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Chapter 42
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Hag-Seed, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Theater and The Tempest
Vengeance
Imprisonment and Marginalization
Transformation and Change
Grief
Summary
Analysis
Anne-Marie interrupts Felix as he starts to call up Team Gonzalo; she wants to provide her own ending for Miranda. Striding to the front of the room, she accuses everyone of treating Miranda like a “rag doll” waiting to be raped, when she’s actually the opposite: a tomboy accustomed to running all over a wild island and fending off the dangerous advances of Caliban. Moreover, it’s probable that Prospero taught her a little magic in all the years they spent alone together.
One of the problems with Felix’s and the prisoner’s interpretation of the play is the passive role to which it consigns Miranda. Anne-Marie is the only person who challenges this stance—interestingly, she does so just as Felix’s own Miranda is starting to grow into her own and challenge her father.
Themes
In Anne-Marie’s narrative, Miranda thinks up a charm to lure Ariel’s protective spirit onto the ship with her; she fills the ship with cowslips, a flower that always tempts the spirit, and uses magic to conjure up a hive of bees. Even though it’s an illusion, Ariel is entranced and follows her onto the ship.
In Anne-Marie’s narrative it’s not Ferdinand who inherits Prospero’s power at the end of the play, but his daughter Miranda.
Themes
Anne-Marie kicks off her boots and jeans to reveal her dance leotard and tells the class to imagine the villains sneaking toward Alonso’s cabin and getting in fight with Ferdinand on the way. Ariel warns Miranda, who runs to the scene and breaks Sebastian’s wrist. She accompanies her narrative with a warlike dance routine, which elicits cheers from the class.
Anne-Marie’s enthusiastic defense of Miranda reiterates the possibility of transformation and evolution even within a play that has existed for centuries; she uses an old plot to articulate a new vision of female empowerment.
Themes
However, Miranda still has to handle Antonio and Caliban, so she calls in the three goddesses. Anne-Marie whips out the three dolls, whose eyeballs have been painted white, and whirls them around her head. The goddesses, she says, incapacitate Antonio while Miranda jumps Caliban and dislocates his arms. Her story ended, Anne-Marie gives a prim curtsy. Stunned and impressed, everyone claps.
When she started working with Felix, Anne-Marie would never have loosened up enough to perform such a fantastical routine. Her prim gesture at the end is a nod to the persona she inhabited in her first appearances, and demonstrates the extent to which she, like Felix, has changed as a result of her work in the prison.
Themes
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