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Chapter 8
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
Today marks the beginning of the fourth iteration of Felix’s class, and he’s nervous—despite his previous success, he knows he could still mess things up. He trims his beard, hoping it creates a “magisterial” effect, and puts on the dark green shirt and tweed jacket he always wears to the prison. These clothes encourage the prisoners to think of him as a “genial but authoritative retired teacher and theatre wonk,” someone respectable but unthreatening.
It’s interesting that Felix sees himself as deviously playing the part of a harmless old theater teacher, because by the end of the novel that’s exactly what he becomes—and while he currently craves more power and influence than he has, he’ll eventually be comfortable and content in this new role.
Themes
Felix uses this persona to keep himself aloof from the prisoners’ lives and personal arguments. He always tells them to forget about their “daily selves” when they enter the classroom. Everyone obeys—they have so few choices in their lives, and they want to preserve this one gift that they’ve been accorded. Felix never says so out loud, but he always manages to suggest how privileged they are to work with him.
Felix tells his students to forget about themselves as a way to maintain discipline, but it’s also a promise of transformation, from a despised prisoner to a valued actor. This is probably one of the reasons Felix’s class is so popular: he actively validates the prisoners’ humanity, and makes them feel like they are men with skills and responsibilities that others care about.
Themes
When Felix turns, he can see Miranda sitting at the table. She’s sad because he’s going to be away from home so much. He reassures her that he’s not in this job for the money, wanting her to think of him as noble and unselfish. Miranda is a teenager now, beautiful but very pale from being cooped up in the house. She worries about Felix when he’s away, making him tea when he gets home and insisting on cooking healthy dinners.
Although Felix still wants Miranda to be with him, her pallor suggests that this kind of half-life isn’t very healthy for her. Felix feels like he’s taking care of his daughter, but Miranda’s presence in the cabin is really of more benefit to him.
Themes
If Miranda were alive, she would be acting out and pushing him away, but in this form “she remains simple, she remains innocent.” Still, Felix thinks she’s been in a bad mood for a while and wonders if she’s fallen in love with someone. He tells her to be good and practice her math while he’s gone. She always obeys him and never goes far from the house—“something constrains her” from doing so.
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Felix prepares to brave the snow and coax his car to start—he’s long replaced the convertible he once drove, but this secondhand Peugeot often malfunctions. His road is rough and only used by the school bus—a bus that Miranda might have ridden, had she lived. He can’t find his scarf, until Miranda reminds him that he’s put it in the armoire. When he opens the door, he suddenly comes upon the animal skin cape he prepared for his aborted role as Prospero. Once the “cloak of his defeat,” it’s now “transforming itself” and “coming alive.” He feels sure that it’s almost time to don the cape again.
The last time Felix saw the magic cape, it reminded him of everything he’d lost in Tony’s coup. However, now it’s a symbol of the power he once had and could wield again. The cape continues to reflect Felix’s different personas. While he may toggle between contradictory roles, he’s not pretending or falsifying himself—he’s just exploring the complexities of his character.
Themes
