“To the elements be free”: Carnivalising the legacy of Shakespeare in Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed

Abstract

In her addition to the tradition of rewritings of The Tempest, Margaret Atwood makes Shakespeare travel through time, well beyond the  confines of his desert island: Hag-Seed takes place inside a penitentiary in landlocked Ontario, Canada, thus prompting us to ponder how  the Shakespearean text can yield new meanings for the contemporary postcolonial world. This essay shows how, in this intertextual  novel, Atwood articulates a powerful reflection on freedom and imprisonment thanks to subversive Bakhtinian devices such as  carnivalisation and dialogism. Indeed, the inmates of Fletcher Correctional, through their performance of a parodic version of The Tempest, subvert the authority of the Shakespearean text through a carnivalesque reversal of established rules of behaviour. The novel  thus posits the importance of theatre as an educational and therapeutic tool. Further, Atwood enlists the help of popular culture as the  prisoners reinterpret the Shakespearean model through a series of provocative rap numbers. Moreover, thanks to the imaginary  scenarios Hag-Seed’s inmates write about the afterlives of the Shakespearean characters, the monologic authority of The Tempest is  dialogised into a cacophony of unruly voices. Playful carnivalisation paradoxically enables a deeper emotional aspect of the novel: the  ability of Atwood’s Prospero figure to come to terms with the trauma of the death of his daughter. In that sense, HagSeed can be seen as  a long process of atonement and mourning. From an aesthetic point of view, the carnivalised performance of The Tempest illustrates  Atwood’s use of metatheatricality and magical realism, the latter being rooted in a carnivalisation of the parameters of conventional  realism. All in all, Hag-Seed can be construed as a novel at the crossroads between modernism and postmodernism: if it relies on a  postmodern parodic gesture, it nevertheless foregrounds the epiphanic modernist agenda of achieving social justice and spiritual  regeneration.