Study Notes: Textual Conversations in The Tempest and Hag-Seed
Module A Textual Conversations Rubric and Conceptual Foundations
The study of textual conversations involves exploring the ways in which comparative study reveals resonances and dissonances between and within texts. This process considers how the reimagining or reframing of specific aspects of a text might mirror, align, or collide with the details of another. By examining common or disparate issues, values, assumptions, and perspectives, it becomes possible to understand how composers are influenced by other texts, contexts, and values, and how these influences shape meaning. This requires an identification, interpretation, analysis, and evaluation of textual features, conventions, contexts, purposes, and values across two prescribed texts.
Personal, social, cultural, and historical contextual knowledge influences perspectives and shapes specific compositions. Engaging with texts in this manner enhances the understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of both works. Textual integrity is a central concept here, referring to the way a text is crafted so that its ideas work together to maintain value and significance as an enduring piece. Texts maintain significance by sustaining intertextual conversations where ideas and themes are reframed to offer new perspectives on relevant issues.
Thesis Construction and Structural Comparison
Composers use form and textual features to create an ongoing dialogue between texts, enabling new understandings of specific themes to emerge through contrast and resonance. They situate their work within specific social, political, and cultural contexts, drawing upon these environments to engage in intertextual conversations. Enduring texts maintain their significance by exploring complexities—such as how individuals are shaped and constrained by social hierarchies, gendered expectations, and moral tensions—across time. William Shakespeare’s The Tempest () is a highly pedagogical tragicomedy that reflects the rigid confines of the Jacobean era through entrenched hierarchical beliefs, including patriarchal authority and the Great Chain of Being. In contrast, Margaret Atwood’s postmodern, revisionist novel Hag-Seed () reimagines these concerns within a contemporary context, introducing more egalitarian and meritocratic values.
The choice of form dictates the nature of the conversation. Shakespeare utilizes monologues and soliloquies as distinct features of tragicomedy to establish dramatic closure and social order. Atwood utilizes free indirect discourse as a distinct feature of prose to provide psychological depth and an individualistic perspective. These formal differences allow for a shift from Shakespeare’s Christian humanist emphasis on forgiveness to Atwood’s secular, individualistic framework, which reflects the influence of Nietzschean secularity. Through the character Felix, Atwood reframes the reconciliation of revenge as a self-determined process rather than the communal restoration seen in the original play.
Representations of Gender Agency and Contextual Friction
Despite evolving socio-cultural movements that strive towards greater gender equality, women often remain confined by enduring patriarchal expectations, a tension that both Shakespeare and Atwood explore through representations of female agency. Shakespeare’s traditional -act structure, bound by the conventions of Jacobean tragicomedy, enforces a rigid dramatic order that mirrors the rigid social order it depicts. Within The Tempest, Miranda is initially defined by patriarchal authority, ordered by Prospero to "Obey and be attentive," which reflects the Jacobean ideal of the obedient and passive woman.
However, Shakespeare complicates this ideal from within his own form. While isolated on the island and freed from courtly convention, Miranda unknowingly subverts these notions, asserting "Pray give me that" to Ferdinand as she carries logs. The use of imperative language reorients her toward active assistance rather than passive obedience. This suggests that even within a form built to enforce patriarchal order, there is a gesture toward the instability of that order. Atwood extends this instability into an open critique using the modern novel form, which is unconstrained by formal rigidity and mimetic of a more fluid, egalitarian lens on femininity.
Atwood uses free indirect discourse to allow access to the interiority of the character Anne-Marie in a way Shakespeare’s stage directions cannot permit. Through this intimacy, she redefines femininity through a -wave feminist lens. Anne-Marie asserts that "Being a girl is the pits, trust me," using colloquial diction to establish relatability and self-awareness regarding persistent systemic gender bias. She does not submit to these limitations but exposes them through active resistance. This resistance is highlighted through Felix, who acting as a surrogate for Jacobean stereotypes, was "never ready when a slice of filth came out of [Anne-Marie's] child like mouth." This surprise exposes the persistent conflation of femininity with innocence and chastity, revealing how naturalized Jacobean assumptions remain even in a contemporary text.
Class Hierarchies and Postmodern Meritocracy
Authorial representations of subordinate figures serve as sites for textual conversations regarding the perceived immutability of class hierarchies. Shakespeare reflects the rigidity of the Great Chain of Being and its resistance to lower-class aspiration through Prospero. Prospero’s condescending diction, "You'd be king o'th' isle Sirrah?", betrays pure disbelief and disdain at the prospect of social mobility. This contempt is mirrored by absurdity from below as Shakespeare crafts the characters Stephano and Trinculo (Zanni figures) and their plot to "kill this man" as a farcical overreach. Through their failed aspiration to usurp Prospero, Shakespeare exposes the futility of attempting class mobility within a feudal structure that the drama itself refuses to destabilize.
Atwood reinterprets this notion within a meritocratic framework that acknowledges the potential for social mobility and criminal rehabilitation in the Canadian penitentiary system. The novel form is structured around a strict chronological process of character development, embedding the philosophy of tabula rasa—the idea that identity, unlike Shakespeare’s static social order, can be rewritten over time. The capacity to "draw on a new face" operates as a metaphor for moral redemption, recasting characters as antiheroes capable of change. This is reinforced as Felix insists that "When you walk in here you become a clean slate."
Despite this progress, Atwood is careful to show that mobility is not universally accepted. The character Sal’s insistence that "Prisons are for incarceration" reveals, through authoritative diction, that individuals of institutional power still cling to outdated, unchangeable views. Thus, while Shakespeare exposes the absurdity of class climbing through satire, Atwood tests the limits of change through the incomplete progress of institutional reform. This demonstrates the enduring tension between entrenched hierarchical beliefs and the possibility of individual transformation.
The Ethics of Revenge and Forgiveness
The impulse for revenge is an unchangeable facet of human nature, yet the ability to liberate oneself from its confines is dependent on context. Shakespeare crafts Prospero to affirm reconciliation as a pathway to moral restoration, grounded in Christian Humanism. Prospero’s declaration that "the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance" employs antithesis to remind the audience that forgiveness is inherently more productive than retribution. This resolves the play's tension within a single, decisive act befitting the dramatic form’s demand for closure. In this framework, Prospero "forgives thy rankest fault," achieving both moral transformation and inner peace.
Atwood's novelistic interiority allows her to unsettle this resolution. Freed from the need for dramatic closure, Felix’s revenge is rendered an incomplete and psychologically fraught process. He reflects that "he has made his peace, but it does not feel like peace," a paradox that exposes the unfulfillment lingering beneath the appearance of resolution. Felix confesses he "can almost taste revenge, tastes like steak, rare," where zoomorphic imagery reveals an all-consuming hunger that resists the neat resolution granted to Shakespeare’s protagonist. Atwood thus locates this unresolved appetite within a secular context that privileges individual justice over communal or spiritual reconciliation, which stands in direct contrast to Shakespeare’s Christian humanist emphasis.