A Midsummer Night's Dream Gender Roles Essay

Throughout many of his works, Shakespeare demonstrated the issues relevant to his time in regards to gender roles and tensions. During the period of the fifteenth century, women of upper class were inferior figures known as the “Elizabethan women” and were dominated by the men in their families. Women were subservient to the men in the family and were expected to obey men in all aspects of their life, no matter what their opinion was. Marriages were arranged to suit the family and disobedience towards men was seen as a crime against their religion, and women were likely to die or suffer banishment for doing so. Likewise, the role of men was to be the head of the marriage and men were allowed to discipline their wife as they pleased. Men were also granted utmost respect and rights. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written by Shakespeare in the year 1600, illustrates the plight of women in a patriarchal society. As a custom for Elizabethan women, traditionally the upper class, in the world of the play, fathers own their daughters and have the right to choose their husbands, with the daughters being killed or banished if they don’t comply. The women of the play, who are lacking physical expertise and political power, are relegated to subhuman status; being treated more like property and less like people. Take into account Egeus’s view of his
daughter Hermia. He approaches Theseus, the Duke of Athens, and tells him that she has “Turned her obedience, which is due to me,/ To stubborn harshness” (1.1.37-38). He attempts to control her choice of partner by subjecting her to harsh Athenian law and even death should she disobey him. Although Hermia can not control whom she loves and is not in love with the person her father chose for her, she ultimately does not have a say because of the common predicament she and many other women were left in because their choice was not a suitable one. Subverting your own father was a questionable act that threatened consequences and therefore resulted in women’s silence leaving them in a predicament. In contrast to Hermia’s lack of power, the fate of Hippolyta shows how women are often ‘trophies’ awarded to powerful men with or without the women’s consent. Hippolyta is of higher power because she is the Queen of the Amazons and is betrothed to Theseus, the Duke of Athens. As a male character he reigns supreme in exerting his dominance over her through his acts of violence during war in order to maintain control over her. For example, in the opening of the play Theseus and Hippolyta discuss their union where Theseus says, “Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword/ And won thy love doing thee injuries” (1.1.16-17). Through this statement, Theseus indicates that he has used his superior strength in addition to some barbaric tactics in order to secure himself a bride. Though the means he has resorted to are not common to courting rituals, they are effective in the world of the play Shakespeare has created to show Hippolyta’s complicated life as an “outsider”, unable to make a decision for herself because she is essentially being forced to marry Theseus. In addition to Theseus’ patriarchal rule over Athens, Oberon exercises patriarchal rule over the forest. By drugging his wife and coercing her into having sex with a donkey, Oberon shows how men in patriarchal society degrade women in order to maintain dominance. As such, Titania’s refusal to hand over the Indian changeling to Oberon is a rebellious act against her husband that must be punished. Because Oberon did not get his way, he says, “I’ll watch Titania when she is asleep/ drop the liquor of it in her eyes./The next thing then she waking looks upon,/Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull,/On meddling monkey, or on busy ape./She shall pursue it with the soul of love” (2.1.179-183). In condemning his own wife to something unthinkable, Oberon must teach Titania a lesson so she remembers that as a woman she is below him. Although she made a decision for herself and is sticking to it, she must bear the consequences. Many men took drastic measures to ensure their wives, although fully capable of making their own decisions learned that they are not permitted because it risked embarrassing the husband, undermined and questioned their intelligence In conclusion, women born into or forced into this conventional patriarchal society were not left with a choice of lifestyle and their fates were left to the decisions made by men.
Women were treated like property, handed over because they were won by war, forced into a union with a man they did not choose but rather by their father, and punished if they disobeyed their husband. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream does a great job in showing these issues. Life for upper class, Elizabethan women was not really a fulfilling one thus leaving the question, which other authors wrote works illustrating their difficult
lives?