William Barker
378: Shakespeare on Stage
Dr. Ron Strickland
Final Paper
A Lacanian Reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
This paper will attempt to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream from a Lacanian
perspective. Specifically, this reading will approach the play on two fronts: first, how
Shakespeare’s structure roughly corresponds with Lacan’s diagram of sexuation;
secondly, I will apply the notion of the Phallus as signifier of supreme authority to
Theseus’ sudden resolution of the quarrel between Egeus and Lysander in Act IV. The
object of this analysis will be to ascertain the trans-historicity of some of Lacan’s
theories, a vestige of Freud’s analytic model that was swept away by later theorists like
Deleuze. Let me begin by outlining some of Lacan’s terms, and begin to introduce them
to Shakespeare’s work in general before focusing on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
I
As a psychoanalyst and linguist, Lacan’s primary interest is in the development of
subjectivity, the state of being upon which human suffering is founded. While Freud
attributed suffering to sublimation of basic drives, Lacan suggests that even our desires
are "narrativized," that humans are interpolated into a grand narrative that trains them for
what to desire. This process of "narrativizing" the subject, of indoctrination into what
Lacan calls the Symbolic Order, is a process a human must take in order to become a
subject. From this process, Lacan “transhistorically” argues, all human endeavor
regarding the mode of production is introduced into something coherent and self-evident.
What does Marx have to do with this? Theorists like Louis Althusser applied Lacan’s
notion of subjectivity to a Marxist interpretation of history, and concluded that the
Symbolic Order was crucial to the subordination of labor. Within the Symbolic Order,
for example, all sexual desire can be directed at one woman, who will bear the children
who will grow to replace the father at the workplace; and it will be the mother’s job to
train them how to do it. In his essay, “Freud and Lacan,” Althusser writes:
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This object is no business of the biologist’s: this story is certainly not
biological! – since from the beginning it is completely dominated by the
constraint of the sexed human order that each mother engraves on the
small human animal in maternal “love” and hatred, starting from its
alimentary rhythm and training. (190)
Through Althusser, Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity speaks to Marxists who
are intrigued by the use of the unconscious as a method to control people. Althusser’s
“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” which discusses the ways in which people
cultivate a sort of inner policeman that monitors behavior, uses Freud’s notion of the
superego and expands it to national proportions. But before this can happen a human
must be inscribed into the Symbolic, and the more fully inscribed, the better.
This process begins as a child begins to speak, a transition that Lacan designates
as moving from the first register, the Imaginary, to the second, the Symbolic, where if all
goes well the child will remain for the rest of its life. The imaginary register can be
described as a Nirvana state the child experiences with the mother, in which all needs are
immediately met. At this stage the child cannot conceive of itself as separate from the
mother – STRIKE THAT – there is not even a child and a mother, only a One-ness that
mistakes the nurturing mother for a world of complete satisfaction.
The child is taken out of this stage when its mother no longer fulfills every need
immediately, and it must vocalize its dissatisfaction. The child enters the second (and
hopefully) final register, the Symbolic, which Lacan equates with castration. It is
castration because language becomes a substitute for our satisfaction, but it is a substitute
that is thrust upon us instead of chosen, and anything short of direct access to material
satisfaction (first w/r/to the mother and eventually with anything we believe we desire) is
tantamount to lack.
What turns us away from the mother is the actual father, who needs the mother’s
attention to carry on the business of marriage, and other things as well. By taking the
mother away and leaving the child to fend for itself (and keep in mind that this is all
myth) the child simultaneously acquires language and identifies the father as the authority
figure, the speaker of the big “No,” that forces language on an unwilling subject. For the
child, the mother becomes the first Other, that state of Nirvana we desire to return to, and
the father becomes our first symbolic representation of the Law, that which denies us
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access to the mother and to material satisfaction. But the father also becomes the “Big
Other,” the seat of symbolic authority (authority in many different forms) that one is
always working to attain, and which one reaches, as one with the Other, only by overdetermination.
This over-determination is similar to Judith Butler’s notion of performative
subjectivity, in which all gender assignments are mere performance (which may be linked
to Marcuse’s notion of the performance principle, I’m not sure; they both use the word
performance, that can’t be denied), and the pervasive performance of certain roles allows
ideologies about gender to be seen as ontological. I’ll get into this in the third section of
my paper when I graft Lacan’s diagram of sexuation onto the woods outside Athens. The
only point illustrated is the extent to which “natural” sexual roles are over-determined
and problematic.
But to talk about over-determination only w/r/to gender roles is to limit the scope
of Lacan’s theory of the Phallus. Performative subjectivity covers many of the tropes
about human behavior that are taken to be self-evident or natural. Anytime a person
assumes a position of authority over another, however natural the assumption may be
under the circumstances, there is over-determination at work. From a linguistic
perspective, the act of reading for meaning is itself a performance, because it requires a
moment of stasis in the ever-shifting signifying chain of the text that allows meaning to
be fixed upon it. In Reading Lacan, Jane Gallop provides a personal example of an
encounter with the Phallus. She writes:
One morning while I was reading Freud, I realized what I wanted from
analysis was to understand everything enigmatic about me, what my
dreams mean, why I was so afraid of fishbones and of diving into water. I
realized that when I read Freud (but not Lacan) I got impression that all
this could, someday, be understood. That, then, was what I wanted from
analysis. This is, I believe, what Lacan means by the phallus. The phallus
“designates as a whole the effects of signification” (E, 285). If I had the
phallus, then I would know what all my signifiers meant, I would
command the play of signification. (111-112)
The Phallus, then, is not just the authority that denies, it is the engine of desire, since it
withholds from us that which we want. Of course we never have command of our
signifiers, as Gallop puts it; we can only freeze their significations, what Dona Haraway
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referred to as “pulling the God trick.” The seat of authority can only be assumed; it can
never be attained.
In Freudian terms the Law can be equated with the demands of civilization – the
suppression of violent impulses, toilet training, and the sublimation of sexual desires. For
Lacan the symbol of authority is the Phallus, the power the father’s penis presumes to
wield over mother and child.
But making the distinction between signifier (Phallus) and signified (authority,
desire) is not always simple. Lacan insists that the Phallus should not be mistaken as
“real” authority. In Ecrits, he writes (or should I say, he states):
…the phallus is not a fantasy, if by that we mean an imaginary effect. Nor
is it as such an object (part-, internal, good, bad, etc.) in the sense that
this term tends to accentuate the reality pertaining in a relation. It is even
less the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes….For the phallus is a
signifier, a signifier whose function, in the intrasubjective economy of the
analysis, lifts the veil perhaps from the function it performed in the
mysteries. (285)
I’m not sure if this quote clarifies how one identifies the Phallus, but at least, as Jane
Gallop writes, one can be sure what the Phallus is not. Gallop suggests whatever the
Phallus ultimately is, it is more closely wedded to the fantasy than to the object (an
inclination consistent with Lacanian theorists), which eventually led Kaja Silverman to
formulate her notion of the “dominant fiction.” However, the confusing of the body’s
penis and the symbolic phallus still exists. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan suggests most of the
confusion stems from Lacan’s use of a pre-existing term. She writes:
Even though the Lacanian Phallus does not refer to…the biological organ,
this term does underline the idea that…the penian part-object, and the
phallic differential function are confused in language. (“Jacques Lacan:
Feminism and the Problem of Gender Identity,” 13)
Ellie describes the Phallus as being “intrinsically neutral,” the equal symbolization of the
penis and clitoris canceling each other out and allowing the Phallus to be co-opted by a
man or woman. Elizabeth’s reign during the latter half of the 16th century is an example
of a woman assuming symbolic authority by renouncing her femininity – that is, her
socially constructed roles as wife and mother. (The important thing to remember in all of
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this is that not only is this position of authority a role that is performed, but that it’s not
even a role in the given sense, since its constituent parts are constantly changing; the
signifying chain is always shifting.)
On the other hand Lacan points out that women cannot assume the subject
position of authority as easily as men. At a certain point Lacan is reduced to myth, and
he states in his “Function and Field of Speech in Language in Psychoanalysis,”
It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the
symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his
person with the figure of the law. (Ecrits, 67)
Here Lacan falls back on Freud’s design of the primal scene, the untraceable moment that
is fundamental to subjectivity. The difference here is that Lacan does not identify it.
Nonetheless, the essential moment is there. In Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Kaja
Silverman demonstrates how the “primordial event” Freud describes in his Totem and
Taboo is still present in Lacan’s psychoanalytic work.
[The primoridal event’s] inception becomes one of the concluding
moments in a phylogenetic narrative, a narrative in which a horde of sons
murder and incorporate the father, and then elevate the paternal principle
to a Law…It emerges as the guarantee that the paternal legacy will be
transmitted in an orderly way from father to son. Although he is less
concerned with phylogenesis than with the ontogenesis of the subject,
Lacan also equates culture with the Name-of-the-Father. “In all
strictness the Symbolic father is to be conceived as ‘transcendent,’ as an
irreducible given of the signifier,” he observes in his seminar of
March/April, 1957. (37)
Escaping the male privilege inherent in the Phallus itself becomes a myth. While a man’s
castration stems from his introduction into the Symbolic, a woman must confront the
castration of language as well as the castration of male-defined subjectivity. Her
subjectivity is tainted by the Other-ness that subjectivity inscribes on her the moment she
enters the Symbolic realm. Even when she is Queen of the Amazons, she still has her
Theseus to contend with; a man determined to drag her into marriage and a productive
sex life. Kaja Silverman writes:
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Our dominant fiction calls upon the male subject to see himself, and the
female subject to recognize and desire him, only through the mediation of
images and unimpaired masculinity. It urges both the male and the female
subject, that is, to deny all knowledge of male castration by believing in
the commensurability of penis and phallus, actual and symbolic father.
(Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 42)
II
From a Lacanian perspective, the erroneous elision of phallus and penis that male
subjectivity makes so easily appears prominently in the history of Western drama. The
underlying premise of all Greek tragedy is that man brings disaster upon himself when he
challenges the highest authority, the gods. Oedipus’ determination to find the cause of
the plague that ravages Thebes in spite of the danger to himself is an example of how the
fantasy role of the protector, or the hero, mistakenly becomes invested with phantom
significance. This kind of psychoanalytic reading of Shakespeare’s plays has shown to
be intriguing.
The edict given by the Ghost of Hamlet’s father to the Prince of Denmark is an
interesting example of how the father’s command assumes the position of the Phallus in
the symbolic when that command, quite literally, addresses national policy. Hamlet’s
ghost may claim to want only justice, but having justice also means usurping the new
king and establishing a new order in the Denmark. The ghost’s words become the Word
of the Father, the Law of highest authority. Interestingly, like the Law a ghost never
materializes.
To oversimplify, Shakespeare’s tragedies have this tendency to elide the
respective positions of subject and symbolic, the father with the Phallus. In a number of
Shakespeare’s tragedies a character’s revenge plot coincides with a disruption of the
given order. The night Macbeth murders Duncan, Lennox arrives early in the morning
and reports on the “unruly” weather.
Lamentings heard i’th’ air, strange screams of death… (Greenblatt, 2581)
There was even an earthquake; all the infirmities of the earth thus described were likely
meant to feed the early 17th century notion that the person who wore the crown had a
direct connection to God (according to Greenblatt, James I was a chief advocate), or as
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Kaja Silverman states, the “…subject is inducted into meconnaissance” (Male
Subjectivity at the Margins, 43).
Shakespeare’s comedies, on the other hand, seem to recognize the distinction
between the male authority figure and Lacan’s Word of the Father. In each of the plays
studied, there are examples of fathers whom give orders that are overridden by an
authority figure from the state and therefore resist the meconnaisance that confuses the
actual father with the Law. In Romeo and Juliet the blood feud between Capulet and
Montague stands as a constant threat to the order of Escalus’ Verona; when Shylock’s
daughter escapes with her Christian beloved and her father’s fortune there is no outcry in
Venice to bring her back; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Egeus’ request to invoke the
“ancient law” of Athens is arbitrarily denied by Theseus. The denial is arbitrary because
while Theseus’ position is closer to the Phallus, he is only acting as the symbol of
authority. Consider if Egeus, finding that his wishes have been unjustly ignored, appeals
to the gods; how would Theseus trump that? If Gallop is right, the fictional gods would
be as close to having a fixed position in the Phallus as anything.
However, while the elision that collapses the literal father into the symbolic one is
avoided, each of these examples illustrates how the commandment of the actual father is
superceded by a symbolic one: Shylock is supplanted by the Duke, Capulet and
Montague by Escalus, Egeus by Theseus. Once again, it is the subject (Egeus, for
example) that seeks the ultimate authority that will bend Hermia to his will, but he has no
“real” access to the Phallus, the Big Other. As Lacan stated in his lectures from 1972-73,
the Other is always out of our reach. The basis of human subjectivity is the cordoningoff of specific psychic zones that come to be perceived as unknowable (perhaps because
it is forbidden – if Lacan is correct, and the process of Other-ing is the desire to return to
the mother, then the result of non-restriction would be disastrous: we’d all be back to
suckling from our mothers). The extent to which each person situates power and
knowledge in this unknowable corner of the psyche determines to what degree power and
knowledge are seen as unattainable, as the Other, or the Big Other. In “Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses, Althusser suggests that societies are constructed to ensure
that most people see power as the Big Other, though the Other can signify anything from
a cruel boyfriend to the State, even to God.
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A [the Other] is barred by us, of course. That doesn’t mean that it suffices
to bar it for nothing to exist thereof. If by S(A) [the signifier of Other] I
designate nothing other than woman’s jouissance, it is assuredly because
it is with that that I am indicating that God has not yet made his exit. (On
Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973, 84)
As Lacan suggests, the Other can even be a woman’s pleasure/pain, which a lot of men
would complain they could never understand. Here Lacan also makes a point about
humanity that I will discuss in the third section: that not all humans are fully inscribed in
the subjective.
Egeus’ grab for Phallic authority is foiled, and he is cast aside by another
(Theseus) who society more clearly associates with the authority of the Phallus. But as I
will describe in the next section, even the heavily-inscribed authority figure of Theseus is
powerless when compared to the embodiment of Lacan’s third register, the “psychotic”
Real: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the embodiment of the Real, I suggest, is Oberon
the Fairie King.
III
In that lecture series of 1972-73, Lacan also introduced his sexuation diagram,
which serves to illustrate that while the Phallus can be read as neutral, and therefore
attainable for any person, subjectivity is not only male-dominated, but white-male
dominated. Lacan acknowledges the Eurocentrism of his predecessor, Freud; but instead
of denying its prominence he foregrounds it as he constructs his discourse, and
formulates a radical theory of subjectivity that incorporates linguistics and history, and
helps to inspire gender studies.
On a blackboard in his lecture hall, Lacan presents his diagram with these words:
After what I put on the board, you may think you know everything.
Don’t. (On Feminine Sexuality, 78)
Lacan’s constantly impresses upon his disciples that connaissance, apprehension or
recognition, is never fully accomplished. According to Gallop, Lacan did not even like
the idea of publishing his lectures, since reading from a page de-contextualized his
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words. By the time he offered up his sexuation diagram, Lacan was no longer interested
in developing a coherent story of the life of a subject, since any coherence found is likely
the generic work of a grand narrative. Lacan was interested in why human subjects seek
fixed meanings and solutions, and how they go about doing it. Taking into account his
notion of the Other, Lacan constructs a map of subjectivity that, ironically, disallows
some from being completely “inscribed.” This is the most important aspect of Lacan’s
notion of subjectivity: that some must be Other-ed in order for the rest to fully realize
their subjectivity.
Here is a model of Lacan’s diagram.
S
Y
Male
Subjectivity
Level One
M
B
O
Lower Level Lower Level
S
L
I
Non “White
Male”
Subjectivity
Level One
S(A)
a
Woman
T
H
E
“R
E
A
L”
Phallus
C
The S in the lower left box indicates the subject, which Lacan insists inhabits the realm of
male subjectivity. On this point he is unapologetically rigid.
Those are the only possible definitions of the so-called man or woman
portion for that which finds itself in the position of inhabiting language.
(On Feminine Subjectivity, 80)
The “woman” with the line struck through it helps to explain why there is no “Female”
subjectivity in Lacan’s diagram. Because subjectivity needs the Other in order to
maintain its symbolic order, “Woman” exists only to the extent that she is barred from
becoming fully inscribed into subjectivity.
This S(A) indicates the signifier of lack or Other, anything that is desirable but
unattainable. In this quadrant there is also the a, which can referred to as the “cause.”
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The “cause” can be read as that specific thing that is desired. However, it is not entirely
outside the self, because it is nurtured within during the Mirror Stage of the Symbolic
Order that what is lacking or desirable is something that lies outside the self. Subjectivity
is drawn towards the “cause” but reaches only its signifier, a. It is in fact barred from the
signified because that is beyond its reach. The Phallus is the position one can assume in
order to “reach” the cause, but again this over-determination, and more importantly, a
myth within the myth of this scheme of sexuation. One cannot break the rules originally
agreed upon. Lacan writes:
On the side of man, I have inscribed S, certainly not to priviledge him in
any way…this S never deals with anything by way of a partner but object a
inscribed on the other side of the bar. He is unable to attain his sexual
partner, who is the Other, except inasmuch as his partner is the cause of
his desire. (On Feminine Sexuality, 80)
Why are women barred from subjectivity then? On either side of the diagram
there are zones designated as Symbolic (for the side closest to Male Subjectivity) and the
“Real,” set against what I referred to as Non “White Male” Subjectivity. This “Real” is
what I would like to refer to as “Your Worst Fantasy Come True.” It is that forbidden
zone in which a breach is made through the wall of subjectivity, and the signified “cause”
can be attained, but in psychoanalytic terms the cost can be psychosis. If the Symbolic
Order is disrupted the carefully cultivated notions of how we relate to the Other, and how
we perceive our own subjectivity, break down. Spacial boundaries that we have lived
with all our lives, and have in fact taught us how to learn, would become unstable.
Language would break down, and the Subject would cease to be a subject, because what
makes a subject, according to Lacan, is desire, and what stands in for our lack is
language. To exist is to take one’s destined place within the Symbolic Order, so to leave
it would mean the subject would cease to exist. But subjectivity teaches its subjects that
this forbidden zone is inaccessible if one is fully inscribed in the Symbolic. But what of
those people who have been Other-ed? Well, what makes them the Other is the access
they do have to that zone. Looking at the diagram, Lacan has placed the Other in the
realm of Non “White Male” Subjectivity, which the dominant fiction co-opts in its myth
of perverse sexuality. Lacan writes:
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Woman has a relation to the signifier of the Other, insofar as, qua Other,
it can but remain forever Other. I can only assume that you will recall my
statement that there is no Other of the Other. The Other, that is, the locus
in which everything that can be articulated on the basis of the signifier
comes to be inscribed, is in its foundation, the Other in the most radical
sense. That is why the signifier, with its open parenthesis, marks the
Other as barred:S(A). (On Feminine Sexuality, 81)
Women, then, as well as other non-white males, are never fully inscribed in the
Symbolic Order, because they also have a foot in the “Real,” the primordial site where
those who are fully inscribed are barred. Mainstream culture admits to the undefined
subjecthood of females by frowning upon male homosexuality practices (sexual relations
between two males supposedly inscribed in the Symbolic) while taking a casual
fascination in lesbianism and the myth that non-white males are more virile than male
subjectivity allows. The assumption in both cases is that females and non-white males
can tap into some reservoir of sub-human instincts that is inaccessible to the fully
inscribed individual.
These “instincts,” identified by Lacan as jouissance, that emphasize pleasure and
disregard the “productivity” of the sex act, are an affront to the conventions of
monogamy and child-bearing, which are necessary to the maintenance of the modes of
production and the myth of subjectivity. The threaten a breakdown of order and a
schizophrenia of the psyche, and are therefore banished from the sight of those fully
inscribed in the Symbolic. Consider now the “remote seven leagues” between the “sharp
Athenian Law” and Lysander’s forbidden marriage to Hermia. What lies between is the
wood, “a league without the town,” where all the mischief and confusion in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream takes place.
If there is a “Real” in Shakespeare’s plays, it is usually found in those places
slightly removed from civilization where logic seems to be suspended and magic reigns –
the heath where the witches meet Macbeth, the Birnham Wood that “arrives” at
Dunsinane, the stormy hill in Act III of King Lear. To these I would add the wood
outside of Athens in Midsummer. Young lovers flee the father and the Law with the
intention of indulging in pleasure, not social commitments, and fairies ironically wreak
havoc with their intentions. In the guise of a love juice, the desires of young Athenians,
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commoners, and fairies alike burst through the walls of their respective subjectivities, and
begin to fire in every direction. Women chase their men through the woods; men reverse
themselves and proclaim their love to one woman at the same time; a fairie falls in love
with a human transformed into a beast of burden; men agree to duel for the hand of a
woman but lose each other in a fog. In this forest, basically, anything goes. Behavior
considered unthinkable with the walls of Athens and the boundaries of subjectivity is
practiced, and love is exchanged freely. The wood, outside the purview of the actual law
of Athens as well as the Phallus, becomes a site of polymorphous perversity. But
subjectivity must be returned to in the end. Although one of the lovers still has the love
juice on his eyes when he leaves (disregard Demetrius’ claim that he was “in sickness”
when he pursued Hermia into the wood, and loathed the “food” of Helena’s love before
he returned to health; it’s only the potion talking), and in returning to Athens still under
its spell brings the woods’ perversity into contact with the Law, it can be assumed in the
end that the lovers will take their assumed places with the Symbolic Order.
In Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Kaja Silverman writes:
…our present dominant fiction is above all else the representational
system through which the subject is accommodated to the Name-of-theFather. It’s most central signifier of unity is the (paternal) family, and its
primary signifier of priviledge is the phallus. (34)
This present dominant fiction could be older than Silverman suggests. In his speech to
Hippolyta at the beginning of Act V, Theseus dismisses the “antique fables” of the young
lovers as the work of “madmen.” But his choice of words gives him away. As he
expostulates on the imaginations of “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet…” Theseus
makes clear that he thinks the lovers’ stories are “fantasies.” However, if the lovers did
in fact touch the “Real,” they succeeded in fulfilling the narrative of their subjectivity
(yet they are alive and sane enough to tell about it). The madness of the “Real” is part of
their dominant fiction; it is located out in the wood, where the constraints of subjectivity
are discarded, and the couples happily leave it there.
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Works Cited and Consulted
Althusser, Louis. “Freud and Lacan.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.
Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
Gallop, Jane. Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.
Greenblatt, Stephen, et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: Norton, 1
997.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton,
1977.
---. On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge. Ed. JacquesAlain Miller. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1998.
Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie. “Jacques Lacan: Feminism and the Problem of Gender
Identity.” SubStance 36 (1982), 10.
Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie, ed. Lacan and the Subject of Language. New York:
Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1991.
Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge,
Chapman and Hall, 1992.
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