From Amazons to Wives: The gendered difficulties of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and its Classical foundations
Though many have historically criticized Shakespeare’s early play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as shoddily written, re-examination of the text over the last several decades has leant new prestige to this entertaining ‘classic’. Most scholars agree that Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a light and frivolous accompaniment to the celebration of a wedding; and while the historical identity of the couple for whom it was written has escaped the knowledge of his students, there is ample textual evidence to support this claim. The main plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream involves the complex machinations of two couples (Helena and Demetrius and Hermia and Lysander) whose romantic cross purposes are further complicated by their flight into the woods and into the realm of the faerie King and Queen (Oberon and Titania) who themselves are engaged in domestic battle. The play contains some of the usual ‘lighter’ themes common to Shakespearean literature such as love, dreams and the creative imagination. It is love however, that causes the most difficulties for Shakespeare’s hapless characters. This sentiment leads to confusion, escape, intrigue and a great many laughs for the audience. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the quintessential comedy using misunderstanding and circumstance to create a scene that becomes incrementally absurd as to produce nothing but laughter.
Dita and The Darkness: Desperately Seeking Gaze
Theorist Laura Mulvey is notorious for her claims about the nature of cinematic enjoyment. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", she concludes that a spectator experiences two main pleasures in viewing conventional Hollywood films: (1) a voyeuristic pleasure, constituted from considering a female figure in an objectified, sexual way, and (2) a narcissistic pleasure, arising from identification with a male protagonist and his ‘gaze’. (Mulvey 62) Central to her argument is Mulvey’s emphasis on the voyeuristic quality of the viewer’s ‘gaze’: it is an erotic look of power and of objectification, held from a distance, based on the fetishization of the female body. The view of the camera, and thus of the male protagonist and the spectator also, is that of the intended male ‘gaze’.
Marginalizing the Soft Paunch
Since its hugely successful introduction in the 1950s, television has been widely regarded as a source of insight into North American culture; yet there is little doubt that the television doubly functions to promote the mainstream. From its inception, television programs have been loaded with latent hegemonic value and belief systems; the white, middle-class nuclear family of American dreams, in particular, seems to have found its niche in the small screen. For in the same way that it sponsors convention and distinguishes "norms", the television set has a unique ability to identify and isolate the unusual, different, and marginal.Yet in lieu of the success of this cultural commodity, one may wonder how television maintains its considerable audience if it is indeed a marginalizing and alienating medium.
In "Setting Free the Bears: Refiguring the Fat Man on TV," Jerry Mosher uses an analysis of fat men on television to deconstruct this cultural dilemma, while also exploring how TV constructs socio-cultural meaning through bodily signification. In this essay, Mosher makes two key arguments about the fat man on television: (1) that although TV classifies him as "normal", he remains a marginal character outside of society [1] , and (2) that his physical "softness" is symptomatic of a "crisis of masculinity" [2]