I am grateful to all of my new subscribers. Thank you! The following was first published in Quillette. Submission is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Warmly, Marilyn
This essay is such a gem. Having reflected on it for a week, I’m pretty certain that the lack of comments arises from performance anxiety in your readers—we can all appreciate your wonderful close reading of Shakespeare and be astonished at the profound insights you offer, but it’s easier to “Like” this post than presume to introduce our own thoughts into the shimmering perfection of its Gestalt.
One of its many pleasures is the running indirect revelations of the battle between you and your college students—the image that comes to mind is you as Errol Flynn playing Robin Hood, dueling with your sword against an infuriated but ineffectual mob of men dispatched by the Sheriff of Nottingham. If you ever consider non-fiction, this essay could be the seed of a wonderful Tom Stoppard-style play interweaving many texts with intellectual panache, wit and erotic verve.
There are so many great lines in your essay already, and if you switch from indirectly reporting the students’ objections to giving them their own lines, interpolated with “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” and perhaps other apposite texts, “Against Submission” could be a theatrical masterpiece.
I can see the professor in the theatrical production—perhaps a wonderful amalgam of Prospero (to change Shakespearean references) and the beautiful genius Heddy Lamarr—as she coolly delivers your lecture while projecting great erotic visual images onto the backdrop of the stage, provoking her college students (and many members of the audience?) to bay even louder for the blood of the professor and all the thought-criminals eager to “reclaim the erotic warmth that is latent in our human condition.”
Your unique synthesis of high-resolution sexual observation with the deepest, and most transcendent, literary, cultural and spiritual allusions reminds me of a line I read years ago when Pope John Paul II first published “The Theology of the Body”: “All human culture arises out of the relationship between man and woman.”
It’s surprising but a little reflection shows that he was right: music, poetry, cooking, domestic arts, architecture, story-telling, art, seem to obviously arise from the needs and desires of a man and woman in a loving relationship and the requirements of raising and protecting their children.
The deepest cause of our culture going haywire is the denial of the truth about the unique importance of the mysterious, primitive, transcendent, creative nexus of body and soul between man and woman—and your work is a spirited attack on the legions of enemies who are close to defeating this great truth. Your work reminds me of the great cavalry attack by the Polish King Jan Sobieski against the vast hosts of the Turkish Vizier which saved Vienna in 1683. They invoked Mother Mary as they charged, and I feel she is smiling on you and your work.
Now, to specifically acknowledge some of the most excellent moments in your essay, while understanding they are just individual elements in a wonderfully realized whole:
This is such a wonderful insight into the Oberon’s deepest motivations as a man and husband, even though as a flawed being—like all of us—his love is expressed in ways inevitably tainted by his own broken nature: “Oberon’s anger comes from the fact that Titania loves another . . . more than she loves her own husband. His punishment may reveal how desperately he longs for her to return to him . . . . Oberon’s desire seems to be to have his wife back in the embrace of marital sexual intimacy. We may condemn the lengths he goes to achieve this end, but we should perhaps appreciate his motives . . .”
If it is Tatiana “who swallows her pride and concedes to him”, it is Oberon who by re-introducing his authority, acknowledges that the authentic Tatiana is who she freely chooses to be, undamaged by having been subjected to any experiences imposed on her. Oberon relinquishes his primitive and limiting masculine possessiveness, as he understands that it is Tatiana’s freedom of conscience that makes her gift of herself so precious. As you point out, by acknowledging Tatiana’s freedom Oberon himself becomes “freer, naughtier, less clotted-up with the anxieties of possession.”
This is such an astute and profound insight, I wish that, along with the wonderful paragraphs that follow, it were widely accessible even to those who lack the intelligence and literary necessary to appreciate your analytical prowess: “Oberon is evidently disinterested in containing Titania’s sexuality. What he is far from indifferent to is her behavior in relation to him. “Why should Titania cross her Oberon?” he asks, and we should note the yearning in his question. His desire is for him to belong to her and not the other way around. How else would he countenance his wife’s congress with a hybrid beast? At issue seems to be, not exclusivity, but the withdrawal of her attentions from him.”
You do perorations so well, and in this one you deliberately or serendipitously echo the singer Sade’s song (and album) “Love is Stronger than Pride”, which, along with “Your Love is King” would make a great soundtrack to your essay, and is perhaps the right fairy music for our time.
Finally, your close discussion of the relationship between Tatiana and Bottom enlightened me to its real possibilities, for which I thank you. Your analysis is persuasive. Reading it, it occurred to me that Aubrey Beardsley was probably a close reader of “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” as well, far more similar to you than me, and that his illustrated work “Venus and Tannhäuser” may well have been inspired by “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” and “the memorable afternoon” between Tatiana and Bottom. I’ll attach the relevant passage.
This essay is such a gem. Having reflected on it for a week, I’m pretty certain that the lack of comments arises from performance anxiety in your readers—we can all appreciate your wonderful close reading of Shakespeare and be astonished at the profound insights you offer, but it’s easier to “Like” this post than presume to introduce our own thoughts into the shimmering perfection of its Gestalt.
One of its many pleasures is the running indirect revelations of the battle between you and your college students—the image that comes to mind is you as Errol Flynn playing Robin Hood, dueling with your sword against an infuriated but ineffectual mob of men dispatched by the Sheriff of Nottingham. If you ever consider non-fiction, this essay could be the seed of a wonderful Tom Stoppard-style play interweaving many texts with intellectual panache, wit and erotic verve.
There are so many great lines in your essay already, and if you switch from indirectly reporting the students’ objections to giving them their own lines, interpolated with “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” and perhaps other apposite texts, “Against Submission” could be a theatrical masterpiece.
I can see the professor in the theatrical production—perhaps a wonderful amalgam of Prospero (to change Shakespearean references) and the beautiful genius Heddy Lamarr—as she coolly delivers your lecture while projecting great erotic visual images onto the backdrop of the stage, provoking her college students (and many members of the audience?) to bay even louder for the blood of the professor and all the thought-criminals eager to “reclaim the erotic warmth that is latent in our human condition.”
Your unique synthesis of high-resolution sexual observation with the deepest, and most transcendent, literary, cultural and spiritual allusions reminds me of a line I read years ago when Pope John Paul II first published “The Theology of the Body”: “All human culture arises out of the relationship between man and woman.”
It’s surprising but a little reflection shows that he was right: music, poetry, cooking, domestic arts, architecture, story-telling, art, seem to obviously arise from the needs and desires of a man and woman in a loving relationship and the requirements of raising and protecting their children.
The deepest cause of our culture going haywire is the denial of the truth about the unique importance of the mysterious, primitive, transcendent, creative nexus of body and soul between man and woman—and your work is a spirited attack on the legions of enemies who are close to defeating this great truth. Your work reminds me of the great cavalry attack by the Polish King Jan Sobieski against the vast hosts of the Turkish Vizier which saved Vienna in 1683. They invoked Mother Mary as they charged, and I feel she is smiling on you and your work.
Now, to specifically acknowledge some of the most excellent moments in your essay, while understanding they are just individual elements in a wonderfully realized whole:
This is such a wonderful insight into the Oberon’s deepest motivations as a man and husband, even though as a flawed being—like all of us—his love is expressed in ways inevitably tainted by his own broken nature: “Oberon’s anger comes from the fact that Titania loves another . . . more than she loves her own husband. His punishment may reveal how desperately he longs for her to return to him . . . . Oberon’s desire seems to be to have his wife back in the embrace of marital sexual intimacy. We may condemn the lengths he goes to achieve this end, but we should perhaps appreciate his motives . . .”
If it is Tatiana “who swallows her pride and concedes to him”, it is Oberon who by re-introducing his authority, acknowledges that the authentic Tatiana is who she freely chooses to be, undamaged by having been subjected to any experiences imposed on her. Oberon relinquishes his primitive and limiting masculine possessiveness, as he understands that it is Tatiana’s freedom of conscience that makes her gift of herself so precious. As you point out, by acknowledging Tatiana’s freedom Oberon himself becomes “freer, naughtier, less clotted-up with the anxieties of possession.”
This is such an astute and profound insight, I wish that, along with the wonderful paragraphs that follow, it were widely accessible even to those who lack the intelligence and literary necessary to appreciate your analytical prowess: “Oberon is evidently disinterested in containing Titania’s sexuality. What he is far from indifferent to is her behavior in relation to him. “Why should Titania cross her Oberon?” he asks, and we should note the yearning in his question. His desire is for him to belong to her and not the other way around. How else would he countenance his wife’s congress with a hybrid beast? At issue seems to be, not exclusivity, but the withdrawal of her attentions from him.”
You do perorations so well, and in this one you deliberately or serendipitously echo the singer Sade’s song (and album) “Love is Stronger than Pride”, which, along with “Your Love is King” would make a great soundtrack to your essay, and is perhaps the right fairy music for our time.
Finally, your close discussion of the relationship between Tatiana and Bottom enlightened me to its real possibilities, for which I thank you. Your analysis is persuasive. Reading it, it occurred to me that Aubrey Beardsley was probably a close reader of “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” as well, far more similar to you than me, and that his illustrated work “Venus and Tannhäuser” may well have been inspired by “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” and “the memorable afternoon” between Tatiana and Bottom. I’ll attach the relevant passage.