Explore the ways in which Shakespeare presents gender roles in AMND. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors.
Shakespeare subverts gender roles as the lovers enter the woods; traversing from a region of order to one of chaos. Shakespeare challenges gender expectations in the woods as he denotes the chaos wreaked upon the Athenian lovers in a supernatural realm which disregards law and convention. Shakespeare uses Helena to distort Elizabethan gender roles as she grasps a perverse sense of power in the woods, contrasting to her female subjugation in the Athenian realm. Helena’s extreme submission to Demetrius is displayed through her animalistic reduction of herself to an obedient ‘”spaniel”’. The asyndetic list of imperatives ‘”spurn me, strike me,/ Neglect me, lose me”’ connotes her almost masochistic desperation to receive attention from Demetrius, even in the form of violence. However, Helena’s indefatigable assertion of her devotion to Demetrius, in this subsidiary position, gives her a warped sense of power. Thus, Shakespeare undermines Athenian gender expectations as Helena strips Demetrius of his capacity to hurt her, physically and emotionally. Shakespeare reinforces this idea through a classical allusion in which ‘”Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase”’. In the Greek myth it is Apollo who pursues Daphne, eventually causing her transformation into a tree to escape him, although Shakespeare reverses the roles in this line to highlight the lovers’ subversion of gender roles in the woods. Shakespeare portrays Demetrius’ initial attempt to assert his male potency over Helena through his threat of forcefully taking the ‘”rich worth of (her) virginity”’. This forms a stark antithesis with Helena’s emasculation of him as her continuous subversion of his threats forces him to ask her to relinquish her hold of him. The monosyllables in Demetrius’s desperate imperative ‘”Let me go”’ connote his need to demonstrate his firm virility. Perhaps the monosyllables present his façade of masculine confidence, concealing his underlying vulnerability and lack of power. Shakespeare distorts societal gender roles, assigned to the lovers, as he elevates Helena’s power and diminishes Demetrius’ masculine dominance in the fairy realm. Contrasting to the gender transgression at the play’s centre, Shakespeare re-establishes patriarchal order at its end through the marriages of the lovers and Theseus and Hippolyta. This reassertion of societal order through marriage was in line with comedic conventions as Shakespeare attempts to sate a contemporary audience. Although, he leaves a 21st century audience unsettled with the perennial patriarchy that governs both the fairy and Athenian realm. Shakespeare juxtaposes the defiance and subversion of Hermia and Helena in the woods to his portrayal of them as absent presences in the final act of the play. Shirley Garner asserts that ‘Shakespeare was undoubtedly aware that he was creating a portentous silence’. Perhaps Shakespeare uses the incongruity of Hermia and Helena’s silence in the final act of the play to cast implicit criticism on Elizabethan wives being deprived of a voice and individuality once under conjugal constraints. This silence marks the subservience of the two women to their husbands and also suggests a breakdown in the friendship they once shared. Shakespeare depicts Helena and Hermia to be separated from each other, almost as strangers, which forms a stark contrast to Hermia endearingly addressing Helena as her ‘”sweet playfellow”’, at the play’s beginning. Garner affirms that the play is ‘a movement toward satisfying men’s psychological needs, as Shakespeare perceived them, but its cost is the disruption of women’s bonds with each other’. Thus, Shakespeare marks the restoration of patriarchal power through the disintegration of female solidarity. The reassertion of male dominance is encapsulated in Puck’s paradigm ‘”Jack shall have Jill;/ Nought shall go ill:/ The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well”’. Puck attempts to project a sense of unity and certainty in the play’s joyous ending, which are inferred through the rhyming couplets and the repetition of the modal verb ‘”shall”’. However, this image is imbued with gender inequality through the active role of the male characters and the passivity of the woman and the ‘”mare”’. The degradation of women to animals alludes to Shakespeare’s adherence, demonstrated in AMND’s final act, yet disapproval of societal conventions which place women in a subordinate position to their male counterparts.
