passages dealing with Sycorax from the original and evades them visually and audibly in her film, trying to moderate Sycorax's appearance, but actually erasing her completely out of discourse, which, by implication, is not unquestionably feminist.