Dream and Ritual Process in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Abstract

Dream and Ritual Process in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Florence Falk Whereas The Tempest ponders the mystery of dream, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream considers the efficacy of dream in effecting transformation. Dream is the heart of the play; the day-night rhythm its pulse. Sun and moon alternate their specific forms of governance, but the dream world alone offers relief from the constraints of day life. At the beginning of the play the waking world is an inter­ ruption that closes off perception, and nearly everyone suffers from impaired vision.1 The characters see narrowly—that is, along a standard curve of assumptions about civilization, status, beauty, and truth; hence, they each see separate, seemingly exclusive, versions of “reality” and assume their versions to be unassailable. Theseus and Hermia clash on the subject of filial obedience: Hermia. I would my father look’d but with my eyes. Theseus. Rather your eyes must with his judgment look. (I.i.56-57; italics mine)2 Helena is plainly envious of Hermia’s attractions: Demetrius loves your fair: O happy fair! Your eyes are lode-stars. . . . My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye. (182-83; italics mine) Seeing—the act of perception that establishes one’s place in the surrounding world—urgently requires renewal. Oberon, shaman figure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, recognizes that seeing—itself an act of choice—needs to be demythologized. His healing medicine (“a little western flower,” whose “juice . . . on sleeping eyelids laid” [H.i.166-70]) sets into motion the chain of events that confounds accustomed 263 264 Comparative Drama modes of seeing. Oberon’s strategy for transformation is the dream, which functions as a rite of passage to restore and expand perception. In fact, the three-part structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (expressed by the movement from Athens to the woods and back again) closely parallels the landscape of “rites of passage,” which precipitates fundamental patterns of growth and renewal. Victor Turner’s anthropological studies on the structural (and semantic) patterns of ritual process reinforce this cultural analogue to the dream-play pattern. Turner studied performance rites of the Ndembu culture of northwestern Zambia and observed that ritual mapping included both village (a structured and ordered society) and bush (an unstable, chaotic community)—the geographical (and psychic) distance between them measured and bounded by a symbolic system of landmarks that assured ritual sojourners safe passage and return.3 Thus the symbolic realm embraced what Turner calls structure and its antipode, communitas. Structure refers to the relatively abstract and permanent pattern of a social order whose form is grounded in law and custom; communitas, to the spontaneous, temporary, and detached aggregate of persons (and environment) beset by provocative acultural and antistructural conditions. Persons in communitas are said to be liminal personae (“threshold people”) because they exist in an ambiguous and transitional state. They are, in effect, faceless, nameless, “invisible” beings who can profit from a temporary (solar) eclipse. “Transformed” by the rite of passage, these persons return again to structure. The third realm in Turner’s cognitive mapping is societas, which refers to structure that has been renewed and leavened by communitas. One might say that societas is the net expression of the interaction between structure and communitas as mediated through transformed ritual subjects. It is also the resolution (at any given moment) of the dialectic between structure and communitasA The process is cyclical: persons released from structure into communitas are rejuvenated by the experience. But the neutral cement of structure is always subject to erosion. Hence, the process is reactivated when social and psychic conflict once again threaten to destabilize the social order. In Turner’s view Florence Falk 265 all societies depend on the continuous dialectic between struc­ ture and communitas and, indeed, cannot function in health without their dynamic interplay. More generally, Turner’s specific contribution has been to use these terms and the central concept of “structure and antistructure” that evolves from them as a model to describe the rhythmic tides of a wide range of societies and diverse cultural experiences. The pattern of transformation and the dream anatomy of A Midsummer Night’s...