Costumes Symbol Analysis

In Hag-Seed, costumes are means both of tricking other people and uncovering hidden aspects of oneself. Felix often invokes costumes when he’s trying to deceive someone. His favorite one, a cloak made of stuffed animal skins made for Prospero in his original, cancelled production of The Tempest, allows Felix to pretend that he is a man at the height of power, rather than a recently-bereaved father; it represents his determination to delude himself and those around him. However, during his exile Felix often takes strength from looking at his cape in the closet; contemplating and eventually donning it allows him to access hidden reserves of determination and complete his revenge. Felix also thinks of the scruffy clothes he wears to work in the prison as a costume, which convinces others that he’s a harmless old teacher rather than a vengeful schemer. But by the end of the novel Felix does essentially become a harmless old teacher, much more concerned with his students’ success than his own plots. Although his clothes originally conceal a lie, they end up representing the truth.

Similarly, the prisoners adopt different costumes in order to express different parts of themselves. Watching his returning students adopt their stage names at the beginning of his course, Felix remarks that they “welcome the return of this other self of theirs, standing there like a costume.” Even though their stage names are fake and constructed, they allow the prisoners to access their thoughtfulness and intellectual curiosity—characteristics not normally fostered by prison life. Once they’ve designed their real costumes for the play, the prisoners all give better and more genuine performances; even though dressing up as sailors or wizards represents their abandonment of reality, it also allows them to express their talent and abilities in a way they can’t in real life. Appearing throughout the novel, costumes symbolize the uneasy coexistence of illusion and truth, both on and off stage.