asangam's blog

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the most clear examples of loving by mimesis, through hearing, through the eyes and finally in the fantasy of a dream. With this play, Shakespeare adopted for first time a strategy perfectly adequated to the resistance provoked by any excess of mimetic revelation. Always the spectators will prefer the magic of a dream or the inevitable love at first sight, but much harder will be for them to aceptate mimesis as the way of the love.

In a Midsummer Night’s Dream, the aspect magical-religious is the most spread and most finished mask of the mimetic interaction, the original mask, our own culture. In this play, the mask is continuosly put and taken away.

Despite its magic characters, this play has an extrem realism which is very present today.

To choose love by another’s eyes, this is one of the most important texts in which we can perceive the clear intention of the author in order to develope the topic of loving mimesis.

LYSANDER
Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth;
But, either it was different in blood,–
HERMIA
O cross! too high to be enthrall’d to low.
LYSANDER
Or else misgraffed in respect of years,–
HERMIA
O spite! too old to be engaged to young.
LYSANDER
Or else it stood upon the choice of friends,–
HERMIA
O hell! to choose love by another’s eyes.

(I, 1, 132-140)

This poetic duet belongs to a very well-known genre when the obstacles of love are sung : difference in age, difference in the social scale and – lastly but not less important- the pressures made by a third person.Love of Proteo to Sylvia depends on the election of Valentin; Tarquino, the one who never saw Lucrecia with his eyes, How can he love her but by another’s eyes?This is something rejected by anyone. Rejection of memetic desire is a silent imperative but very strict.

Lisander and Hermia are too mistaken in order to imagine something so subtle like the mimetic interpretation of their words. Mimetic desire is as less concious of itself as the act of breathing. Hermia has just changing one lover for another in a few hours, and Lisander invaded by another passion will abandon Hermia in the forest. The one and the other, however, only believe in their own myths. That is they have created their own myth, the one they will imitate along their lives.
Shakespeare is much more modern than all of us, puecause he is the only one who reveals the indefeasible tabues of our culture, that thinks that is free of any tabu. In front of the tiniest revelation of our abyss which separate from the conception of the desire, we murmur that Shakespeare was a conservatist. But in the field of the desire, the ideas that, fron century to century, we label as subversive in order to make then younger, they are in fact, the most conservatine, stale topics in the Renaissance and with which William Shakespeare jokes with no mercy.

This tabu of mimetism in very well studied by René Girard, who extracted the loving mimesis from which seemed to be only a romantical and pure desire. Though there are many theories of romantic love such as that of Robert Sternberg in which it is merely a mean combining liking and sexual desire, the major theories involve far more insight. For most of the 20th century, Freud’s theory of the family drama dominated theories of romance and sexual relationships. This has given rise to a few counter-theories. Theorists like Deleuze counter Freud and Jacques Lacan by attempting to return to a more naturalistic philosophy:

René Girard argues that romantic attraction is a product of jealousy and rivalry—particularly in a triangular form

Girard, in any case, downplays romance’s individuality in favor of jealousy and the love triangle, arguing that romantic attraction arises primarily in the observed attraction between two others. A natural objection is that this is circular reasoning, but Girard means that a small measure of attraction reaches a critical point insofar as it is caught up in mimesis. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and The Winter’s Tale are the best known examples of competitive-induced romance.[12]
Girard’s theory of mimetic desire is controversial because of its alleged sexism. This view has to some extent supplanted its predecessor, Freudian Oedipal theory. It may find some spurious support in the supposed attraction of women to aggressive men. As a technique of attraction, often combined with irony, it is sometimes advised that one feign toughness and disinterest, but it can be a trivial or crude idea to promulgate to men, and it is not given with much understanding of mimetic desire in mind.

Girard, René. Shakespeare,los fuegos de la envidia. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1995
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_(love)