SOURCE: “The Gender of Metamorphosis,” in Allegories of Writing, State University of New York Press, 1995, pp. 113-48.

[In the following excerpt, Clarke offers a Freudian analysis of the changeling child and his significance to Oberon and Titania.]

Like the pharmakon that slips out of semantic control in the moralization of the Circe story, a similarly ambivalent trope—the “changeling boy”—decenters the daemonic action of A Midsummer Night's Dream. On the one hand, Shakespeare adorns his erotic comedy with a lyrical gamut of names of generated forms, signs of natural growth and abundance. This profuse texture is one reason why, on the surface, the play is so good-natured:

Oberon. I know a bank where
the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania. …

(S 2.1.249-53)

On the other hand, even good-natured mischief can be painful, as when Puck frightens Bottom's companions out of the woods, and his mock-horrific transformations out-proteus Proteus:

Puck. I'll follow you;
I'll lead you about a round,
Through bog, through bush, through brake, through brier.
Sometime a horse I'll be, sometime a hound,
A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire;
And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn,
Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn.

(3.1.96-101)

Here Puck's declarative verbal metamorphoses set up a “round” or turning motion, a delirium of metaphor mimicking the primary process, the slipping of signifiers out of semantic control and proper relation.¹ The immediate outcome of Puck's metamorphic magic, of course, is the transformation of Bottom into a brief species catalogue, a fabulous monster, a man with the head of an ass.² Like the spirit with which he is introduced, Puck is marked by “miswandering,” the Verwandlung of metamorphosis. But Puck's mischief makes a mockery of moralisms, “sad tales.” Puck's “meaning” is conveyed in a key line—“My mistress with a monster is in love” (3.2.6)—that celebrates a triumph of misprision, the mock-incestuous liaison between the anointed Titania and the transformed Bottom. Concerning the confusions resulting from Puck's erotic mischief with the Athenian teenagers, Oberon objects:

What hast thou done? Thou hast mistaken quite
And laid the love-juice on some true-love's sight.
Of thy misprision must perforce ensue
Some true-love turned, and not a false turned true.

(3.2.88-91)

Puck counters by affirming his own literary paradigm, the comic erotic daemonic represented by two lovers in interchangeable turmoil over one beloved:

Then will two at once woo one:
That must needs be sport alone;
And those things do best please me
That befall prepost'rously.

(3.2.118-21)

The metamorphic business in this play is aggressive as well as erotic. Within the ironic frame but behind the comic screen, the disruptive and dispossessive overtones of metamorphosis are present in the “fairy quarreling” plot, through which Oberon uses Puck to humble Titania, tricking her into relinquishing “A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king; / She never had so sweet a changeling” (2.1.22-23). Oberon appears briefly in Lamia as well, prefiguring Apollonius as a paternal usurper of female possessions. Oberon's protests over Puck's metamorphic mischief are disingenuous, when he has been putting Robin Goodfellow up to all manner of daemonic stealth to recover this particular changeling boy. This is just to say that as fairy patriarch Oberon is above the law, outside the game he is playing (with Puck as his agent) on Titania.

The anger between the fairy king and queen is echoed at the broad scenic level by a reversal of natural seasonal progression: Oberon would have it that this blight on the land is a deviation from the proper nature of things and not simply from his own paternal prerogative. From Oberon's position, Titania's maternal willfulness is incestuous, hence monstrous, hence metamorphic, a travesty in which the parental figures as well as the seasons “change / Their wonted liveries.”

Titania. The seasons alter:
hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazèd world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.
Oberon. Do you amend it then; it
lies in you.
Why should Titania cross her Oberon?
I do but beg a little changeling boy
To be my henchman.

(2.1.107-21)

The absent center, the ultimate object of misprision in A Midsummer Night's Dream, is the changeling boy. This occulted figure is the true daemon of the plot. It is a talisman for its possessor, and Oberon sees no reason for Titania to possess hers beyond what he considers the proper season. Here the daemonic scene plays out an Imaginary scenario in which “two (parents) at once woo one (child),” and the one who is wooed is at once two—the bisexual child in the realm of the phallic mother.³ Keyed at this level of archaic content or fabulous monstrosity, the changeling boy as hermaphroditic daemon is quite invisible, it exists only as absconded. Rather, we get multiple substitutes: the changeable, interchangeable Demetrius and Lysander, and the metamorphic Bottom, himself marked with a name figuring the ambivalent genitalia.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the metamorphic saturnalia concerns a disruption of and return to a patriarchally legitimate eros and fertility. Montrose (1986) seconds my previous remarks about the gender of metamorphosis in the Golden Ass—“within the changeling plot are embedded transformations of … male fantasies of motherhood” (75)—and also notes the ideological instability imported by metamorphic figures: “The festive conclusion of A Midsummer Night's Dream, its celebration of romantic and generative sexual union, depends upon the success of a process whereby the female pride and power manifested in misanthropic [Amazonian] warriors, possessive mothers, unruly wives, and willful daughters are brought under the control of husbands and lords. But while the dramatic structure articulates a patriarchal ideology, it also intermittently undermines its own comic propositions” (75-76). That is to say, in this comedy Shakespeare has worked an Apuleian parody against a Christian/Neoplatonic line of patriarchal allegory.

In this composite or ambivalent landscape, Titania is a Jocasta who has arrogated to herself a phallic son-consort, represented on the one hand by the “changeling boy” and on the other hand by the transformed Bottom. Bottom is both Sphinx—fabulous monster—and Oedipus, ending up in the bed of the Queen. Once again, now in a sophisticated Elizabethan farce, the themes of metamorphosis cluster around gender politics, here in a way that relates the incest taboo to a patriarchal interest in terminating a mother/son liaison. The rhetoric of metamorphosis in this play is focused most significantly on Oberon's efforts to persuade Titania to submit to his primacy by relinquishing her phallic consort. When he fails to persuade her with words, he resorts to magical wiles, but the comic daemonic business with the love potion (Oberon's pharmakon) remains rhetoric, ideological pressure, by other means.

We might interpret A Midsummer Night's Dream as encoding the slippages of patriarchal engendering. The dilemmas of the opening scene—Demetrius's desertion of Helena, Hermia's quarrel with Egeus, her determination to elope with Lysander, and so forth—represent the day's events; the day's residues are the vehement but unresolved erotic trends the lovers carry with them into the woods. The dream proper begins when the Fairies—the agents of the dreamwork performed upon the human lovers—emerge bearing transformative powers. All the “jangling” and “vexation” of the lovers' reversals is the dream distortion of their erotic relations, played for dramatic comedy: the lovers should be loving but they are fighting. But the “children” (the lovers) are quarreling because the “parents” (Oberon and Titania) are quarreling. The King and Queen of the Fairies are also the objects as well as the symbolic bearers of the infantile wishes. The subject of the infantile wishes is the changeling boy.

The quarrel of Oberon and Titania returns us to the latent infantile experiences driving the manifestations of the dream. In particular, the play screens a preoedipal child's experiences of uncertainty and divided loyalties within the nuclear family. The occulted changeling boy's primary libidinal trends are already distorted by displacements and reversals. On the one hand, the fairy parents' arguments over the son-figure correspond to a conscious desire—“I wish they would stop quarreling”—that laterally inflects Hermia's and Helena's anxieties over Demetrius's and Lysander's wrangling. On the other hand, as long as the fairy quarreling prevents parental intercourse, it produces a wishful separation, and Titania's refusal to relinquish the changeling boy fulfills his Oedipal desire: “I want to stay where I am and keep my mother as my lover.” But this libidinal trend is unacceptable according to the patriarchal ego ideal that determines the manifest outcome of the dream—Oberon's theft/recovery of the changeling boy for masculine proprieties. Thus the primary latent wish of the changeling boy is displaced to another “changeling,” the monstrous Bottom, through whom the metamorphic fantasy is played out to provide an illicit night of love in the bower of the mother. Once again, a metamorphic interlude allows for both a concealment and an exhibition of desire.

Notes

1. Shakespeare “came close to dramatizing Freud's hydraulic theory about the flow of libidinal cathexis which blindly drives the unconscious will from object to object, when he showed the lovers blindly ‘transferring’ their loves from object to object in the forest, though he saw, instead of a flow of cathexis, a flow of juice from the flower ‘love-in-idleness’”: Meredith Anne Skura, The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 37.

2. Cf. René Girard, “Bottom's One-Man Show,” in Clayton Koelb and Virgil Lokke, ed., The Current in Criticism: Essays on the Present and Future of Literary Theory (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1987), 99-122: “the ‘translation’ of Bottom and the intervention of the ‘fairies’ mark the culmination of the dynamic process triggered by the collective decision to perform a play. It is not a magical irruption, a sudden and inexplicable disturbance in a static situation of bucolic peace among people going peacefully about their business of acting, it is the climax of successive structural transformations” (107). The dramatic becomes daemonic when the game of role-playing becomes contagious and generates its own metamorphic momentum.

3. On Freud's ambivalence toward the concept of bisexuality within his own theory, see … [Marcia Ian's Remembering the Phallic Mother: Psychoanalysis, Modernism, and the Fetish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press)] 1993, 2-4.