Pick 2 of Belsey's quotes that interest you or that make a solid point about the play. Write each quote, with MLA, parenthetical citation.
Below each quotation, please write no fewer than 2 sentences of analysis about your thoughts on Belsey's points or greater connections within the play.
Please write your initials at the end of your post.
Due before class on Thursday. Thank you!
"The plot leads up to the marriages of the lovers, but it does not quite confirm the distraction we might expect it to identify between true love on the one hand and arbitrary passion induced by magic on the other"(Belsey 189).
ReplyDeleteMarriage should be for true love and Hermia and Lysander truly love each other, but Helena and Demetrius are in "fake love". Demetrius has a love potion on his eyes that make him think he;s in love with helena, but really it's just the spell.
"The play invites us to sympathize with the young lovers"(Belsey 187).
The play makes us sympathize with the lovers because we want them to be happy and we want Helena to be with Demetrius and Hermia to be with Lysander, but the love potions mess things up. The potions fix it for Helena, but hurt HErmia at times, even though they both end up with what they want.
BG
" A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play about love"(Belsey 182). This is true, but it is also a story about the blindness of love and the hardships you must go through to reach it. This is too broad of a statement for her to make, because the main motif is confusion.
ReplyDelete" But A Midsummer Night's Dream does not always do exactly what we might expect, and in this way it keeps its audience guessing..."(Belsey 187-188). This is true I beleive the story has many twist and turns, but there is also alot of dramatical irony. This gives the reader the advantage and more knowledge then the character.
"The play does not ignore the trace of violence that exists within love when the other person fails to conform to the lover's idealized image"(Belsey 185).This is true because in the play Helena gets mad at Lysander for loving Hermia. He was not living up to her expectations of a lover who would solely love her.
ReplyDelete" Romantic love is in this sense oddly impersonal"(Belsey 183). Both ladies in the play, Hermia and Helena, want the same thing out of love. They are similar because they both want to be attractive, and will do anything to gain love.
AH- ABIGAIL HENNINGSEN
"Conversely, if the play of 'Pyramis and Thisbe' evokes tears of laughter rather than sorrow, it alludes, nevertheless, to the tragic possibilities of a conflict between love and parental opposition,"(Besley 186). Besley describes the irony integrated in the story. She tells how love can be just as confusing as turning the tragedy, "Pyramus and Thisbe," into a comedy. There are confusing ways in which love works, just as the whole conflict between Lysander, Demtrius, Hermia, and Helena.
ReplyDelete"Paradoxically, the love that is voiced by Theseus seems more insistent to the degree that it is more prosaic, literally, more like prose, since the speech rhythms do not coincide with the line endings, but run directly across them," (Besley 184). Besley explains the way Theseus speaks when talking about love. Throughout the story, characters tend to talk in rhyming schemes, usually couplets, about love, tragedy, or any deep feeling. The fact that Theseus does not speak in rhymes makes it questionable about how Theseus really feels.
MM
"...The play suggests, not to pin down anything so multiple, not to encapsulate love in a neat definition that would encourage us to measure our own and other people's experience and find it normal or abnormal, mature or immature, wise or foolish"(Besley 182).
ReplyDeleteWhat Besley is suggesting in this passage is that love cannot be measured off of other people's experiences. Love cannot be analyzed as normal or abnormal because it shouldn't be affected by other people's opinions. Love is what a person makes of it. It is very common for us to experience this in our everyday lives.
"The fairy queen's temporary devotion to a donkey is the play's clearest and funniest indication of love's arbitrary nature"(Besley 185).
The dumb love of a queen to a donkey is an ironic relationship. While the Queen is a high-class ruler, the donkey is a disrespected animal.
"But as Helena herself sees earlier in the play, love does not necessarily see what is there" (Belsey 184) This is true, when people are in love they don't always see each other's flaws. When Titania is in love with Bottom, she doesn't see that he is an ass and that he looks like one as well. When the spell is broken, she realizes that he is hideous.
ReplyDelete"One reason why the lovers seem comic is that their changes of preference do not appear arbitrary to them" (185). Throughout the play people are constantly changing who they love. Titania goes from Oberon to Bottom and back to Oberon, Lysander goes from Hermia to Helena and back to Hermia, and Demetrius goes from loving Hermia to loving Helena. While this is happening, nothing seems weird to them, and once it is all over, they either don't remember what happened or they think it was a dream.
"How else, after all, do people learn to talk about love in the first instance, except by reading love stories? No wonder the four lovers are virtually indistinguishable" (Belsey 183).
ReplyDeleteThis quote expresses how hard it is to distinguish who loves who because love is so confusing. Also, it is hard to tell the different characters apart because all of their perspective of love are the same.
"Romantic love is in this sense oddly impersonal" (Belsey 183).
This quotes expresses how the different characters did not get to choose completely who they loved. The nectar was one of the main things that confused them into loving other people, causing a dilemma.
"The play teases the audience with glimpses of familiar forms and figures, and then deflects our attention onto something unexpected" (Belsey 188).
ReplyDeleteI believe this quote is true because throughout the play something crazy would happen (like the someone falling in love with the wrong person) and then the scene would cut to something else that would happen unexpectedly. the play was full of surprised and kept everyone on their toes the entire time.
"In this way A Midsummer Night's Dream offers to leave its audience in a state of mind that bears some resemblance to Bottom's when he wakes up from his dream: exalted, perhaps, but a little less assured, less confident, and altogether less knowing than before" (Belsey 190).
This quote is saying that the play leaves the audience like Bottoms dream left him. He was confused about everything that happened.
"In one sense comedy produces the wishes it then goes on to fulfill" (Belsey 187). The comedy in the story like when Hermia's father acts ridciulous when not letting her marry Lysander and it seeming a far dream/joke of Hermia marrying Lysander. But then it ends up there together. This is then a comedy when the dream/joke happens.
ReplyDelete"Romantic love is in this sense oddly impersonal. Because of love's power to idealize, the object of desire seems unique, even though in the event it turns out that Hermia and Helena are interchangeable" (Belsey 183). This quote talks about how the love in Midsummer Night's Dream is not exactly true love because the flower's nectar is used to make the person fall in love with another person. Making the romantic love not true and very impersonal.
Good work! We will discuss these in class.
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