Sexual Phantasy and Its Violence in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Abstract

This paper examines Jan Kott’s interpretation of the Dream where he finds ‘dark love’ in the reversal of love objects of desire, and compares this dark love to ‘zero risk’ loves that Alain Badiou notices in contemporary society, as found in a well-planned marriage on the one hand and fun sexual arrangements on the other. It argues that though Kott did not point out, and Badiou did not specify in his explanation of zero risk or safety loves, these kinds of love disclose more possibilities of sexual violence against women as in the cases of the Dream where female characters are situated with their male partners. Besides, this paper reconsiders Theseus’ famous speech that compares the lover, to the lunatic and to the poet, by reflecting it with Badiou’s philosophical conceptualization of true love that takes love as a ‘construction’ or a ‘tenacious adventure, not reducing it to the first encounter where ‘shaping fantasies’ Theseus describes are experienced. It also traces Theseus’ course of life that is only indicated in the quarreling scene of Oberon and Titania, but historically recorded in “the Life of Theseus” of Plutarch’s The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, which shows his serial ravishments, perjuries, and abandonments of women. Moreover, by illuminating Helena and Hermia’s experiences they underwent with Demetrius and Lysander’s switching partners, from the standpoint of Theseus’s women, it argues that these women show the symptom of self-humiliation by occupying through imagination the position of women Theseus is said to have raped and abandoned. Lastly, differently from a general assumption as in the criticisms of Garner and Montrose that the play affirms a patriarchal order by gratifying men’s heterosexual needs whereas dismantling female friendship, it contends that the female affinity portrayed beautifully in this play, that is, between Titania and a votaress, and between Helena and Hermia, is not that fragile one to be destroyed by men’s attempt to sever it.