Figuring “Mimetic Desire” Embodied in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Regarded as a representative comedy of Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is well-known for the multilayered examination of love and its vagaries, also the absurd sense of humor produced by ludicrous fights. In the play, four young Athenians, respectively Hermia, Helena, Demetrius, and Lysander, fall into two love triangles in secession. Both followed with wrangles and fights, which serve as the main plot while producing a dramatic conflict of the play.
In his work Géométries du désir, the French scholar René Girard briefly discussed about the connection between the play and his theory of “mimetic desire”, which was first proposed in his work Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. The combination of theory and the details of the play provided a new scope for analyzing the characters’ behaviors and the implication of human nature, implying the inner relationship between desire and dispute. Yet only a few studies further examined the fitment of this device for analysis: In 2000, Rebecca Adams pointed out the shortage of Girard’s device because he overemphasis on the violence resulting from mimesis and rivalries while neglecting the bright side, such as love and creativity of mimesis. From another aspect, Palaver reinterpreted Girard’s idea of “divinization of the object accompanied by extreme self-degradation” in 2013 and thereby expounded the cause of Helena’s self-loathing. It was in the same year that Wang bridged the connection between the theory and the comedy comprehensively while inferring the modernity embodied in this Shakespeare’s play, Wang also identified with Girard’s conclusion by extending the crisis of A Midsummer Night’s Dream precisely rooted in “mimetic desire”. In recent years, Xu echoed with that argument as well as recognized this perspective “unique and subversive”.
The main objective of this paper is to probe into the connection between the play and the “mimetic desire” theory synthetically, followed with a critical view towards the defect of this analytical device, viz., compared to the Realistic works René Girard has analyzed, the supernatural power, randomness and other factors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream make the conflict non-inevitable, hence the theory is not absolutely persuasive.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a comedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, was written about 1595–96 and published in 1600. Shakespeare interweaved four separate plots and four groups of characters. In the story, two love triangles among four Athenian youths take place one after another: Lysander and Demetrius fell in love with the same girl twice, first is Hermia and then Helena, caught in the throes of the mimetic crisis, which accelerates increasingly and makes any stability in relations impossible. On the surface, their fight for Hermia is spontaneous, while another one is driven by supernatural power: the love potion produced by the magic flower called “love-in-idleness”.
In 1961, René Girard published the book Deceit, Desire and the Novel where he first proposed the theory of “mimetic desire”. According to which, human beings imitating each other’s desires give rise to rivalries and conflicts. Girard claimed that humans’ desire can be linear, yet it is not essential. The model of “triangular desire” was devised to demonstrate his idea of “mimetic desire”, the model includes 3 elements: mediator, subject, and object, with the mediator radiating toward both the subject and the object. “The spatial metaphor which expresses this triple relationship is obviously the triangle. ” The scholar also added. On the basis of which it can be inferred that the desire is not directly produced from the subject to the object, but the subject imitates the desire of the mediator towards the object while mistakenly taking others’ desire as his/her own, resulting in pursuing a same target, namely the object.
Obviously, the love triangles among Athenian lovers in the play and this theory have mutually-matched elements and almost parallel structures. By perusing the details of the story, it can be observed that at the beginning, Demetrius used to love Helena before falling head over heels for Hermia, while he suddenly shifted his love to Hermia:
LYSANDER:
Demetrius, I'll avouch it to his head,
Made love to Nedar’s daughter, Helena,
And won her soul;
Nevertheless, the absurdity occurs when in Act 3, Scene 2, where Helena complains about the fact that Hermia and Helena are just like twin sisters, with similar hands, voices, minds, and beauty:
HELENA:
As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds
Had been incorporated. So we grew together
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet a union in partition,
Two lovely berries molded on one stem;
Despite the merits and beauty being entirely the same, the mimetic crisis between two male characters still takes place. Girard demonstrated that the behaviors of Lysander and Demetrius can be thoroughly explained by “mimetic desire”: the outbreak of their fights for love aren’t accidental, the reason lies in the fact that they affected and mimicked each other, therefore acting spontaneously.
Some scholars share the same opinion with Girard, while bringing together the relationship between these two love triangles with the play systematically, Wang believes that the shift of Demetrius' love is because he fell into the triangular desire: Within this tailor-made model, Lysander becomes the mediator, Demetrius who serves as the subject of this model, deems Lysander’s desire for Hermia, namely the object, is his own desire. It is also suitable for the case after the protagonists enter the forest when the change of attitudes took place as a result of Puck’s mistake: Two male protagonists begin to pursue Helena instead, it reflects the idea of “The object changes with each adventure but the triangle remains. In conclusion, the fight between Lysander and Demetrius is bred in their desire.
“Mimetic desire” serves as a new scope to observe A Midsummer Night’s Dream, however, there are also poking holes for this device. In the remainder of this article, the critical thinking towards the shortage of “mimetic desire” in analyzing this comedy will be discussed.
In the first place, it can be inferred from the book that with the “mimetic desire” theory, Girard had analyzed several works such as The Red and the Black, Madame Bovary, and Don Quixote, which were literature created on the basis of reality. Even for another Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, as being analyzed in Géométries du désir, are realistic literary works. Compared with which, A Midsummer Night’s Dream invites supernatural elements like magic and spells, especially after the four youths entered the forest, where the traditional boundaries including human reason and sanity completely crush down. Although the lovers have one foot in the conventional world of Athens, the play forces them to confront their own irrational and erotic sides as they move temporarily into the forest outside of Athens. Therefore, in a sort of way it is contrived if all of the reasons behind the contradictions are asserted to be fully explained by the “mimetic desire” theory, for it is quite unreasonable to explain the extraordinary events in the forest with the rules in the conventional world. Hence it is doubtful whether Demetrius began to pursue Helena on account of imitating Lysander: for the two protagonists were bewitched and Demetrius was irrational. His actions are totally out of his own will. Consequently, the studies may assume that mimesis exacerbates the conflicts while being more prudent if analyzing the phenomenon based on some plots.
In the next place, it’s worthy of discussion other factors lead to the events in the play, such as “love at first sight”, as the play may imply:
HELENA:
For, ere Demetrius looked on Hermia's eyne,
He hailed down oaths that he was only mine,
And when this hail some heat from Hermia felt,
So he dissolved, and showers of oaths did melt.
The original lines have not mentioned another rival in love Lysander in this scene. As from Helena’s nuncupative, an even closer possibility is Demetrius falling in love at the first sight after meeting Hermia. If so, the affection purged from Demetrius to Hermia can be reconsidered as a linear desire: disregarding the effect of “others”. In the meantime, it cannot be separately asserted as the simple result of mimesis. As Xu argued in his research, Girard believed that the hidden logic contained in Shakespeare’s work is exactly the “mimetic desire”, while the risk rests with the simplification. After all, it’s a bit rough to classify the complexities of human nature into merely a single category.
Last but not least, it is noticeable that the “triangular desire” is not a single monolithic structure. The relationship between the subject, object, and the mediator is relative: for instance, when the opposition and the fights occur mutually, it is difficult to ensure the individuals holding their absolute positions of “subject” “mediator” or “object”. Shakespeare offers us an abbreviated portrayal of the mimetic crisis. Despite its brevity, all elements of the crisis are visible, as the characters exchange positions with each other in rapid succession. As the two young male characters are affected mutually, their positions could be flowing. The features of simplicity and instability of “mimetic desire” both determine that the complexities hidden behind the love triangles among the four Athenians should not be nested in a single template.
In conclusion, Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream presents the absurdity of which creates a peculiar sense of humor for the comedy. Meanwhile, as a relatively novel analytic perspective, René Girard’s conception of “mimetic desire” and “mimetic crisis” uncovers one possible cause of the issues while further implying how the collapse of cultural order transforms the entire society into a violent struggle of all against all. Overall, the defects of the device, including simplicity, fluidity, and exclusivity are seldom discussed, while being worth weeding. For further studies, it may be inferred from other details in the play or by combining other correlative theories, so as to deduce the conclusion that even without the magic of “love-in-idleness”, the two characters will probably also do the same thing. Only by which the paring, as well as elucidation, would be more logical and persuasive.
