What is calibans curse/ myth?

Question

Im suppose to do a paper on the book "the picture of Dorian gray" and the preface talks about Caliban so does anyone know what calibans curse is or what calibans myth is?

Answer 1

Caliban is a fictional character in William Shakespeare's The Tempest, a deformed monster who is the slave of Prospero. He is referred to as a mooncalf, a freckled whelp, he is the only human inhabitant of an island that is otherwise "not honored with a human form." In some traditions he is depicted as a wild man, or a beast man, or sometimes a mix of fish and man, stemming from the confusion of two of the characters about what he is, found lying on a beach.

So it can be interpreted that Caliban was not a pretty person who would not wish to look upon his own face for the sorrow he would find there. Therefore what Oscar Wilde is saying is that the 19th century didn't want to look at realism becuase it was ugly and made you sad(Caliban looking in the mirror), whereas romanticism was far more entertaining and beautiful (Caliban not looking in the mirror).

Of course you could make Caliban's curse out to be Dorian's curse. To never look in the mirror to see reality, rather live in the romantic sense that all will stay young and beautiful.

Answer 2

Its not so much a curse, but rather an literary analogy.

"Caliban was originally mostly a comic figure; however, in later years, he became a symbol for the wild, natural man. And, in more recent times, Caliban has been used as a metaphor for colonialism by various postcolonial intellectuals. The fact that, in Shakespeare’s original, neither Caliban nor Sycorax are native to the island is often overlooked in this view."