Crisis And Redemption In A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is considered to be the most mature of Shakespeare’s early comedies.It contains a profound insight into human nature.This thesis focuses on René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and uses A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a research text to explore the survival crisis and try to find some ways to solve it,reflecting on the paranoia and madness of human nature caused by mimetic desire,so as to achieve the purpose of alerting people.This thesis consists of an introduction,a body and a conclusion.The introduction briefly introduces Shakespeare’s life experiences and the writing background of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well as the current status of domestic and international researches,then briefly discusses the framework of this thesis and its significance.The main part consists of four chapters.Chapter one is the theoretical foundation,introducing the origin,connotation and characteristics of the theory of mimetic desire and explaining the feasibility study of text and theory.The second,third and fourth chapters are the key points of this thesis,which mainly explore the survival crisis caused by mimetic desire and try to find some solutions to the survival crisis.Chapter two explores the crisis of self-construction of subject in the text caused by mimetic desire.Human beings who are deeply involved in mimetic desire want to make themselves the object of others’ desires and thus establish self-identity.However not everyone can successfully establish self-identity,which causes a crisis of self-construction and presents a state of self-emptiness and distortion.Chapter three discusses the crisis of the loss of object’s value in the text according to the mimetic desire theory.Girard believes that the loss of object’s value will lead the subject to choose a new object or directly change his own mediator,and the expansion of this metaphysical desire will lead to the spread of human envy and jealousy,which will cause more frequent fights and conflicts.For example,the tragic love and the false marriage,jealousy and violence between lovers in the text are all existential crises caused by the loss of object’s value.Chapter four tries to find the way to break the mimetic desire and accomplish redemption by analyzing the characters in the play.In the text,although Bottom is in the dream forest,he is not dominated by mimetic desire and keeps a rational attitude,which is inseparable from his maintaining a high level of self and cognition.At the end of the play,the four characters come out of the forest,and their hearts return to purity,regaining their original desires and clarifying their beliefs.The conclusion reflects on the paranoia and madness of modern human nature caused by mimetic desire.A Midsummer Night’s Dream not only reveals the survival crisis of people in Shakespeare’s era under the domination of mimetic desire,but also predicts the trend of modern human nature to some extent,thus warning people to face the complicated modern society.Only by keeping sober,examining oneself,understanding oneself correctly,and seeing through all kinds of false confrontations and conflicts around,can we really get rid of the domination of mimetic desire.