Figurative Language In A Midsummer Night's Dream

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A Midsummer Night’s Analysis
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare states that the causes of conflict always revolve around love. Shakespeare supports this idea by exploring many types of destructive love from controlling to irrational desire to obsessive. Figurative language and conflict is then used to establish these types of love and the relationships between his characters, thus reflecting on his belief that love causes problems. Specifically, we see this through Egeus’s control over Hermia, Titania and Oberon’s desire for a changeling boy, and Helena’s obsession over Demetrius.
The first type of love to cause conflict was Egeus’s possessiveness and need to control his daughter Hermia. Egeus loved his daughter to the point of overprotectiveness. In Act I, …show more content…
Despite Demetrius’s abhorrence towards Helena, she pursues him excessively and cared only about what he thought of her; due to this, Helena was deeply insecure of her appearance and obsesses over Demetrius’s validation. Shakespeare uses a hyperbole of what Helena compares herself to, to emphasize the negative feeling love can bring: she says, “No, no, I am as ugly as a bear, / For beasts that meet me run away for fear” (Shakespeare 2.2.67-68). Through Helena’s compulsive need to be accepted by Demetrius and her insecurities, she sabotages Hermia and Lysander’s escape in the hopes that Demetrius will be grateful to her. This act caused many conflicts in the forest. Helena’s need for Demetrius’s validation drove her to betray her friends for her own sake. With this, their relationship was established to be an obsessive and unrequited love. Shakespeare uses Helena to show how love can bring out the worst in us. Furthermore, it supports Shakespeare’s belief that love causes conflict, as Helena’s longing for Demetrius is what caused the young Athenians’ feelings to become intertwined with the
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