Feminist Reading of Shakespeare\'s Midsummer Night\'s Dream

Midsummer Night's Dream

William Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream is ostensibly concerned with heterosexual marriage, but it is seldom noted just how disturbing the play's picture of marriage seems. The subject is seldom raised without mention of death or conquest: even the farcical drama enacted in the play's final act by the rude mechanicals is a story of two lovers who die violently, except the story is played for laughs. I would like to show by an examination of several key motifs in the play -- the relations between fathers and daughters, the friendships between women, and the status of men and women in the play's erotic couplings -- that Shakespeare's real subject in the play is the status of women. A Midsummer Night's Dream stands out for its portrayal of a culture in which women are labeled as inferior and rendered as powerless.

The subjection of women is undeniably central to A Midsummer Night's Dream due to its prominent placement in the drama's opening. Here we experience, one right after the other, two variations on the theme of women being "ruled" by men. The overarching structure of the play is framed by the marriage of the play's political ruler, Theseus, the Duke of Athens, to his wife-to-be Hippolyta. It is worth noting that Hippolyta is, mythologically, the Queen of the Amazons -- an all-female tribe of woman warriors. Nonetheless, it is jarring to hear that this marriage is based on actual literal conquest at the point of a knife, as Theseus announces:

Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my sword,

And won thy love, doing thee injuries;

But I will wed thee in another key,

With pomp, with triumph and with revelling. (I.i)

It might be possible to understand this as fanciful "war between the sexes" rhetoric, were it not the case that the immediate plot-point following concerns another narrative of female obedience to male authority -- this one related to fathers and daughters. Egeus, a citizen of Athens, is appealing to the city's ruler because his daughter Hermia is marrying against her father's wishes: Egeus has promised his daughter to Demetrius, but Hermia desires of her own volition to marry Lysander. The redress sought is unusual, to say the least:

EGEUS: Be it so she will not here before your grace

Consent to marry with Demetrius,

I beg the ancient privilege of Athens,

As she is mine, I may dispose of her:

Which shall be either to this gentleman

Or to her death, according to our law

Immediately provided in that case.

THESEUS: What say you, Hermia? be advised fair maid:

To you your father should be as a god;

One that composed your beauties, yea, and one

To whom you are but as a form in wax

By him imprinted and within his power

To leave the figure or disfigure it.

The premise of the ensuing middle acts of the play, which follow Hermia and her two suitors, is that Hermia's father has the power to kill his daughter if she does not marry the man he chooses. Indeed, Theseus expresses the status of women here in a poetic metaphor: Hermia's relation to her father should be that of a created being to the god that created it. Hermia is not human but like a wax doll -- her father sculpted her, and he may liquidate her too, if he so chooses.

One might think -- given the hint of Amazon femaleness suggested by Hippolyta -- that the subaltern status of women in the play would produce a kind of solidarity between women. But the women's friendships in the play are actually undercut by the lowered status of women overall. This becomes most evident in the relationship between Hermia and Helena in Act II Scene I, when Helena -- lovesick for Demetrius whom Hermia scorns -- expresses her own status as a woman freely in less-than-human terms:

I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,

The more you beat me, I will fawn on you:

Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,

Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,

Unworthy as I am, to follow you.

What worser place can I beg in your love,

And yet a place of high respect with me,

Than to be used as you use your dog? (II.i)

This rather horrifying speech, in which Helena compares her status to that of a dog who is more obedient the more it is beaten, suggests something troubling about the status of women overall. Yet Helena finds little solidarity with Hermia later in the scene. When she believes Hermia is conspiring with both men to mock her, she gives a depiction of the female friendship before sexuality came in, which has an underlying distastefulness:

O, is it all forgot?

All school-days' friendship, childhood innocence?

We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,

Have with our needles created both one flower,

Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,

Both warbling of one song, both in one key,

As if our hands, our sides, voices and minds,