Margaret Atwood on Prison Reform: Shakespeare Makes Inmates More Empathetic | Big Think

Margaret Atwood on Prison Reform: Shakespeare Makes Inmates More Empathetic

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In Margaret Atwood’s new novel Hag-Seed, the protagonist Felix loses his job as a theatre director and is exiled to teach in a prison. Exiled? You betcha. Atwood’s latest work is a re-telling of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

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MARGARET ATWOOD :

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, and essayist. She is best known for her novels, in which she creates strong, often enigmatic, women characters and excels in telling open-ended stories, while dissecting contemporary urban life and sexual politics. She is among the most-honored authors of fiction in recent history. In addition to the Arthur C. Clark Award-winning "The Handmaid’s Tale," her novels include "Cat’s Eye," which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, "Alias Grace," which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, and "The Blind Assassin," winner of the 2000 Booker Prize. "Oryx and Crake" was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003. She was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in 2008. Her most recent novel is "The Year of the Flood."

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TRANSCRIPT:

Margaret Atwood: People are very conflicted about what prisons are for. Are they to punish people and make them have the most horrible awful life possible? Or are they to open up other chances for them or possibly a combo? Now we would all agree that some people really need to be in there because they are a danger to other people. If running around outside and quite frequently a danger to themselves it's also quite true that some of them probably don't belong in prisons at all, they belong in institutions that would do something about their mental challenges that they're having.

Prison systems in Hag-Seed, which is a revisit in Prospero's novel form of Shakespeare's play The Tempest, it's kind of inevitable that you would be writing about prisons because there are so many of them in the play. So revisiting the play involves writing about imprisonment, coercion of various kinds. And everybody in that play is in prison, constrained, unfree in some way for some part of the play except possibly Miranda who although she's on an island she can't get off of doesn't know anything better so doesn't feel that she's imprisoned. I might point out that on this island there's no butter. They toted up the things they had to eat and they were fairly limited so you can see why Prospero might want to get back to Malan his hometown simply to have something better to eat, but that's an aside.

So I did look at prisons and I was involved earlier in a protest in Canada against the closing of prison farms where people had been learning to interact with and care for beings other than themselves, namely animals, which can be very therapeutic. Over the years prisons have gone through many forms. Were they to put your political enemies in so you could ransom them later? Were they to put criminals in in order to punish them? Were they debtor's prisons where you oddly put people in who couldn't pay their debts thus making it impossible for them to pay the debts? Their relatives would usually have to bail them out if they had any relatives. Then in the 19th century, a very reforming age, we got the idea that prisons should be improving, that people should be improved by them that they should learn skills that would be useful to them later on instead of prisons that got called penitentiaries and then some of them got called reformatories so you're going to reform people.

And in 19th century prison systems in North America, which I read a bit quite a lot to write my novel Alias Grace, which concerns a famous real life murder case, they talk illiterate people to read and write so that they could read the Bible. So they were very instructional in that way. Where we are now is we don't know. And it doesn't make sense to talk about the prison system. So which prison where? How does it see itself? What is it being used for? And who is sent there? I was at Bard College a little while ago and they do run a college degree system in an adjacent prison. And you can get your degree and in fact a couple of people graduated at that time because I was there for graduation. And as for teaching Shakespeare in prisons, that has gone on more than you might think.

There's a very good book called Shakespeare Saved My Life, which is about a female college professor who went into a maximum security all male prison and tau...

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