Where Thine Flower Blooms: Eroticism in Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream & Scandinavian Traditions
Midsummer is the time of solar solstice, as well as festive traditions dating all the way back to Pagan times in Europe, particularly in the Scandinavian peninsula. It is a time when the celestial body has reached its zenith; an annual astronomical event whose imaginative powers have long been associated with a heightened sense of sexuality. Midsummer Eve is a period in which the collective consciousness allows desire to be granted a license, which, upon being released, exposes its own absurdity, thus ensuring it collapses back into order by the morning.
Even though Shakespeare's “A Midsummer Night's Dream (1596)” and the Swedish solstice festivities are countries and cultures apart, they are contingent on the undertows of eroticism which makes up its license, as well as its eventual collapse.
Tender Wound of Love
Shakespeare’s 1596 play takes place on May Day and is centered around the forthcoming marriage between the Duke of Athens, Theseus, and his soon-to-be bride, Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. The narrative intrigue revolves around the four central lovers; Hermia, daughter of Egeus; Lysander, of whom Hermia loves; Demetrius, Hermia's soon-to-be betrothed; And Helena, unrequited lover of Demetrius.
The two lovers, Hermia and Lysander, flee to the woods as an act of rebellion due to their forbidden love: they reveal this to Helena, who in turn tells Demetrius of this. The forest is in turn ruled by Oberon, King of Fairies, and Titania, his Queen. After a disagreement between the two, Oberon decides to use an enchanted potion on Titania to sway her will.
“Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before, milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,
And maidens call it ‘love-in-idleness’
Fetch me that flower; the herb I showed thee once
The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature it sees”
- Oberon, Act II scene I.
In the excerpt from the passage above, it becomes clear to the reader that Cupid’s arrow has turned the palpable desire into an involuntary function, whose mechanism is contingent on the eroticism it produces. The arrow is described as being shot, which emphasises how love within the realm of the play is something that occurs through violence, rather than through consent. In the third unrhymed line of the stanza, the flower turns from milk-white to purple, which signifies the physicality of the bruised mark that stems from the violent desire. Oberon's passage reveals to the reader that the flower-divination of desire is therefore weaponised, and thus enacted as a form of sexual madness rooted in magic. Desire, then, is inflicted, not felt.
Shakespeare scholars – such as Jan Kott – underscore in his work Shakespeare “Our Contemporary (1964)”, and more specifically his essay “Titania and the Ass’s Head”, how the eroticism in the play is inseparable from the themes of violence and cruelty, which is reflected in the muddled boundaries between these oppositions. One cannot be distinguished from the other. They are, it seems, two sides of the same coin.
Oberon witnesses Demetrius cruelly reject Helena in the enchanted forest, whereafter he feels piteous towards her – Oberon then orders his servant, Puck, to use the potion on Demetrius to make him love Helena. Puck makes a series of mistakes in which the potion is wrongly applied, which results in a frenzy of unrequited desires. The four lovers find themselves in a dreamlike state where the body is surged with a sexual awakening associated with the surreal nature of the Midsummer night. What the nature of this night tells us is that desire is arbitrary and based upon sight; not soul. To want is indiscriminately anchored not in truth of the Self, but rather, it is an off-shoot of the Midsummer magic.
In the first scene of the third act, Titania, after having been awoken by the singing of local tradesman, Bottom the Weaver, finds herself madly compelled by him. This in itself reflects the absurdity of the dream, since Puck had magically transformed Bottom’s head into that of a donkey.
“I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again.
Mine ear is much enamored of thy note,
So is mine eye enthrallèd to thy shape,
And thy fair virtue’s force perforce doth move me
On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee.”
- Titania, Act III, scene I.
The disparity between the Queen’s doting affection and the absurdity of a donkey’s head not only reflects the comedic aspect of the play, but it also makes visible the strength of the eroticism within the Midsummer night. The final line, in which she confesses her ostensible love, underscores how involuntary and spontaneous the effects of the potion are. She is swept along by the magic of the dream, where the persuasion acts as proof of its absurdity. This directly relates to Kott’s notion of how degradation and desire are intertwined instead of being naturally binary oppositions: the bestial nature of Titanias infatuation is overtly degrading, all the while she is filled with treacherous desire. It becomes clear, then, that degradation and desire in the play is, effectively, suffused into one.
By the first scene in the fourth act, Titania awakens from her love-frenzied state, and finds herself revolted by her degrading wants. By being released from the shackles of Midsummer magic, the inverted desire of the night collapses in on itself, leaving only a faint trace of the preceding events as a fading memory. This collapse, the desire being granted a momentary license and thereafter dissipating by dawn, does not strictly only adhere to the realm of Shakespeare’s play. It bears a near-identical ritualistic rhythm to the Swedish traditions of Midsummer, which predates the play by centuries.
A Dance of Daffodils and Desire
Scandinavian Midsummer traditions function in a similar fashion. The holiday, then, has long carried a tinge of sexual undertones in its relation to the natural world. Midsummer, it is believed, is much like Shakespeare’s play a night rooted in the interplay between magic and desire, according to Swedish folklore. One such saying goes; “Midsommarnatten är inte lång men sätter sju och sjuttio vaggor igång”, which roughly translates to “Midsummer Eve is not long but sets seventy-seven cradles in motion”. This tongue-in-cheek saying emphasises the lustful nature of Midsummer, which can be observed in its many rituals.
Firstly, the phallic symbolism (though contested by folklorists, its freudian symbolism still remains) of the maypole burrowed into the ground signifies the fertility of the season– it reflects the wish for a fruitful bearing of the soil, which is then welcomed by the attendees dancing around the pole. The maypole becomes, on that fruitful Midsummer night, an ode to the fecundity of Spring and Summer.
Furthermore, the parallel of desire being enacted through floral rituals seems to be strikingly similar to the eroticism of Cupid's flower. One such tradition, according to Swedish ethnologist Jan-Öjvind Swahn, is the walk of the Flower Maid, in which young girls pick seven sorts of flowers in complete silence, after which they climb over seven roundpole fences and place the flowers underneath their pillows in hopes of dreaming of their future lover. Like Oberon's flower, the young Flower Maids of the field utilize the ritual of eroticism to call forth their lover, and by doing so conjure them to their bedside.
Much like the social setting of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Swedish Midsummer tradition is rooted in a sense of liminality, which, according to British anthropologist Victor Turner, is a term which describes a threshold space where social boundaries are dissolved; the civic containment of everyday-life is blurred out as the social roles become muddled. During Midsummer, the open fields of the landscape offer a communal yet anonymous setting where the social rank is equal in the eyes of said tradition. This is what Turner refers to as ‘Communitas’ in his seminal work “The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (1969)”, where he describes the term as an egalitarian, structureless bond which arises when a community shares a liminal experience, such as Midsummer, together. It is a space where desire is allowed to proliferate. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the dream-frame of the forest functions in the same manners as in the Swedish tradition, in which the boundaries of the civic room and the playful dreamscape blur together. This then allows for a descent into treacherous desire. Lysander, Helena, Demetrius and Hermia thus find themselves ensnared in the liminality of the night, running amok as the distinction between dream and reality fades into itself.
It is so, then, that when night becomes day and the enchantment wears off, the attendees of both the play and the festival find themselves forgetful of what transpired. Desire within both alike becomes a pressure valve, which is then released only for a short amount of time (and within that narrowed-down space) so that it can be contained and dissolved by sunrise. It therefore mirrors the summer solstice itself; which is defined by its anticipated zenith and abrupt climax.
Perhaps, as Puck stated, it was all a dream then– perhaps, even, it could have been both.
By Jack Ciontos