87 pages • 2 hours read
Margaret AtwoodHag-Seed: William Shakespeare's The Tempest Retold
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Your Mind Can be a Prison
In Hag-Seed and its original source, The Tempest by William Shakespeare, prisons are not just physical but mental. Atwood’s narration focuses on Felix’s perspective, giving the reader access to his actions and feelings. Though Felix is not always aware of his contradictions, the reader can infer them. Central to this characterization is the prison Felix creates for himself. He nurses his obsession with his dead daughter and his desire for revenge against Tony. In nurturing this obsession, Felix cuts himself off from the freedom to move on with his life and find happiness again, sentencing himself to 12 years of loneliness and anger. Felix has moments of clarity in which he recognizes the insanity of his continued relationship with an unreal Miranda; he even makes the comparison to prison explicit, telling himself to “Pull [him]self together. Break out of [his] cell” before taking the job at Fletcher Institute (47). Even in this new role, however, his obsessions continue to isolate him. He is also aware that he uses people like Estelle and the Fletcher prisoners, but he doesn’t care because he is consumed by his anger; he willfully erases his moral code in his pursuit of revenge. In giving up parts of himself to his obsession, Felix traps himself within his own mind.
Felix’s prison of the mind parallels Prospero’s prison of the mind. Prospero has both a physical prison (the island) and a mental prison (his need to control others and obsession with revenge). The ending of The Tempest emphasizes Prospero’s mental prison when he asks the audience for their approval and their prayers. This demonstrates that while Prospero might have freed himself from his physical prison, he hasn’t freed himself from his self-doubt, disappointment in life, and distrust of other people. Prospero cannot free himself, so he needs the audience to approve of his journey and encourage him to live freely. This emphasizes the depths of Prospero’s self-entrapment.
Both Prospero and Felix are ultimately unsatisfied with their victories. Their triumphs are hollow because neither wants to return to the life they fought so hard to regain. They can’t be happy without their past, nor can they be happy with their past. Ultimately, it is Felix’s mindset that holds him back from living well, not the injustice of his losses.
Empowerment Through Transformation
In Hag-Seed, characters who avoid change create false realities in which they repeat dead-end cycles. Felix refuses to deal with the changes in his life, such as the death of his family and the loss of his beloved job. Rather than confront change, Felix creates an identity as Prospero and builds a dream world that consumes his life for 12 years. Felix’s aversion to change leads him down a dark path.
Although Felix doesn’t want to endure change, he chooses to engage in transformation. Felix plays many roles. He is a teacher, a director, and, in his role as Prospero, a sorcerer. These identities merge as Felix slips seamlessly between multiple roles. As a teacher, Felix encourages his students to think about Shakespearean language and themes through their own autonomous interpretations. As a director, Felix is over-the-top and controlling. As Prospero, Felix is vengeful and obsessed with his self-image. All three roles share a fundamental commonality: They each place Felix in a position of power and influence. However, these transformations are not productive to Felix’s character development. Instead, these different roles allow Felix to avoid true change. Felix’s superficial transformations prevent him from discovering who Felix Phillips truly is.
Felix extends this process of transformation to others. No person in Felix’s day-to-day life is solely their individual self. Felix doesn’t give Anne-Marie the space to be herself; instead, he projects his paternal instinct on Anne-Marie, viewing her as emblematic of Miranda the daughter and Miranda the Shakespearean character while robbing her of her autonomy. Felix perceives his students similarly. Each prisoner has their given name, their street nickname, and their Shakespearean character. Felix views them through the lens of transformation, in which each individual man becomes Felix’s interpretation of characters from The Tempest. Though Felix compliments himself on perfect casting—in perceiving the hidden Shakespearean character at each student’s core—this is really just multiple layers of projection: Felix sees individuals through the lens of characters he has already projected his own preoccupations onto, taking away the prisoners’ humanity and reducing them to his own desires.
Despite Felix’s preference for transformation over meaningful development, the secondary characters have a chance at true growth. The prisoners look forward to their freedom—to their second chance to become a new person. Their experiences in prison will fundamentally change them, but even if the change is for the worse, they are open to life’s challenges as learning opportunities. Anne-Marie is also on her own journey, no matter how badly Felix wants to box her into the role of his daughter. Anne-Marie makes her own connections with the prisoners, falls in love with Freddie, and asserts her talent and creativity. The development of the secondary characters only emphasizes Felix’s rejection of true change. While he tries to label, analyze, and interpret real people as characters in his game of chess, the secondary characters grow into their own autonomy, whether Felix notices it or not.
The Marginalization of Imprisoned People
Hag-Seed explores the marginalization of imprisoned people. Central to the novel’s plots and themes are the Fletcher Correctional Players, a group of incarcerated men who enroll in Felix’s Literature Through Literacy course. They read, analyze, and adapt Shakespearean plays into performances that bolster the prisoners’ sense of self, community, and connection to the outside world.
The prisoners face a variety of prejudices. The politicians who visit the prison are overtly antagonistic: They plan on pulling funding for the literacy program because they see no value in teaching prisoners, whom they deem irredeemable. On the surface, Felix is more sympathetic to the prisoners’ situation, but he also has no problem putting them in danger or looking down on them. Felix is dismissive of their struggles with reading Shakespeare, and he fancies himself a savior in their eyes. He considers the prisoners lucky to have access to him and his genius. Felix’s superiority complex dehumanizes the prisoners. Furthermore, Felix uses them for his revenge plan. If the plan didn’t work, the prisoners would likely have received harsher sentencing, but Felix doesn’t seem to care that he puts the prisoners at risk. Because Felix is motivated by his own selfish ambitions, the prisoners are nothing more to him than minions. Felix wins their loyalty, but they don’t win his respect no matter how well they analyze, perform, or humanize Shakespeare’s characters.
Ironically, the Fletcher Players provide the moral of the novel. Though Felix is the supposed Shakespearean expert, Part 5 of the novel features the prisoners’ deeply thoughtful and empathetic analyses of the humanity of each character in the play. In reading the Shakespearean character through the lens of complex human layers, they redeem the beauty of human nature. The prisoners bring up points of analysis that Felix had never thought of, though Felix doesn’t allow this to change his mind about his superiority over them. While the prisoners are imperfect, they are good to one another, to Anne-Marie, and to Felix. They are loyal, helpful, intelligent, and community-minded. In this novel, the prisoners have a more developed moral consciousness than the characters who live freely in the world outside of the prison, including successful politicians and intellectual directors. In doing this, Atwood reimagines the enslaved characters in The Tempest as the marginalized and ignored heroes of the story.
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