Anna Quinn - The Night Child

“Are you saying it was a coincidence that British Colonization was underway at the exact moment the play was written and performed?” she’d said loud into Nora’s face, hazel eyes snapping. She even quoted Caliban, slamming her fist on the table, “‘This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, which thou tak’st from me.’” And then shaking her head in a condescending way, “Of course, Shakespeare intended to show oppression.”

“How can you know what Shakespeare intended?” Nora had said, face flushing. “He’s been dead over four hundred years. You can’t know. And since when do we advance our own agendas?” Nora knew full well they did it all the time, but still, doing it with art, with literature, really bothered her. “Aren’t we supposed to challenge our students to come to their own conclusions? Their own truths?”

“Their own truths?” Dorothy said. “Most of them walk in here laden with patriarchal attitudes. It’s our job to enlighten. Period.”

And then, first-year faculty member Bruce Baker, a math teacher with a psychology minor, had weighed in. Bruce, who was assigned freshman English at the last minute because Denise Abano quit to start an olive oil business in Pike Place Market—“ Too many desperate kids ,” she’d said to Nora over the phone. “ Too many. Coming to school hungry, hopeless, drugged out. Where are the parents? Where are the goddamned parents?” Bruce, with his new-teacher glow, voted to keep The Tempest . “They must love it,” he’d said, “a banished dude seeks revenge using magic!” His knowledge surprised Nora, since English wasn’t his thing. “My dad’s in the theater,” he’d shrugged. “Played Prospero seven times.” When Nora suggested they switch plays, she’d teach Romeo and Juliet and he could have The Tempest , he raised a hand, said, “Oh, no, no, no, no. If I have to hear ‘ We are such stuff as dreams are made on ’ and ‘ How our little life is rounded with sleep ’ one more time, I’ll fucking kill myself.” He’d tapped his pencil on the table then. Looked at her hard. “Yeah, and the whole rape thing, that’s gotta be a bitch to explain. I couldn’t do it. I mean a father wants to rape his own daughter. That’s so fucked up.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Prospero didn’t rape Miranda,” Nora had said, her heart rate increasing, startling her. “Caliban wanted to—”

“Oh, come on,” Bruce interrupted, no longer tapping his pencil. “The Freudian paradigm? Caliban is Prospero’s id. Ariel’s his superego. Do the math. Prospero wanted to rape his own daughter.”

“Oh, jeez,” Nora said in a dismissive way, though a sudden flood of heat into her face had contradicted her nonchalance, flustered her for a moment.

“See, this is what I’m talking about,” she said. “Forcing art into some cultural scheme.” She arranged her notes into a neat pile and placed them into a file folder. Tucked a bit of hair behind her ear. Looked at him, looked at Dorothy. “I just want a more relevant story, that’s all. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has the anguish between young people, the impact of inequality on a relationship, and it deals with beauty, or what we call beauty, what beauty really is, not the clichés, something internal. I just want—I just want to offer art and let the art work its magic. Let the art shape them, find them—” but she stopped then, realized she was rambling.

“It’s all moot anyway,” Dorothy said. “There’s no money for new books.”

Nora remembers how distraught she’d become in that discussion, especially when Bruce brought up Caliban as a projection of Prospero’s desires. She hadn’t questioned her feelings then, had merely felt she’d spoken her mind with conviction and passion. But now, with David’s suggestion of PTSD, maybe there was more.

She said, “Daddy forced me to touch his penis.”

A wave of nausea slams her. She considers running out of the classroom, running the five blocks to the ferry and jumping on board, and on the other side, boarding a bus to Canada and never coming back again. She’s on dangerous ground, and she knows it. She clings fast to herself, breathes slow and deep into the sick feeling, deep and slow until she can continue. “It was the age of discovery,” she says to the class now, her voice quivery. “A time when Europeans were expanding the geographical horizon of the people of the Middle Ages, when people thought the world only consisted of Europe, Africa, and Asia.”

“You mean a time when white bastards took over land that wasn’t theirs and called those lands new worlds?” Elizabeth says.

“There are those, many in fact, who would agree with you,” Nora says, but keeps her opinions to herself, fights the urge to shout, Yes! White bastards, fucking assholes! “And others who read it purely as an artistic story without a political bent.”

“Well, Shakespeare wasn’t an idiot, was he?” Jaleesa says. “So of course this is political.”

“Ummm, seems kind of obvious what this is about,” Jason says, studying the book’s cover, “There’s a big-ass storm and a ship and a pissed off god in the sky shooting fire at it and—”

“You mean goddess,” Jaleesa says. “Don’t you see her long red hair, her flowing gown?” And then, “Though of course, it is a white goddess. When are we ever going to read something with a black goddess?”

“Well, this goddess is pissed,” Lidia says. “Whoever’s in that ship is screwed.”

“I hope she kills them all,” Elizabeth says.

“Well, she’ll probably kill all but one guy, and he’ll swim to the island, blah, blah, blah,” Jason says. “Typical shipwreck story.”

“We don’t know which side of colonization Shakespeare was on,” Elizabeth says, ignoring them, staring at the cover. “But I’ll bet he’s against it. He cared about art and beauty. He’d make the mariners survive so they’d know what it feels like to be tormented and controlled by something stronger.” Her tone is angry, and she continues to stare at the cover. She sits very still, very straight in her black T-shirt and baggy camouflage pants, her black combat boots. Nora is worried about her. She’s been increasingly edgy lately, her body and face so tight. Nora makes a mental note to catch Elizabeth after class, find out what’s going on, let her know she’s not alone.

“It could be like Lord of the Flies ,” Jason says. “Fear and survival. Attack and murder. Primal. Totally primal.”

“Shakespeare’s a dick. A sexist pig,” Susan says, daughter of doting helicopter parents who make sure she has the best education, Tommy Hilfiger clothing, all the necessary orthodontia. “I mean most of the women in his plays seem like victims. Don’t you think he’s sexist, Mrs. Brown?”

Nora leans on her desk, shifts her weight. “Well, in the context of the conventions of his day …”

“Yeah, it’s like, now we know Spam sucks, but in the fifties it was totally cool,” Jason says.

“What about Queen Elizabeth?” Lidia asks. “She ran England when Shakespeare was alive.”

“She was an exception,” Nora says. “Most women then had a pretty raw deal. And don’t think she had it easy. People came up with all kinds of reasons for her success—that she was a man in disguise, for example, or that she surrounded herself with men because she was too stupid to make her own decisions. Only recently has her success been attributed to her brilliance.” Nora pauses for a moment. Her eyes meeting all the curious eyes looking at her, listening to her. Tiny surges of strength fire through her body, and she feels a singular awareness of who she is now, in this moment. She is a teacher. She is strong. She is not her past. She continues as if the earlier nausea, the fears, never existed, her voice clear and confident. “Women during Shakespeare’s time were a long way from having any rights and were in one way or another the property of men, either their fathers or their husbands.” She thinks then of Ophelia and her parting shot, her suicide, her refusing to be the plaything of men. “There’s still a huge battle ahead for equality,” she says.