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Chapter 43
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
While the class takes a coffee break, Felix asks Anne-Marie if the goddesses really would have been able to exercise the power with which she imbues them. After all, in the play they’re just illusions conjured by Ariel. Anne-Marie shrugs and says they can be real goddesses if that’s what she wants.
It’s interesting and a little comic that, while Felix gives himself total liberty to transform the play for his own goals, he still resists the attempts of others to do so—especially when it involves changes to the cherished role of Miranda.
Themes
Representing Team Gonzalo, Bent Pencil makes his way to the front of the classroom and gravely thanks the rest of his team. He says that one can think of the play in terms of optimistic characters—like Ariel, Miranda, and Ferdinand—and negative ones—like Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian. With his naïve and idealistic persona, Gonzalo is the most positive of the characters. However, Gonzalo is also completely powerless, and his lack of agency suggests that “extreme goodness [is] always weak.”
It’s interesting that Bent Pencil makes this point about Gonzalo, since Lonnie’s combination of goodness and lack of agency have made the same suggestion. In a way, Felix’s effort to acquire power and achieve revenge is also an attempt to differentiate himself from Lonnie, and prove that good people don’t always have to lack power.
Themes
Bent Pencil asks the class to suppose that all goes well at the end of the play, and everyone sails back to Naples to celebrate Ferdinand and Miranda’s wedding. Gonzalo returns to King Alonso’s court, but the monarch is so grateful for his loyalty that he offers him whatever he wants. Given power for the first time in his life, Gonzalo retains his goodness: he goes back to the island and sets up a utopian kingdom with “no differences of rank and no hard labor” or crime.
Bent Pencil’s imagined future is diametrically opposed to SnakeEye’s: rather than imagining a world in which only the strong and devious survive, he suggests that those who deserve power will eventually attain it. However, Felix himself has shown that it’s almost impossible to attain power without at least a little scheming.
Themes
When the report is ended, Felix asks curiously how this project turns out. Bent Pencil says he will have to imagine it. Gonzalo doesn’t have any magic to enforce his wishes, but perhaps the “better natures of other people” will make his republic a success. Felix then calls up Team Hag-Seed to give the last report.
In a way, Bent Pencil’s last remarks reflect the atmosphere of Felix’s classes in the prison. He has no real power over his students, but by trusting in their “better natures” has achieved extraordinary results.
Themes
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