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.
Symbols & Motifs
Fletcher County Correctional Institution
Fletcher Country Correctional Institution is a physical and metaphorical space. Felix selects the prison as an environment that will salvage his reputation and sense of purpose. When he begins working at the prison, he doesn’t know exactly how the prison will factor into his plan for revenge, but he sees in the prison a replica of Prospero’s island. Prospero’s island is his prison, but it is also a space for Prospero to flex his powers and win his life back. Felix immediately imagines the prison as his own island. He charms the guards and Estelle into arranging everything he needs or wants to make the prison his stage, thus giving Felix power that he abuses to threaten Tony into giving Felix what he wants.
The prisoners of the Fletcher County Correctional Institution represent the better side of human nature: powerless people coming together to learn from one another and extend empathy to characters first written about in the 17th century. These prisoners and their goodness contrast with Felix’s bad intentions, emphasizing the prison as a space of oppression and corruption, but also of potential joy and rehabilitation.
The Tempest by William Shakespeare
The Tempest by William Shakespeare is the original source material that inspired Atwood’s novel. Atwood’s adoption of Shakespeare’s five-act narrative structure alludes to it, and the characters and plot of Hag-Seed directly mirror it. Felix is Prospero, Tony is Antonio, Anne-Marie is Miranda, 8Handz is Ariel, and these characters from the novel subconsciously echo the characterizations of the original play’s characters. This gives Atwood a blueprint for her novel, but more importantly, the play gives Felix a guide. He actively uses The Tempest to reimagine his life after loss and to plan his revenge. The Tempest therefore serves internally as an allegory for Felix’s life.
Chess
The goal in chess is to capture the king. In The Tempest, both Antonio and Prospero plot against the king, making all their maneuverings a metaphorical game of chess. Ferdinand and Miranda bond over a game of chess, which is symbolic because their union promises Miranda (and, by extension, Prospero) a path back to power. In Hag-Seed, Anne-Marie as Miranda and Freddie as Ferdinand reenact this chess scene, which leads to a relationship that Felix can take advantage of to keep Sal, a prominent minister, under his influence. Chess is a pragmatic game: one that is carefully methodical. This pragmatism defines Felix’s 12-year path to winning revenge over Tony. Therefore, chess symbolizes the navigation of power dynamics.
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By Margaret Atwood
