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Chapter 6
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
Felix decides to concentrate on revenge first. All the plans that come to mind seem impractical; he can’t just lure Tony into a dark basement and kill him, and he can’t imagine seducing his “robotic” wife. He fantasizes about poisoning him, but knows he doesn’t have the resources to accomplish this.
Felix only imagines the most drastic and absurd forms of revenge. Here, ideas cadged from the theater prove useless; however, when he starts thinking in a more nuanced fashion, he will be much more successful.
Themes
In order to be better informed, Felix starts to track Tony’s movements as much as possible. It’s easy to do this because Tony is hungry for achievements and always makes sure they make it into the newspapers. Felix can often read interviews with him or accounts of his presence at various galas. He even gets awards for programs that Felix conceived, like busing local kids to see Shakespeare productions at the festival.
Tony’s transformations throughout the novel are always presented as disingenuous and false—there’s no suggestion that he’s actually interested in allowing underprivileged children to see Shakespeare. In this sense he contrasts with Felix, who really does positively transform his character and try to help others along the way.
Themes
Six years after Felix loses his job, Tony leaves the festival and runs for political office, winning a seat in the provincial legislature, where he works alongside the Heritage Minister Sal O’Nally. Felix’s spying is further facilitated with the advent of Google. He starts hanging around a local internet café and eventually buys a computer for his own cabin to browse in privacy. He’s shocked by how much information he can glean, from his remote cabin, about Tony’s and Sal’s activities. Still, he doesn’t know why he’s gathering all this information or what “justice” he’s waiting for.
It’s interesting that both Felix’s profession—theater—and Tony’s—politics—depend on casting illusions. However, while Felix’s illusions generally reveal some truth about real life or help people improve themselves, Tony’s serve only himself and often harm his constituents, like the prisoners. Again, Tony’s character helps define the difference between positive and negative transformations.
Themes
In fact, Felix’s growing obsession with spying is less insane than another development in his life. For years he’s been counting how old Miranda would be now, had she lived, and daydreaming that she’s still with him. From there, it’s only a few steps to actually believing that she’s invisibly keeping him company. Again, he checks out children’s books from the library, but this time he reads them aloud. Intellectually he knows that she’s not present, but it’s comforting to think that she is.
It’s never clear how much Felix believes in his own imaginings—he simultaneously says he believes that Miranda is keeping him company and promises that he knows this isn’t true. Miranda’s presence is the novel’s biggest illusion, and it suggests that the purpose of illusions isn’t just to make people believe something false but to challenge ideas of what exactly constitutes reality.
Themes
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In the years when Miranda would have been in elementary school, Felix “helps” her with homework and quizzes her on multiplication tables. He starts to cook meals for her, which helps him remember to eat. She always tells him to finish the food on his plate. A little later, he teaches her chess, which she takes to immediately. He never displays his latent anger to her; whenever he’s stalking Tony on the computer and muttering plans for revenge, she’s somewhere far away.
Miranda’s presence in the cabin is at least partly a function of Felix’s grief. Although grief is usually considered a negative emotion—not least by Felix himself—in this sense it saves him, forcing him to cook for himself and giving him a sense of purpose. Atwood presents grief as experience to learn from and even appreciate, not just to overcome.
Themes
Usually, she plays outside all day. When Felix hears birds squawking in the forest, he assumes Miranda has provoked them. In the winter she goes outside without warm clothes, but she never gets sick. In fact, she’s much healthier than Felix. She never asks him why they’re living in this tiny house, so far from town. When one day Felix actually hears her singing outside the house, he’s frightened that his daydreams are becoming too strong. He thinks that he needs to pull himself together and find a “real-world connection.”
Felix is conflicted between wanting Miranda’s presence to continue and wanting to preserve his sanity, in the conventional sense of the word. It’s also interesting that Miranda’s presence helps validate his odd existence, since she thinks of it as normal. Later on in the novel, the concerns she poses to him will inspire him to change, rather than maintain, his lifestyle.
Themes
