ABSTRACT
Several recent critics have argued that Prospero’s magic in The Tempest may be understood as an attempt to control a dangerous and threatening female sexuality, and to replace it with a kind of sanitized, non-physical generativity that is gendered male. I place Prospero’s Books in the context of such interpretations, and suggest that Greenaway technological version of Prospero’s “life-giving” magic can illuminate some aspects of the current discourse relating the human world to the new electronic technologies. Prospero’s Books is part of an extensive discursive shift that includes aspects of cyberpunk, “technoporn,” extreme versions of artificial intelligence and virtual reality theory, and other attempts to reconfigure desire and sexuality in terms of human/machine interaction. Greenaway’s work-Prospero’s Books as well as his other filmsmay be regarded as a soft-core, high-culture manifestation of what Constance Penley and Andrew Ross call “technoculture” (Penley and Ross 1991). Prospero’s Books portrays Prospero’s magic powers as an “appropriation” of maternal power, and in doing so may suggest a psychoanalytic framework for understanding the “technophilia” of the present cultural moment, and its preoccupation with “disturbingly lively” machines.
