The wild native creature, a tragic fool-villain, from Shakespeare's The Tempest. In the prologue to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote, "The nineteenth-century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth-century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass." Mulligan uses the quotation to mock Stephen's obvious discomfort with difference between the image of himself that the mirror presents and his own idea of himself.
