Prospero’s Tri-Filial Family Unit: Queer Childhood as a Tool and Threat to Heteropatriarchal Maintenance and Restoration in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Abstract

This paper explores the quasi-familial dynamic in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, proposing that Prospero’s efforts to restore and secure patriarchal authority in Italy and on the island are contingent upon his abusive paternal control over three queer child figures: Ariel, Caliban, and Miranda. Drawing on early modern childhood studies and queer theory, this paper reads these figures as queer children: mutable, gender-unstable, arrested in development, and marked by naïveté. It is among the first studies to conceptualise these characters as a tri-filial unit whose queer identities are instrumentalised to construct a vision of heteropatriarchal stability. Prospero fosters his children’s queerness by maintaining them in queer states, manipulating these conditions to advance his heteropatriarchal agenda of securing his biological daughter’s marriage to the prince of Naples. However, as the play progresses, each child figure begins to resist or outgrow Prospero’s control, ultimately revealing the fragility and artificiality of the hetero-patriarchal structures he seeks to uphold. This paper argues that The Tempest exposes the inherent instability of patriarchal power, showing that the very queer identities Prospero manipulates become the agents of its potential undoing.