1

Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Department of English

and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Amira Smoudi

Marina Warner’s Indigo: Mirroring of

Colonization through space and time

Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A.

2016

2

3

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,

using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author’s signature

4

5

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my supervisor prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. for her

valuable advice provided for this thesis.

6

Table of Contents

1. Introduction ............................................................................................................. 8

2. Indigo’s literary template: Retelling of The Tempest ............................................. 10

2.1 Parallels of characters ...................................................................................... 18

3. Reflection of colonial issues in fairy tales and myths ............................................ 25

3.1 Serafine I .......................................................................................................... 26

3.2 Serafine II ........................................................................................................ 27

3.3. Serafine ........................................................................................................... 32

3.4 Serafine’s stories: the island’s heritage ........................................................... 33

4. The impact of colonization in a mirroring structure .............................................. 36

4.1 Repeating history ............................................................................................. 37

5. Conclusion: Warner’s mirroring to interconnect colonization’s impact through

space and time ........................................................................................................... 38

Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 39

Resumé ....................................................................................................................... 42

Résumé ....................................................................................................................... 43

7

8

1. Introduction Marina Warner dedicated her writing career to the exploration of cultural and gender

debates. The thesis is concerned with her novel Indigo or, Mapping the Waters in

connection with colonialism and the reflective mechanism that the novel uses to

perform the issue. For this purpose, William Shakespeare’s, The Tempest is chosen for

analysis being Indigo’s literary template. Warner also uses historical facts of

colonization and political and national perceptions of England and the Caribbean. Her

aim to apply the colonial theme in her work lies within her family history. Indigo

therefore reflects Warner’s autobiographical features as well.

The major secondary sources include the study The English Novel In History,

1950-1995 by Stephen Connor, the work “Marina Warner's Indigo As Ethical

Deconstruction And Reconstruction” by Eileen Williams-Wanquet, studies Britské

spisovatelky na přelomu tisíciletí and “Marina Warner: Mythology, Fairy Tale and

Realism” by Milada Franková and the articles “Spinning a yarn with Marina Warner”

and “What next, Miranda? Marina Warner’s Indigo” by Chantal Zabus.

Stephen Connor, provides a survey of Indigo and its literary template The

Tempest. In depth he analyzes the relationship between the two books in terms of the

plot and the resemblance of the books’ main characters. Eileen Williams-Wanquet

concentrates on revisiting the past in Indigo and the autobiographical and historical

references. Milada Franková explains Warner’s aim in rewriting to pursue the female

stand. Chantal Zabus provides an interview with Marina Warner, who talks about her

family and its imprints in Indigo.

The first chapter will analyze Indigo’s purpose to deal with postcolonial history

and the motive to rewrite The Tempest. Further on, it will focus on the closer parallels of

the two works. The thesis will explore Warner’s dealing with The Tempest’s characters

that are put into the seventeenth and twentieth century layers of the novel. Indigo offers

9

a modern retelling of the story and its characters are as well more modern due to their

demythologization. Nevertheless, the rewriting goes even further as it also involves

feminism and thus provides the female plot of The Tempest.

The second chapter will be concerned with Warner’s mythological study.

Indigo’s reflection of colonial issues in fairy tales and myths deals with three fairy tales.

Each of them serves as a parallel to the characters of Indigo and includes also a general

message that can be read as a moral upon colonization.

The last chapter analyzes Warner’s dealing with space and time and the

repeated blur of the two time periods and places. It provides the notion of repeating

history via colonial issues that are continuing from the past to the present.

10

2. Indigo’s literary template: Retelling of The Tempest The masterpiece of Marina Warner, Indigo or, Mapping the Waters, deals with

mirroring, considering the writer combines two different time frames and geographical

spaces, as the novel evolves alternately between London in the twentieth century and

the West Indies in the seventeenth century, which altogether mirror and mingle. These

separate worlds are, as the story goes on, continuously connected with its characters

interchanging within time, which creates a notion of revisiting the past, as well as it

develops a moralistic level, due to, according to Williams-Wanquet in “Marina

Warner’s Indigo as Ethical Deconstruction and Reconstruction”, “using fantasy and

magic realism for an ideological purpose” (268). For this purpose, Indigo’s ‘real world’

also incorporates Caribbean fairy tales and myths. Not only does the novel include

reflecting elements within the storyline, it also reflects its literary template – The

Tempest by William Shakespeare, as well as historical facts (although Warner is

preferably concentrated on the emotional impact that colonization brought on the

society rather than the historical events), and autobiographical features. Accordingly,

Warner “grounds her novel in geographical, historical, and autobiographical reality,

thus connecting her readers to the world outside the page” (Williams-Wanquet 269).

Marina Warner is an English writer, who is noticed for her novels, which, as

Milada Franková argues in her analysis Marina Warner: Mythology, Fairy Tale and

Realism, “reflect late twentieth-century literary and cultural debates and at the same

time retain a realistic narrative mode and are concerned with the problems of the real

world” (37). Anna Rutherford notes in the journal Kunapipi that the most significant of

them is The Lost Father, which has won a Regional Prize of the Commonwealth

Writer’s Prize (504). Warner’s work encompasses a variety of fields of interests,

starting from the novels and tales, up to historical studies and literary and cultural

analyses, which contains themes of culture and the gender roles, as well as fairy tales

11

and myths. Her large scale of survey is applied in Indigo, as it includes her focus on

female symbolism and her study of Caribbean mythology. Kathleen Wheeler, in the

study A Critical Guide to Twentieth-century Women Novelists, appreciates the variety of

specialization which forms a unique style of Warner’s writing, since she “explore[s] and

push[es] beyond the familiar limits of fiction” (335). However, even though Indigo

enters to the fantastic world and thus shows an original postmodern structure, the

contribution of the work is aimed at the readers’ absorbing of the colonial impact and its

morals through the closeness to the novel’s characters. This feature is created by the

effect of mirroring and also, as Franková notes, by Warner’s ability to portray the

stories realistically and that the characters are ‘rooted in the real contemporary world

(Franková 2012: 37).

Indigo was published in 1992 as a postcolonial interpretation of the colonial

efforts of England in the Caribbean during the 17th century, containing the retelling of

Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as well as the elements of issues that colonialism had

brought in the society, such as slavery, religious and cultural struggles, with the

oppressed female position in the newly created patriarchal world. Warner also

experiments with space and time; consequently, she creates an extraordinary storyline

which is mirroring itself through and through. The story is set in two separate times and

geographical spheres – the Caribbean world of the colonial expansion period and

England during a part of the 20th century.

The seventeenth-century period of the plot deals with the ‘witch’ Sycorax, who

lives on the imaginary Caribbean island of Liamuiga and is known in the village for

being well versed in herbal medicine and an indigo dye. One day she rescues Dulé – an

African baby she saves by cutting the belly of his dead mother who has been washed

ashore from a slave ship: “When she unfolded the young woman inside the green leaves

12

in which she was wrapped, she could feel the shape of the infant inside as she had seen

in her walking dream, so she took the oyster knife and she cut through the wall of the

young woman’s abdomen” (Warner 1993: 84). It has been viewed by some villagers as

a rather ‘scary miracle’ that Dulé has survived the incident: “It wasn’t natural, some

said. It was pure witchcraft,” and Sycorax got abandoned by her husband (Warner 1993:

85). In consequence, she leaves the village and settles in a tree house that later becomes

a shelter for one more child – an Arawak girl called Ariel who has been brought to

Sycorax by her brother Tiguary: “When Sycorax took her in, Ariel was homeless,

another strangers’ child, who refused to work for food and shelter” (Warner 1993: 96).

Even though nurturing the two children, Sycorax becomes a sort of enemy to them as

they grow up, since she forces them to live with her in the tree house and teaches them

the indigo dye. Dulé, because of the lack of communication with his peers, breaks free

and lives separately: “Then he was gone altogether, to learn the language of the men in

her tribe and leave childhood behind him” (Warner 1993: 105). Before Ariel follows his

footsteps, the island is invaded by a British colonist Kit Everard, who attacks the tree

house with fire (Sycorax suffers an injury by being burnt that later kills her) and with

his crusade captures Sycorax and Ariel as hostages due to their cultural distinction

which is viewed as ‘dangerous’ and ‘life threatening’:

‘Imbeciles!’ muttered Kit. ‘She won’t eat you, you prize imbeciles.’

‘That’s exactly what she would do,’ said Tom Ingledew, weakly. ‘If we let her.

And you’re doing your best to help her.’ (Warner 1993: 139)

During this captivity, Kit and Ariel create a sort of romance which escalates in

bearing Kit’s child – Roukoubé. Subsequently, an uprising by the natives is being

organized (in which Dulé takes part) when realizing that they cannot stand the usurping

that has been imposed on them and that there is no chance of dealing with the British

13

peacefully: “the islanders struck, in greater numbers than ever before, and armed with

muskets and other stolen firepower” (Warner 1993: 181). In this uprising (in which

Dulé takes part) Sycorax suffers an injury by being burnt out from her tree house, which

later kills her. Ariel fortunately manages to escape but the treacherous behaviour of

Dulé is being punished by cutting his legs up to his hamstrings and renaming him

Caliban, as Kit states in a letter to his father: “Some of my men call him ‘cannibal’,

seeking to undo the power of his monstrousness by naming it, like conjuring. ’Tis to my

mind a false notion, and I prefer the lisping usage of the children, Caliban,” (Warner

1993: 201).

The storyline of the twentieth century is happening in England with the

descendants of Kit Everard – Sir Anthony Everard, his wife Gillian and their daughter

Xanthe, and Sir Ant’s son with his former wife Estelle Desjours, Kit; his wife Astrid

and their daughter Miranda. The connection with the past is bridged by the maid

Serafine who is retelling the young Xanthe and Miranda Caribbean myths. Both girls

are later in life involved in a renewed invasion of the islands because of the

development of a tourist hotel. The lives of the girls end differently: Xanthe gets

drowned and Miranda has a child Feeny with the black actor George Felix who is

playing Caliban in a production of The Tempest.

Lisa G. Propst, in her work “Unsettling stories: Disruptive Narrative Strategies

in Marina Warner’s Indigo and The Leto Bundle”, argues that Warner’s Indigo forms

“strategies that invite readers to share the same dilemma of how to respond to the lives

of silenced people”. The novel “ask(s) how to imagine the stories of the oppressed

without risking false empathy or reducing the nuances of history to allegory” (331). The

intention to write Indigo, was to write about colonialism and nationalism issues

included. Indigo is therefore influenced by real events and carries autobiographical

14

features of Warner’s own family roots and historical facts which are immersed into a

fictional story.

Concerning the mirroring of the geographical features, Warner presents a map at the

beginning of the book which displays the two fictive islands of Liamuiga and Oualie. In

reality, the Caribbean islands reflect the islands of St. Kitts and Nevis which is also

being proven: “where the waters of the Atlantic wept up against the Caribbean Sea”

(Warner 1993: 123). The historical facts about colonization correspond to reality in

terms of the conditions and possibilities of the Caribbean inhabitants opposed to the

British colonizers. Warner mainly focuses on the colonizers’ aim of usurpation and thus

their mentality, since, as Terence Hawkes notes in the study The Empire Writes Back:

Theory And Practice In Post-Colonial Literatures, “In the Caribbean, the European

imperial enterprise ensured that the worst features of colonialism throughout the globe

would all be combined in the region” (145).

The autobiographical features are imprinted in the character of Kit Everard who

“is obviously the fictive counterpart of Marina Warner’s ancestor Sir Thomas Warner”,

who was the first settler of St. Kitts alternatively Liamuiga in Indigo (Williams-

Wanquet 269). The contemporary family of Marina Warner is shown in the twentieth-

century period of Everard’s family in London due to the fact that Warner’s family was

also “born and bred in the West Indies” and that Warner’s grandfather who is reflected

in the character of Sir Anthony Everard, was “born in Trinidad and then went to live to

London” (Williams-Wanquet 270). In the interview “Spinning a Yarn with Marina

Warner” by Chantal Zabus, the author herself describes the portraying of her

grandfather as she mentions the connection of the grandfather’s love for cricket and Sir

Everard’s invention of a fictional game of Flinders:

15

My grandfather was this quintessential English thing: he was the

captain of the English cricket team. In those days, the captain of a

cricket team was the alternative to the King of England. (...) There was

such a hierarchy in the game itself. Cricket epitomizes the British view

of its own colonialism- mannerly, courteous, calm and effective. It

crystallizes in itself the British view of themselves as colonizers. They

west not Goths or Huns; they came in with cricket, the civilizing art of

cricket (522).

In the interview Warner continues with revealing her family history which

explains the mirroring of Kit Everard and his child with Ariel – baby Roukoubé or Red

Bear Cub – in Warner’s family: “In the seventeenth century, Thomas Warner, who was

the first settler of the island of St. Kitts in the 1623, and was made Governor of the West

Indies by the King of England, was married to a local woman. By that marriage he had a

son who was known by the name Indian Warner” (Zabus 1994a: 522). Also other

characters echo in the story such as the Everards’ black maid Serafine Killebree who is

in real life the portrait of Warner’s grandfather’s black cricket trainer (called Killibree);

Miranda who is somewhat a portrait of the author herself and others, for instance

Tiguary who reflects the “native chief of the islands in 1618, Tegremane” (Williams-

Wanquet 270).

Warner’s major impulse to write about colonial history and its impact is set in

her own family history, as she says “After the war my father opened an English

bookshop in Cairo, and it had been burnt down during the first wave of anti-British riots

in 1952 – I hope one day to write about this, something to do with the colonial situation

and growing nationalism” (Zabus 1994a: 519). The reason why Warner chose to write

about the colonial history and includes a rewriting of an old play, which may also be set

16

in the colonial sphere, is explained as Williams- Wanquet quotes Warner: “This impulse

towards returning to the past, to a topos in the past and rewriting it has become highly

characteristic of contemporary fiction, especially when its concerns are polemical:

returning to the past, re-visioning it” (267). To rephrase the message of the colonial

subject, Franková in her work Britské spisovatelky na přelomu tisíciletí, says, that the

novel is categorized as postcolonial literature, and in this context it is considered to be

another modern rewriting of Shakespeare’s drama The Tempest, while simultaneously

carrying elements of Warner’s historical-literary-critical exploration of traditional fairy

tales (122).

Indeed, Indigo’s rewriting of The Tempest is considered, as Stephen Connor

notes in The English Novel in History 1950-1995, to be one of the most “impressive”

and “provocative” rewritings (186). However, the book is “more of an improvisation

upon its original than an attempt to translate it” (Connor 186), Warner is not

concentrated on the close rewriting of the story, as she is pretty much directing the work

towards the ability to retell the story in a more generalized contemporary scene. Even

though it is considered to be the most famous and creative rewriting of the play,

Franková says that at the beginning of the 90’s with respect to postcolonial critical

theory, it was no novelty to create a postcolonial interpretation of Shakespeare’s The

Tempest (Franková 2003: 130). Moreover, Indigo is not the only work applying

rewriting in the postcolonial mode, The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and Foe by J.

M. Coetzee are also very much influenced by their literary templates concerned with the

colonial setting and theme (Franková 2003: 130). The usage of Shakespeare’s figures in

the rewriting has brought The Tempest closer to the contemporary readers and blends

the view on colonization from an old and contemporary point of view. Further, the

rewriting incorporates the supernatural world of fairy tales and myths, as Warner says:

17

“it is important to tell the ugly story as it is to tell the reparatory tale” (Franková 2012:

41). This makes the storyline and its characters in both time frames two sided, since

Warner views history and its events with an opened mind and “suggest that an original

truth exists, which could be retrieved and retraced. But there is always another story

beyond the story” (Franková 2012: 41). Despite the usage of the supernatural world in

the story, Indigo remains a valuable historical and cultural study: “The fantastic and

mythological features of The Tempest tend to be explained away rationally” and “the

realistic detail and overall realistic floor-plan predominate” (Franková 2012: 42).

Besides, this colonial theme and writing about the reflection of Warner’s ancestors, the

writer highlights the feminine “just as debates about representation came to the forefront

of feminist and postcolonial theory in the late 1980s” (Propst 2009: 334). All in all,

choosing Shakespeare as a literary template for this novel was wise as Bogosyan Natali

quotes Terence Hawkes in Postfeminist Discourse in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and

Warner’s Indigo: Ambivalence, Liminality and Plurality: “Shakespeare is a powerful

ideological weapon, always available in periods of crisis, and used according to the

exigencies of the time to resolve crucial areas of indeterminacy” (12). The play serves

to the post-colonial writers as an “‘allegory of colonial relations’” (13).

The Tempest was written and first performed, as Harold Bloom notes in

Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in 1611, and it is considered that Shakespeare wrote this

piece entirely on his own (xv). The play is significant, as Cao Li argues in her study The

Colours of Fiction: From Indigo/Blue to Maroon/Black (A study on of Miranda’s Story

in Indigo, for being “the most widely rewritten literary texts in the wake of postcolonial

concerns” (73). It was noticed for the relationship between Prospero and Caliban, which

could be viewed as a “metaphor for the encounter between colonizer and colonized” and

18

in this relation was used by George Lamming in the Pleasures of Exile which is

considered to be “one of the early influential rereadings of the play” (Connor 187).

2.1 Parallels of characters

Warner’s motivation for gaining from Shakespeare’s The Tempest as the other

writers have done is due to the fact that the play “offers itself as a pattern book, from

which to cut new clothing” (Franková 2012: 40). Warner becomes inspired by the

characters of The Tempest but also recreates stories or features that the play does not

offer and places these ‘vintage’ characters into a real historical scene of the colonization

of the Caribbean. The fact that the Shakespearean figures are now dealing with a real

historical scene “sheds the fantastic in favour of the realistic” and “demythologizes the

figures” (Franková 2012: 42). The characters that can be viewed as mirrors from The

Tempest to the characters of Indigo are Sycorax, Ariel, Caliban and Prospero. They are

put into both of the time frames the seventeenth and twentieth centuries and Warner

uses these quasi-mythological figures to reflect the impact of the colonization on the

same-called characters in Indigo and exposes them to the classic themes of issues, such

as “exploitation, slavery and racism” (Bogosyan vi). The retelling of this historical

period that is significant for being dark, full of loss is being “doubled” and “reinforced”

by including such a classic author as Shakespeare. Warner connects her four

demythologized characters into “the wider context of a historical-political-cultural

field” and on that terms challenges the colonial authority (Williams-Wanquet 273).

Stephen Connor calls Warner’s exploration of blurring the old with the new and

mythological with ‘real’ as a “change of attitude towards a play that […] has been an

alluring model for a number of novelists” (187). She intentionally changes the moral

fiber, Williams-Wanquet argues, so she could “fill in the gaps and blanks of the play”

and by that make them useful for her purpose in Indigo, to fill “the absence of female

19

voices” and “the life and civilization of the other side, of the islanders in the Caribbean

before the occupation and colonization of their land” (268). Warner is therefore

responding to the change of attitudes towards The Tempest, since starting from the

1970’s the interpretation of the play has been more towards the “relations of power

between Prospero, the colonizer, and Caliban and Ariel, the colonized subjects, marking

the change from imperialist to postimperialist attitudes towards race and class” (273).

To start with Sycorax, the modification is being used with transforming the ‘evil

witch’ from The Tempest to a humanized ‘milder witch’, as Sycorax in Indigo is

considered to be mostly a healer, “who becomes a witch in the colonizer’s interpretation

of their fatal encounter” (Franková 2012: 41). Shakespeare’s Sycorax is not present in

the play but is continuously mentioned in connection with having ‘dark powers’ and

being connected with the devil. In contrast, Warner’s Sycorax is a respectable indigo

maker who takes care of Ariel and Dulé and uses only herbs: “Her brother, Tiguary, did

not object to her repudiation, or make it the pretext for a feud between their villagers; he

announced that Sycorax was filled with sangay, preternatural insight and power, and her

membership of their family a signal blessing” (Warner 1993: 86). Nevertheless, both of

them are linked with being feared by the people, since having ‘powers’ is in both cases

to the others ‘fearsome’. In addition, both of the figures are expelled from their homes

as Shakespeare’s Sycorax gets expelled from Argier:

This damned witch Sycorax,

For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible

To enter human hearing, from Argier,

Thou know’st, was banished. (Shakespeare 1.2.12)

and Warner’s is put into exile to a different part of the island to live alone with her

practices: “He would have had to propose an end to her stay himself eventually, for

20

women with certain powers of enchantment were customarily required to live in

seclusion” (Warner 1993: 88). The fear is later on mainly spread among the colonizers,

which escalates into Sycorax’s injury. This puts a different light on the Shakespearean

character, as it challenges a feared character being ‘good’ but punished for her

dissimilarity. Warner highlights the colonization’s impact in treating a different culture

with fear and thus trying to destroy it as well as it challenges the feminine stand in this

task: “Sycorax represents the narrow-mindedness that accuses intelligent women of

being witches because they are threatening. She gives back a voice to the silenced

female presence in The Tempest who never appears onstage,” (Williams- Wanquet 274).

Another significant character that deals with punishment is Dulé, who gets his

feet cut by the colonizers and is also mirrored with a ‘negative’ character from

Shakespeare –Caliban. They are linked with the ‘dark destiny’ caused by their origin.

Caliban is a son of the witch Sycorax and the devil. The specific mother and unspecified

father is shared with the ‘birth’ of Dulé, since he comes from the womb of a dead

African slave. Warner deals here with the issue of racism, and connects the black colour

with the belief that it is ‘sinful’- the devil’s child. Warner is taking Shakespeare’s

Caliban’s description of Caliban that he is “not honour’d with human shape” and

implicates it in terms of the history of slavery. As in Sycorax’s case, the people are

afraid of Dulé’s dissimilarity which by the colonizers is taken onto another level when

they rename him Caliban and treat him as a slave. The notion of being a monster

because of coming from spurned parents in Caliban’s case is in Indigo drawn on Dulé’s

“strange birth and his later disfigurement by the European slavers (...). Dulé is no longer

a hideous monster, but the victim of the real devil – slavery” (Williams-Wanquet 275).

Warner is therefore turning the tables, and shifting the guilt towards the colonizers,

since even though they are the ones calling Dulé Caliban, they perform the devilish.

21

The colonizers in Indigo are mostly drawn on the Everard family, and are

mirrored in the central figure of The Tempest, Prospero. Prospero is a symbol of the

patriarchal tendency to own and to rule under his terms. “Prospero becomes symbolic of

an imperialist mentality, which is defined by the desire to possess others; it persist

through the ages and is the root cause for the repeated violence of the history”

(Williams- Wanquet 276). Making this human figure from The Tempest an inhuman

spirit of the colonizers (the history of colonization), it decreases the male voice. The

connection between Ariel and Dulé is in terms of usurpation analyzed by Chantal Zabus

in “What next, Miranda? Marina Warner’s Indigo”: “‘Ariel and Caliban/Dulé (...)

embody the original Arawak and African forced labour needed by the mutation in the

land, labours ratio which followed as a result of Western Europe’s first-phase expansion

into the Americas’” (84).

In Indigo and The Tempest, the characters of Ariel are connected with serving to

others and not having their own voice, they serve as a “metaphor for the exile and

extinction of a whole peoples” (Williams-Wanquet 275). Both Ariel figures are kept by

Sycoraxs’ in a “cloven pine” or “tree house”. ‘In Indigo, the Indian girl is trying to leave

the tree house to live independently whereas in The Tempest, the spirit is striving for

independence in order not to serve Prospero. From this imprisoned ‘spirit’ nevertheless

results offspring who becomes in Indigo the representation of a blend of cultures (the

colonized and the colonizers), since Indigo is “full of such rehearsals and resurrections

that links the generations beyond blood tides, across time and space” (Williams-

Wanquet 275). The Arawak Ariel has an illegitimate child with a ‘white’ Kit Everard:

“The story of Ariel’s baby Roukoubé, which is to Warner ‘the kernel of Indigo’, best

embodies the suppressed history of miscegenation, ‘of the intermarriage of the early

colonists (which) is never told’” (Zabus 1994b: 86). Kit is in this unlawful relationship

22

mirrored with Ferdinand and his “submerged fantasies of rape” (Zabus 1994b: 86).

Roukoubé therefore symbolizes a created life not made from love but who gives an

important message of racial consciousness: “he is a hybrid, the result of a transgressive

choice” (Zabus 1994b: 85).

Similarly as Roukoubé is created the character of Miranda, who is in Indigo also the

descendant of a Creole, as Sir Ant is married “in the 1920s to the Creole Estelle

Desjours, which then explains the fact that our contemporary Miranda has a ‘touch of

tar brush’ from her grandmother’s Creole blood” (Zabus 1994b: 85). She symbolizes an

independent female voice in the twentieth century that smoothes the footprints of one’s

origin and creates her own destiny. Miranda is aware of her mixed race and she escapes

the cycle of the ‘powers’ and ‘revenge’: “Warner’s Miranda is brought forward in time

to become the present-day heroine of the novel (...) She is the twentieth-century central

consciousness of the novel” (Williams-Wanquet 275). Although Miranda has not been

so nurtured during her childhood and growing up, as Xanthe, she is the character that

receives a happy ending, mostly due to finding her peace “Warner has allotted Miranda

a role in the act of reconciliation in Britain in the sense of the ideal of multiculturalism,

perhaps also in the spirit of Shakespeare’s Miranda impersonating a promise of a better

future” (Franková 2012: 42), George Felix is symbolically playing the role of Caliban

due to his ‘black movement’, nevertheless marrying the ‘child of the devil’ brings

Miranda a happy peace in contrast to the rest of the Everard family, and a child – Feeny,

after the nanny Serafine. According to Lisa G. Propst in her work “Bloody Chambers

And Labyrinths Of Desire: Sexual Violence In Marina Warner's Fairy Tales And

Myths”, the union of Miranda and Shaka is “‘the sign of a loosening of the historical

trapsofennity and fantasy that have persisted through the history of colonisation and its

aftermath, and is an acceptance of both the necessary changeability of history, and the

23

ineliminable otherness of the other’” (134). Moreover, Propst notes that “Their union is

a symbol of interracial harmony and mutual respect. It transcends the initial aggression

between them and the violence of the colonial legacy” (Propst 2008: 133-134). Warner

wants to emphasize that it is the spirit, not the origin that leads the character towards the

happy-ending. Miranda, who is not obsessed with wealth in the revisiting of the past in

the Caribbean like Xanthe, is “rewarded by love” and “marriage” and “inheriting all

Xanthe’s wealth” after she gets drowned. Miranda is therefore “rewarded for her

openness to the other and for feeling responsible for the past managing to overcome it”

(Williams-Wanquet 277).

Like Roukoubé, baby Serafine is also a result of mixed blood and carries the

name of Miranda’s black nanny, to point out that beside her black skin she was a mother

to Miranda more than Astrid. Baby Serafine closes the story and the “happy ending of

Shakespeare’s play is borrowed” (Williams-Wanquet 277) in that “‘it is resolved at the

end with a marriage, not a legal marriage, but a union, and the birth of a child, the child

symbolizing [...] the future and home’” (Williams-Wanquet 277).

Indigo and The Tempest not only share the happy ending but also the feature of

mirroring “in which everything reflects and re-reflects everything else” (Bogosyan

14).This gives Warner, as mentioned above, an opportunity to also include ‘female

energy’ to the recreated characters of The Tempest, as Indigo “challenges the male myth

of history as violence”, and “brings into being another, feminine myth, using magical

realism, mythology, and fairy tales to call for a future change of mentality” (Williams-

Wanquet 268). Indigo provides the female plot of Sycorax, Ariel and Miranda and tries

to reconsider the suppressed within suppressed, as they are dignified due to origin and

also to being women. Warner admits that she was aiming to “write the daughter’s plot,

24

to take the story from the other side and show how the daughter extricates herself from

the father’s plot” (Zabus 1994a: 524).

To sum up, Indigo and The Tempest share the system of “hall of mirrors” and

tendency of “metamorphosis” that is being used by Warner as a tool to highlight the

colonial impact on controversially using ‘damned’ characters of The Tempest (Sycorax,

Caliban, Ariel) and making them victims of racial prejudices (Franková 2012: 41).

Warner explains that “‘Metamorphosis is often the actual subject matter of these

stories... the stories are themselves not only about to change, but also magical change,

change that is supernatural (caused by some divine agency) or (...) prenatural (caused by

nature...)’” (Williams-Wanquet 281).

25

3. Reflection of colonial issues in fairy tales and myths The theme of metamorphosis is also created by fairy tales which are included into the

real world of the story to point out that the moral truth that is reflected in old myths is

applicable in every time period. Warner’s aim to include the fantastic into the novel

comes from her earlier studies on the topic, as she says: “In fact Indigo grew out of my

work on fairy tales. I really wanted to wrote a book on fairy tales but I stopped From the

Beast to the Blonde and wrote Indigo instead” (Zabus 1994a: 521). Not only do the tales

reflect the novel’s characters, they also serve as a mediator of old truths and thus they

include colonial issues, as Cao Li argues “myths and legends have a powerful shaping

power on history and people’s perception of the world” (77). The stories narrated in

Indigo come from an oral tradition of the Caribbean and they serve to express the

“voices silenced by history” since “when a story exists only in the oral tradition, it often

reflects the collective subconscious of the people” (Williams-Wanquet 278). In other

words, the old Caribbean stories should be able to reveal the truth of mankind

notwithstanding time or place. Indigo includes three stories, each told by Everard’s

black maid Serafine, who is mirroring in them the moral for young Miranda and Xanthe

and later Miranda’s mother Astrid, and correspondingly reveals the reflection of the

Caribbean myths upon the colonization impact as well as the violence of history in

general: “Indigo reacts to such fantasies by showing the inescapable force and

complexity of history that lies behind every myth of absolute beginning, and

acknowledging the prior inhabitation of every paradisal garden” (Connor 189).

26

3.1 Serafine I

The story of Serafine I tells the fable of a King whose excessive protection of his

daughter actually harms her. Serafine tells this story to Miranda when she “was still the

only little Everard” (Warner 1993: 3) at the Everards’ garden. Although the narration is

set “before Xanthe was born” (Warner 1993: 3), it follows the relationship of Sir Ant

Everard and his daughter Xanthe. One day the King ties in roses a drunk man called ‘the

fat man’ at his palace when he is seeking for the party goers to know how the young

people behave to protect his daughter – the princess who has never been outside the

palace. For capturing ‘the fat man’ the King is granted by his master a wish. Followed

by greed, the King wishes to have the power to turn into gold everything he touches.

Unfortunately, he turns his daughter into gold as well.

In terms of the father – daughter relationship, Serafine predicts that isolating Xanthe

from the ugliness in the world would rather put her into danger, since she gets clingy

and incapable of a sensible judgment. The turning into gold resembles Xanthe’s

drowning and her “final transformation: a pearl of rare size and beauty” (Warner 1993:

376). Moreover, the story ends with the King’s words: “Everything’ll be all right, you’ll

see. Your life is only just beginning” (Warner 1993: 12) which metaphorically can be

read as bringing the princess to death through a spell that can be undone in the afterlife,

next life (Warner 1993: 12). The figure of the princess is described as “an innocent

white as snow, pink as roses, gold hair like corn, and she’s never seen anyone outside

her father’s palace” (Warner 1993: 5-6). Pale skin and blonde hair which is later used

for Xanthe’s nickname Goldie refer to the highlighted diversity of skin coloring. In

contradiction to Miranda, Xanthe is pampered in real life as in that fairy tale whereas

the Creole Miranda remains rather uncategorized and unrecognized due to her skin

color, as it can be seen in a conversation between Sir Ant and Gillian when the

eighteen- year old Miranda is left by her parents in Paris:

27

‘What’s a girl like her to do these days? (…)

She’s no fool, I know. But she’s awfully swarthy. Do you think employers

would take her? It might put off likely customers. (…)

She’s not very dark. There’s many Welsh darker- eyed than her.

She’s not Welsh, Ant darling.’ (Warner 1993: 237)

Miranda does not take part in Serafine’s first story but as a close listener, she is able

to gain wisdom that is within and escape the dark end of the colonial family of the

Everards that is being punished for their overwhelming desire for more. In addition,

Serafine inserts many morals between the narrating, preparing Miranda for the

confrontation with the adult life, handing out foresight to her: “Never be mean, it’ll

make you suffer - cast your bread upon the waters and it’ll come back, sweetheart,

you’ll see” (Warner 1993: 9).

3.2 Serafine II

In Serafine II, Serafine retells the story of an old Caribbean myth of a sea

monster Manjiku. This second tale is told to both of the girls – Xanthe and Miranda,

right before bedtime. However, the story is again more directed towards Xanthe.

Serafine retells the story of Manjiku with a happy ending, since she wants to comfort

the children. The tale follows the relationship of the fisherman Amadou and his wife

Amadé which gets one day challenged by “a beautiful silver starfish” (Warner 1993:

221) that turns out to be a woman who captures Amadou’s heart. The discovery of the

silver girl tears apart the calmness within the couple as Amadé finds out about

Amadou’s new love: “He says nothing to Amadé. Amadé notices, just the same,

something’s taken hold of her man, eaten into his heart” (Warner 1993: 222). Even

though, Amadou secretly nurtures the star girl every day, unfortunately she dies: “his

care’s got him nothing, the silver girl’s dead” (Warner 1993: 222). Nevertheless, the

28

true love of Amadé becomes a source of a powerful magic as it saves the girl as well as

Manjiku. After Amadé declares: “I understand loving (…) here’s your love back” she

gives Amadou “the flower of Adesangé, the red god, of fire and life” (Warner 1993:

223) and sacrifices herself to the sea monster Manjiku, which brings back the girl from

the dead. Manjiku, who “specially likes to eat women: juicy, dark women full of blood,

the way we are when we get old enough to be mothers” (Warner 1993: 221) eats the

loving Amadé and consequently the spell cast upon him wipes out and makes him a

handsome man.

There are several parallels to Xanthe’s inability to love and her death. Similarly,

as in Serafine I, Xanthe is reflected in a beautiful girl “with hair like spun silk and blue

eyes like pieces of the sky come down to earth” which she is proud of: “Xanthe likes

this bit, she has blue eyes and fancies they’re like the sky” (Warner 1993: 221). The

beauty and white features are, like in Serafine I, worshipped also outside Serafine’s

tales, as Serafine compares the features to a sort of enchantment: “It’s a spell, you see,

the mermaid has the power to cast spells. With her white hair, her eyes like bits of the

sky” (Warner 1993: 222), however these figures the princess and the silver girl) are

indeed tragic figures. Here is again also noticeable the concept of capture that is

characteristic of the men in Xanthe’s life – Sir Ant and Sy, as Amadou, similarly, does

not want to share his silver girl with anyone else and “keeps her a prisoner in a fish

pond where he stores the catch” (Warner 1993: 221). Like the King that turned the

princess into gold due to overprotecting her, the possessiveness here is again shown to

be dangerous: “He doesn’t want anyone to see her. He wants her for himself. He’s like

Manjiku, all men are, aha!” (Warner 1993: 222). Xanthe has nevertheless not taken this

moral to heart, since she lives her whole life being depended on men. Contrastingly,

Miranda as a close listener of the tales is able to sense the risk that lies in the

29

dependency on others and states: “‘I’m never going to get married. I’m never going to

let anyone get so close they can tell me what to do, know what I think, have a right to

me’” (Warner 1993: 328). Despite all the warnings, Serafine and Miranda offer Xanthe,

she is confident in her reliance on men: “‘I’m much less...contingent than you, because I

accept it as part of the way things are for little girls like you and me. Ha! I just know

that I have to choose rather carefully who I’m dependent on. Error in this area would be

something of a nuisance’” (Warner 1993: 329). However, Xanthe later develops caution

towards her father and his overprotectiveness: “‘Sy’s right about Poppa. Everybody

loves him, because he seems so mild and calm, but that’s just his way of keeping you in

his power (…) you know, Poppa would have liked to marry me himself if he could,

that’s what Sy says, and he’s spot on, I’m telling you. Under lock and key, lock and key,

in the tower forever’” (Warner 1993: 329), and her mistrust of his intentions leaves her

coldhearted: “‘Let him be heartbroken. You’ve never been thwarted every step of the

way like I have’” (Warner 1993: 329).

Furthermore, Xanthe’s destiny of drowning is reflected in the silver girl’s

drowning: “A sunstroke did for her, and he found her floating, with her hair fanning out

around her, her jeweled skin still sparkling like she’s alive” (Warner 1993: 222).

Similarly, the silver girl’s death is caused by being punished for intruding peace “she’s

far from home, you see, she’s strayed into tropical waters” (Warner 1993: 221) as

Xanthe arrives in the Caribbean and restores the invading of the island by building a

tourist hotel there.

Eventually, in Xanthe emerges a sign of surrender: “She hadn’t cared, she’d

never known how to love well, that golden girl – and she was rewarded because the

world fears love and hates need and she was never needy as she is now. But now at

least, now that she’s dying, she has a glimmer of how much more she could want if she

30

could have her life over. And she wants it, as I did and still do…” (Warner 1993: 375)

and she switches into the character of loving Amadé who gets eaten by Manjiku:

“Xanthe was drowning in the pearl beds which she matched with her barley hair and her

nacreons skin and her thin flesh all the way through to her springy, tensile skeleton.

(She had disappeared into the mouth, the maw, deep into the innards of Manjiku)”

(Warner 1993: 373). Finally, “Xanthe’s voice cut through, under Atala’s, crying out

from the coral palaces in the reef her pain at what she had lost and never cared for, the

loving she had been given and never noticed except to scoff or scratch it in the face”

and her beauty, her comfortable, wealthy and cold hearted life transforms into a pearl as

a reminder of her vanity in oblivion: “In the soft, walled chamber of her marine host,

she was mantled in pearl, layer upon layer spun about her foreign body until,

mummified at the mineral heart of a pale rainbow, she became forever smooth and

sheeny and hard” (Warner 1993: 376).

Manjiku mirrors the invaders or colonizers intruding on the islands due to the

thirst for blood, possessiveness and urge to be a mother: “What Manjiku wants – more

than food, more than drink, more than sweet life itself – is to have a child of his own.

(…) Not just to have it, like a father – no he wants to be a mother, to bring the child out

of his mouth, spit out a little Manjiku” (Warner 1993: 220).As a matter of fact, also the

physical features remind of the colonizers: “Manjiku’s pale, pale, he can’t bear the light

of the sun, it burns his pale skin, his pale flesh, it leaches the life out of him in blisters

and wens” (Warner 1993: 219-220) which is also pointed out earlier by Tiguary and

Sycorax who describe the first sight of colonizers: “‘The Tallow men came from further

away – their lids are so thin and pale, their eyeballs burn in the sun even when they keep

their eyes closed’ Sycorax replies: ‘Ah, them. I remember that, ha. Kin to Manjiku. Are

they a kind of shellfish? Heat turns them pink’” (Warner 1993: 99). Serafine

31

furthermore points out a warning of greed: “‘You’ll find out, children, that in this world,

people burn to have things they can’t have, and strange things as that’” (Warner 1993:

220). The story of Serafine II also includes the caution upon the interpretation of the

colonization, when Kit Everard’s entry gets romanticized: “There’s another story with a

happy ending they know, not just from Serafine, it’s traditional in their family, and in

the history books in which the Everards have a mention. How the first Kit Everard won

the love of an islander and how she saved him and his brave band of pioneers” (Warner

1993: 224). This amounts to an idealization of colonizing, since it omits that the process

is a bloody one, more of a bloody invasion than a victory and that it is a not yet an

ended process. The truth is nevertheless hidden to the motherland of the usurpers and

the real tale of Manjiku is only opened to the oppressed: “Manjiku had taken Mr.

Anthony’s first wife, the island wife, the one that died by drowning. And many others,

before her, natives: Manjiku has an appetite for them especially. But this savage story

isn’t seemly for the little English girls, so Serafine has adapted it, as storytellers do”

(Warner 1993: 224) and in relation to the silencing of the history, Serafine adds: “The

stories of Manjiku she had heard on the island, when she was herself a girl, had not had

happy endings” (Warner 1993: 224). Indeed, the truth can only be revealed by the

natives as the chapter continues with Pére Labat who meets Ariel in old age: “He

reported that he had met a survivor from the heroic days, an ancient Indian hag”

(Warner 1993: 225). In fact, Ariel is an example of a silenced native (even literally,

since she does not use her voice to speak anymore), however she stands as a strong

female character to her people: “Her example proves the nobility of soul the native can

possess when tutored in the ways of godliness and truth. She was a lamp of truth to her

people” (Warner 1993: 226).

32

3.3. Serafine

Serafine III. is actually told to Miranda’s mother, Astrid, who lies in a hospital.

The story is at the very end of the novel, therefore after Xanthe’s death. The fact that

Miranda is not present at the storytelling may indicate that she has now gained her

wisdom and Serafine passes the wisdom upon others who need it. Serafine notes that

“‘Miranda’s happy, and seeing as how she’s not the happy kind, I think it’s a kind of

miracle’” (Warner 1993: 400) which refers to her predestined life of a Creole origin that

Miranda has escaped emotional problem with her parents (she feels abandoned by them)

that she has been trying to compensate. Astrid is in physical and emotional pain, as she

is “in hospital for spell after a bad attack of DTs and expulsion from yet another place

of refuge – the Camelites in East Anglia” (Warner 1993: 399) and feels abandoned by

Miranda: “‘Blood isn’t thicker than water, not in our family. Nobody bloody cares for

anyone any more. Nobody cares about me. I’m forgotten…I might as well be bloody

dead…’” (Warner 1993: 402).

The story that Serafine tells is about parenting and colonizing. The hunters are

after a tigress and they set a mirror in the woods to catch her. When the tigress meets

the mirror, she gets captured, as “she gets involved” and “doesn’t hear the net rustle in

the braches above her” (Warner 1993: 401). In these terms Serafine makes a joke about

the colonizing and civilizing people, as she begins the story: “‘This happened now a

long time ago, before the days of guns, you know, when every human creature on the

earth was a savage’ – (She croaks a laugh.) ‘And who’s to say much has changed?’”

(Warner 1993: 401). But more importantly, it is advice for Astrid not to lose Miranda:

“‘It’s not good always wanting the same, the same as yourself in someone else. To look

for yourself in little it’s dangerous!’” (Warner 1993: 402). The mirror element in the

story reflects the urge of mothers to persuade their children to go in their steps. The

relationship of Astrid and Miranda mirrors in Sycorax’s loss of Ariel which she cries for

33

during Xanthe’s drowning: “‘I would have loved her better, Oh my daughter, if I had

not wanted more and more from her, if I had not pushed my blade into her. Oh, to have

loved her without longing to own her, to rule her, to keep her cloven to my will!’”

(Warner 1993: 374). Serafine prepares Astrid to not suffer as Sycorax did:

The drowning voice she hears was making that same mistake, she feels the want

now that drives love away, that makes loving a mirror in which you only see

everything you want for yourself. Sycorax remembers, I was blinded to Ariel’s

needs, her different love, so that I could not bear it when she diverged from me.

(Warner 1993: 374).

The parents’ suffering is shared by Sycorax, Astrid and Sir Ant and Serafine’s stories

point out that selfishly capturing children “‘always leads to heartbreak, you know, to the

disappointment that cuts’” (Warner 1993: 402).

3.4 Serafine’s stories: the island’s heritage

Each of these three stories has a moral and Serafine initially places them in

various stages of Miranda’s life. As being the Everards’ maid, she “observes the ups and

downs of the colonial family”, and thus wants to help the youngest generation to avoid

the mistakes that the Everard family has made in the past: “Serafine opens and closes

the book with her fairy tales, which function as Fowlesian ‘maggots’, i.e. subtexts in a

larval stage, or Renaissance masques which conjure up to the child Miranda the island

of her ancestors” (Zabus 1994b: 89). Having Creole origin, Serafine serves as a

transmitter of the Caribbean history to the present day (Zabus 1994b: 90). She can

“unscramble the ‘noises’” (Warner 1993: 402) of the island and turn them into stories.

However, at the end of the novel, as she is very old, her role of a transmitter is gradually

fading and possibly will move up to the next wise woman although Serafine still

remains in a positive relationship with the Island’s heritage as the book closes:

34

There are many noises in her head these befuddled days of her old age; they

whisper news to her of this island and that, of people scattered here and there,

from the past and from present. Some are on run still; but some have settled,

they have ceased wandering, their maroon state is changing sound and shape.

She’s often too tired nowadays to unscramble the noises, but she’s happy

hearing them, to change into stories another time. (Warner 1993: 402)

Connecting with the stories the past and the present, Serafine is related to Sycorax

and her saman tree. These two women serve as an important female element that holds

the power of unifying the time layers. Chantal Zabus interprets the “combination of

postcolonial and fairy tale structures” and argues that Serafine represents the “female

subject in relation to postcolonial theory” and that “storytelling is always shown as

travelling across all kinds of temporal and geographical boundaries” (Franková 2012:

42).

Although retelling the old myths of the Caribbean, Serafine is understood by her

listeners since she is still able to “function within realistic context of storytelling”

(Williams-Wanquet 275). The reason behind Serafine being a transmitter of these old

truths is due to her lost daughter. Although only hinted at, Miranda learns that Serafine

lost her daughter in Enfant-Béate. “‘You had a baby once, Feeny, didn’t you?’ She

really does want to hear again about Feeny’s daughter, who she left in Enfant-Béate

long, long ago” (Warner 1993: 221). However, Serafine does not reveal the story:

“‘Hush’, says Feeny. ‘One story at a time’ and keeps it to herself” (Warner 1993: 221).

During the telling of the first story Serafine reveals her unhealed sadness: “‘She longs’-

Serafine states, and breaks off and taps her chest as if she were discussing her own

longing” (Warner 1993: 8). Warner explains the mysteriousness of Serafine as being a

“wise queen, an anymous outside figure” that “holds the secret of the story and knows

35

the riddles” (Zabus 1994a: 89). Even though being an independent figure, the maid still

carries with herself the colonial heritage since “in a sense she has been incorporated and

colonized, she’s an island that has been taken over” (Zabus 1994a: 521). She sacrifices

her wisdom and passes it onto the younger generation, in other words ‘teaching’

Miranda to “rethink the world”, leaving herself under the master’s rule (Zabus 1994a:

521).

The moral that unifies the three stories is the reminder of one’s selfishness as the

King, Manjiku and the tigress are being all punished for their greed and serves as

“reminders that one must be careful about what one desires or covets” (Cao Li 82-83).

On the positive side, the second story’s loss frees Miranda, as she is reflected in the

monster Manjiku that is saved by being able to develop an open mind and thus

generosity towards the colonialization’s impact. She learns how to read Serafine’s

stories and for the understanding of the Creole transmitter she frees herself from the

karmic punishment of the colonizing history of the Everard family: “mapped with

darker lines as if she had steeped them in ink to bring out the pattern, the lines

crisscrossed and wandered, and Miranda would have liked to be able to puzzle out the

script, for she was beginning to read. Feeny’s palms were dry and hard like the

paper in a story book, and when they handled Miranda she felt safe” (Warner 1993: 4).

36

4. The impact of colonization in a mirroring structure Even within Indigo’s plot, there are many mirrors. They are placed to reveal

the influence that colonization is able to have in society. Warner therefore uses two

time-frames to show the scene of the beginning of the usurpation on Liamuiga and then

the bias that still continues in the 20th century and also later the English society that

carries on the marks of it – whether amongst the creators of the usurpation or the

descendants of people that were being used. With the mirroring technique, Indigo tries

to present the colonization as “violent and destructive”, and the aim is to “explore the

scars and exiles of colonialism and to illustrate the initial dislocation of lives and how

‘history goes on living in the present and taking its toll on the present,’ both among the

colonized and the colonizers” (Williams-Wanquet 271). Together with the reflecting

actions of the story’s characters and thus the karma of history, the mingling time duality

shows the consequences of colonization, such elements of how “nature is destroyed;

vegetation is burned or cut down and the original rainforest is replaced by tobacco and

later sugar cane” (Williams-Wanquet 271). The annihilation of the land of the “silenced

people” is over and over again “stressed by references to the radical change that

occurred in the life of the islanders on ‘that day four hundred years ago, when

everything changed for them’” (Williams-Wanquet 271-272). Warner’s message of the

mirroring structure lies in the colonial memory or colonial history that is “open to more

than one account and interpretation” (Cao Li 84). The open-mindedness is underlined in

Indigo to persuade the reader to be able to empathize with the early and late colonized

and of mixed races as well as with the motives of the colonizers: “The idea of learning

about and recognizing the difference and otherness of the others across distant cultural

boundaries has a very urgent contemporary dimension and has been a core concept in

the immigration and multicultural discourse” (Franková 2012: 42-43).

37

4.1 Repeating history

Indigo does more than establish the damaged picture that colonial history has

created. It shows that “history continues and repeats itself like Caribbean waters that

change and return all the time” (Cao Li 74-75). The element of time frequently

portrayed in connection with Sycorax’s perception – “for her, the past abided, rolling

into the present, an ocean swelling and falling back, then returning again” (Warner

1993: 95) – indicates that “what happens in the past has its effect on the present” (Cao

Li 75). The history is not linear, the prints of colonization that people carry on as the

time goes by is commemorated by Sycorax’s saman tree that “the primitive people in

their ignorance still worship, studding its gnarled trunk with nails of tin or brass to

register their desires,” which serves as a reminder that the colonization’s injustice in not

forgot (Warner 1993: 225). In connection with Sycorax, Mehmet Fikret Arargüç notes

in the study “The Dream Of Sycorax In The Americas: Understanding Magical Realism

In Indigo” that “Not only does Warner give voice to her, but she makes Sycorax

powerful using the techniques of a magical realist text in contrast with the colonizing

English men” (166-167).The twentieth century layer including the establishment of

tourism creates a renewed European profiteering of the Caribbean with “its feelings of

superiority and inferiority, hatred and envy, is a legacy of the imperial past” (Williams-

Wanquet 272). Correspondingly, “the access to independence is a reenactment of the

violence of colonization, with fighting and rioting between natives and Europeans and

among the emerging new leaders. Feelings of inferiority persist on the part of the

islanders, who are trying to piece together an identity and rebuild a shattered economy”

(Williams-Wanquet 272).

38

5. Conclusion: Warner’s mirroring to interconnect colonization’s

impact through space and time When considering the mirrors of colonization in Marina Warner’s Indigo or,

Mapping the Waters, the concept of space and time stands out as the writer combines

William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest with the newly developed plot that reflects

itself within two different time frames and places. Warner is using reflecting elements

such as the parallels within the story line of Indigo, the literary template of The

Tempest, autobiografical features, historical facts and Warner’s interest in mythology.

In that regard, the thesis deals with the rewriting of the play The Tempest. The novel

retells the characters and themes from The Tempest to point out the issues of slavery and

racial prejudice. However, it does not just remain in the postcolonial discourse, it goes

even beyond to a postfeminist level and therefore offers a large-scale reflection of its

literary template. There are also mirrors of the recreated characters in three applied fairy

tales as Marina Warner also deals with mythology in the novel and this mythic level

serves as a unique reflection of colonialism and the destiny of each individual figure

whether standing on the colonized or colonizing side.

In connection with these mirroring mechanisms comes Indigo’s dealing with

space and time, as the colonial history is followed in two different times and places and

thus develops a notion of revisiting the history, as the story mirrors itself through the

time and special layers. The significance of the duality of space and time is in its

pervading as Warner uses the seventeenth-century layer of the Caribbean with the

twentieth-century period in Europe. The thesis proposes that Indigo’s mirroring

structure offers a view on the impact of colonization.

39

Bibliography

Primary sources

Shakespeare, William, Harold Bloom, and Burton Raffel. The Tempest. New Haven:

Yale University Press, 2006. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 23 Nov.

2016.

Warner, Marina. Indigo or, Mapping the Waters. London: Vintage, 1993. Print.

Secondary sources

Arargüç, Mehmet Fikret, and Maryam Ebadi Asayesh. “The Dream Of Sycorax In

The Americas: Understanding Magical Realism In Indigo.” Border Crossing:

Transnational Working Papers 6.2 (2016): 150-168. Academic Search Ultimate.

Web. 23 Nov. 2016.

Ashcroft, Bill, Helen Tiffin, and Gareth Griffiths. The Empire Writes Back: Theory

And Practice In Post-Colonial Literatures. n.p.: London: Routledge, 1989,

1989. Katalog Masarykovy university. Web. 23 Nov. 2016

Bogosyan, Natali. Postfeminist Discourse In Shakespeare's The Tempest And

Warner's Indigo: Ambivalence, Liminality And Plurality. Newcastle upon Tyne:

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 23

Nov. 2016.

Connor, Steven. The English Novel In History, 1950-1995. n.p.: London: Routledge,

1996., 1996. Katalog Masarykovy univerzity. Web. 23 Nov. 2016.

Franková, Milada. Britské spisovatelky na přelomu tisíciletí. n.p.: V Brně:

Masarykova univerzita, 2003, 2003. Katalog Masarykovy univerzity. Web. 23

Nov. 2016.

40

Franková Milada. 2012. “Marina Warner: Mythology, Fairy Tale and Realism”. Acta

Universitatis Wratislaviensis No 3434. 37-45

Li, Cao. “The Colours Of Fiction: From Indigo/Blue To Maroon/Black (A Study Of

Miranda's Story In Indigo).” Ariel 1-2 (2005): 73. Literature Resource Center.

Web. 23 Nov. 2016.

Propst, Lisa G. “Bloody Chambers And Labyrinths Of Desire: Sexual Violence In

Marina Warner's Fairy Tales And Myths.” Marvels & Tales 1 (2008): 125.

Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 Nov. 2016.

Propst, Lisa G. “Unsettling Stories: Disruptive Narrative Strategies In Marina

Warner's Indigo And The Leto Bundle.” Studies In The Novel 3 (2009): 330.

Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 Nov. 2016.

Rutherford, Anna. 1994. Kunapipi, XVI. 1. 1994. 504

Available at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol16/iss1/1

Shakespeare, William, Harold Bloom, and Burton Raffel. The Tempest. New Haven:

Yale University Press, 2006. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 23 Nov.

2016.

Wheeler, Kathleen M. A Critical Guide To Twentieth-Century Women Novelists.

n.p.: Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, c 1998., 1998. Katalog Masarykovy

univerzity. Web. 23 Nov. 2016.

Williams-Wanquet, Eileen. “Marina Warner's Indigo As Ethical Deconstruction And

Reconstruction.” CRITIQUE: Studies In Contemporary Fiction 3 (2005): 267.

Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 Nov. 2016.

Zabus, Chantal. 1994a. “Spinning a yarn with Marina Warner”. Kunapipi XVI. 1.

519-529

41

Zabus, Chantal. 1994b. “What next, Miranda? Marina Warner’s Indigo”. Kunapipi

XVI. 3. 81-92

42

Resumé The aim of the thesis is to analyse the mechanism of mirroring in Indigo or,

Mapping the Waters by the English writer Marina Warner. Warner is using reflecting

elements such as the parallels within the story line of Indigo, the literary template of The

Tempest by Williams Shakespeare, autobiografical features, historical facts and

Warner’s interest in mythology. In that regard, the thesis deals with the rewriting of the

play The Tempest. The parallels of the two plots and its characters serve as a metafor for

the colonization issues. Moreover, the rewriting opens up the feminine side of the play,

as Warner develops a female plot of The Tempest. Second, the work is concerned with

the reflections of fairy tales and myths. Each story is analyzed in terms of parallels to

the Indigo’s characters. Warner’s appliance of mythology also points to the elements of

issues that colonialism had brought in the society. In connection with these mirroring

mechanisms comes Indigo’s dealing with space and time, as the colonial history is

followed in two different times and places and thus develops a notion of revisiting the

history, as the story mirrors itself through the time and special layers. The thesis

proposes that Indigo’s mirroring structure offers a view on the impact of colonization.

43

Résumé

Cílem této práce je analyzovat mechanismus zrcadlení v knize Indigo aneb

mapování vod od anglické spisovatelky Mariny Warnerové. Warnerová používá

odrazných prvků, jako jsou paralely uvnitř v ději Indigo, literární vzor Bouře od

Williama Shakespeara, autobiografické rysy, historická fakta a Warnerové zájem v

mytologii. V tomto ohledu se teze zaobírá přepisem hry Bouře. Paralely těchto dvou

dějů a jejich postav slouží jako metafora pro poukázání na problematiku kolonizace.

Kromě toho, přepracování Bouře otevírá i ženskou stránku hry, následkem vytvoření

ženské dějové linie. Dále se práce zabývá odrazy pohádek a mýtů. Každý příběh je

analyzován z hlediska paralel k postavám knihy Indigo. Warnerové aplikování

mytologie rovněž poukazuje na otázky, které kolonialismus vznesl napříč společností. V

souvislosti s těmito mechanismy zrcadlení vyvstává problematika zacházení s časem a

prostorem v knize Indigo, jelikož je v knize sledována koloniální historie ve dvou

různých časových a prostorových rovinách. Jak se příběh zrcadlí prostřednictvím

časových a prostorových vrstev rozvíjí díky tomu představu opakování historie. Tato

práce nabízí, prostřednictvím konstrukce zrcadlení, pohled na úrovně dopadu

kolonizace.