Prisons, both mental and physical, dominate the novel. After getting fired from his job, Felix exiles himself to a primitive cottage and allows himself no contact with his former life; he becomes so obsessed with his grief for his daughter Miranda and desire for revenge on Tony that he’s unable to form new relationships with others. In this sense, he keeps himself in an emotional prison for most of the novel. Ironically, it’s by going to work in a real concrete prison that he’s able to liberate himself by finding new purpose. When he tells the ghost of his daughter to “be free” at the end of the novel, Felix uses the rhetoric of imprisonment and release to express that freedom is a matter of personal choice.
For the inmates at Fletcher Correctional Center, however, imprisonment has nothing to do with personal choice. On the contrary, most of them see prison as the manifestation of the social oppression which has characterized their lives and the history of their country. This is particularly evident through their strong identification with Caliban, a “monster” in The Tempest who is imprisoned and enslaved for most of the play; rewriting Caliban’s story and imagining a triumphant life for him after the play, they reframe his imprisonment as a result of the social conditions under which he lives, rather than his innate character or morals. Moments like this argue that while people create some prisons for themselves, others are enforced by society in order to demonize and disadvantage its most vulnerable members.
Prisons Quotes in Hag-Seed
This is the extent of it, Felix muses. My island domain. My place of exile. My penance.
My theater.
But my other name’s Hag-Seed, or that’s what he call me
He call me a lotta names, he play me a lotta games
He call me poison, a filth, a slave,
He prison me up to make me behave,
But I’m Hag-Seed!
Prisons are for incarceration and punishment, not for spurious attempts to educate those who cannot, by their very natures, be educated. What’s the quote? Nature versus nurture, something like that. Is it from a play?
“We could put them on show,” says TimEEz. “Gibbering lunatics. Street people. Addicts. Dregs of society. Always good for a laugh.”
You called me dirty, you called me a scum,
You called me a criminal, a no-good bum,
But you’re a white-collar crook, you been cookin’ the books,
Rakin’ taxpayer money, we know what you took,
So who’s more monstrous…than you?
Prospero says to the audience, in effect, Unless you help me sail away, I’ll have to stay on the island – that is, he’ll be under an enchantment. He’ll be forced to re-enact his feelings of revenge, over and over. It would be like hell.
What has he been thinking—keeping her tethered to him all this time? Forcing her to do his bidding? How selfish he has been! Yes, he loves her: his dear one, his only child. But he knows what she truly wants, and what he owes her.
Prisons Symbol Timeline in Hag-Seed
