Prisoners of Shakespeare: Trauma and Adaptation in Atwood’s Hag-Seed

Abstract

This essay examines the ways in which Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed, an adaptation of The Tempest in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, connects her abiding concern with representing trauma to issues of literary and dramatic adaptation. The essay applies theories of traumatic repetition to examine how protagonist Felix Phillips relies on Shakespeare’s Tempest to help him respond to his experiences. However, his obsessive use of Shakespeare makes it difficult to distinguish between repetition as a means to work through trauma, on the one hand, and the repetition compulsion associated with traumatic suffering, on the other. Furthermore, Atwood exposes a resemblance between these forms of repetition related to trauma and the process of adapting a text, which Linda Hutcheon defines as “repetition without replication” (7). Ultimately, Atwood produces a meta-literary reflection on her own novel and the Hogarth series overall, and she positions authorial adaptation as a response to the trauma of literary history.