Midnight Summers Dream Vision Essay Research Paper

Midnight Summers Dream Vision Essay, Research Paper

Vision, Night and Day

A Midsummer Night’s Dream begins in the city that was, to the Renaissance imagination, the center of ancient Greek civilization. (Romanticized) Athens stands as a testament to what human beings know and are able to know. But throughout this play, Shakespeare delights in decentering the world mortals take for granted; soon the audience learns that the dark forest is the center of the play’s world, relegating Athens, center of the civilized Greek world, to the periphery. Day gives way to night, and mortal rulers leave the stage to be replaced by fairies. Night-and nighttime in, of all places, a forest-with its darkness and unseen horrors, seems a strange setting for a comedy. But in the world the play constructs, the special properties of night make it the perfect vehicle for the four lovers to set out on a project of self-discovery. Shakespeare plays on the same tensions as the trans-cultural phenomenon of the blind fortune teller: a belief that in darkness, reliance on senses other than eyesight leads to true seeing. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the nighttime forest, by disrupting and transforming vision, forces introspection and improvisation that help the four lovers on their way to self-understanding.

The darkness of the night setting seems particularly important in a play (and a culture) where the language of love relies so heavily on sight imagery. Fairy magic literalizes the connection between love and sight: appropriately, Oberon’s love juice is applied to the eyes. In the language of the play, to look on or at someone is the most common metonymic expression for falling in love with a new person, or for spending time with the one you already love. Lysander steels himself and Hermia against the trial of separation with a call to “starve our sight / *From lover’s food till morrow deep midnight” (1.1, ll. 221-2). Vision and hunger together become the elements of Lysander’s metaphor about lovers and separation; to see is to be with, and a lover’s company is elevated in importance to the need for food and drink. But Hermia and Lysander are not going to see each other by the light of day. The scant light of midnight-midnight, when dawn and dusk are both equally far off-will provide all the necessary illumination for their “lovers’ food.” The darkness of night is only intensified by the forest location, and yet these lovers are expected in the course of the play to come to see each other more fully. “Setting eyes” on someone is also an expression for falling in love. Note Helena’s tortured complaint that “ere Demetrius looked on Hermia’s eyne / He hailed down oaths that he was only mine” (1.1., ll. 242-3). Vision as a key part of love plays itself out fully in this line: eye contact is vital, because looking at someone looking at you is perhaps the most basic physical confrontation of another person’s subjectivity (compare the experience of eye contact to the impossibility of hearing someone hear you, or smelling someone smell you). Demetrius looks into Hermia’s eyes and falls in love. At the end of the same monologue, Helena uses more sight imagery in her resolution to get Demetrius back: “But herein mean I to enrich my pain, / To have his sight thither and back again” (1.1 ll. 250-1). What has wandered must be made to come back, and so Demetrius’ gaze becomes shorthand for Demetrius’ love. Sight, eyes, looking-all are part of a vocabulary of love that would seem to require the light of day rather than a setting in the darkest of all places at the darkest of all hours.

But if Lysander’s plan gives the first hint about the play’s setting (aside from the play’s title), Helena gives the first hint of a way to negotiate the tension between a nighttime setting and the visual language of love. Although the language of love makes extensive use of sight imagery, Helena asserts that real love has little to do with the eyes: “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid blind” (1.1 ll. 234-5). The gaze of the mind, therefore, gives love its true shape (although even in making this assertion Helena is forced to rely on sight imagery). What kind of gaze, then, is at work in the night world of the forest. Throughout the course of the night, the gaze becomes, at different times, introspective, non-visual, or enchanted, twisting the meaning of “love is blind.” By cutting away or transforming the sense humans rely on most, the night world forces new kinds of looking. Cupid’s blindness, described by Helena as a handicap, becomes a strength. Consider the passage in which Lysander describes the time when they will implement his plan: “Tomorrow night, when Phoebe doth behold / Her silver visage in the watr’y glass . . . ” (1.1 ll. 209-10). This short poetic description shows the potential ways that the normal mechanics of the gaze might be changed. Phoebe, or Diana, is the goddess of the moon and of transformation, particularly the unseen and mysterious transformations that happen under cover of darkness. The moon, the only source of light by which lovers can behold each other, is not shedding light on the activities of others but looks instead at her own reflection. The night world is therefore one that inverts the gaze from an out-looking action to an in-looking one, from a window to a mirror, from observation to introspection. The idea of a dream plays with the