“A Sea Change into Something Rich and Strange.” Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed: A Metatextual Approach

Ever since it was published, Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016) has been scrutinized for its peculiar engagements with the Shakespearean pre-text at the cross-section of various discourses, from literary and media studies, through drama pedagogy, even to prison studies. Drawing on the prison metaphor from the original and recontextualizing it as a contemporary prison performance is just one of the multitudinous forms and ways in which The Tempest is incorporated into Atwood’s novel. Thus, though it is quite difficult to designate a sole term for what she (un)does with the classic, one striking issue anyone may encounter is its intertwining metatextuality which encapsulates many of its core interpretations as a rewriting and/or adaptation. The present paper aims at unravelling the many layers, means and functions of this particular type of metatextuality and/or metatheatricality found in the novel. We look at the polyphonic nexus of texts and contexts that defines Atwood’s novel as an experiment that reconsiders, with a gesture of metatextual homage, the prospects of rewriting – a practice Shakespeare himself was highly familiar with – in the contemporary age. Nested in the Genettean structuralist framework (Genette 1997 [1982]), our approach is meant to expand its applicability taking into consideration Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizome to investigate Atwood’s rewriting as an instance of “rhizomatic metatextuality” as well as the strategies of interpretation, appropriation, and reconstruction in fan fiction rewriting (see Jenkins 1992). Placing metatextuality as the central interpretive key of the novel, we shall discuss the roles of theatre (and art, in general) represented in Hag-Seed as an aesthetic and art history account, as well as the status of the interpreter or the intended audience of both the novel and the play within.