How is the female role in marital love portrayed in the play? ...

[jCorn1234]

How is the female role in marital love portrayed in the play? What doesit suggest about gender roles in a traditional, custom-bound society?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

Does the love juice have a similar effect on all the characters?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

[wergv]

Answer to Question 1

• The theme of unruly women and the threat of matriarchal misrule emerges in the adult love relationships, in the first scenes allusion to Theseuss legendary defeat of the Amazons threatening his new city, Athens. Titanias fixation on the orphaned Indian boy has alienated her from her husband, though her devotion to her votaress wins our sympathy. (We might think of Freuds Victorian family romance, in which the mother/child bond threatens the privileges of the marital bed and requires regulation.) The quarrel between fairy king and queen in turn has brought about an upheaval in the natural order of things. Is Oberons desire to raise the boy among men, as his page of honor, necessarily a violation of Titanias desire to raise the boy as her own? (Think about rites of passage in patriarchal societies, in which boys are ceremonially removed from the sphere of their mothers influence and inducted into male activities and tribal customs. Such rites preserve traditional gender distinctions and are part of the cultural process by which order is maintained in traditional societies.) In what other ways does the play explore the problem of gender hierarchy?

Answer to Question 2

• The love juice has similar effects on Lysander and Titania (compelling them to dote on love objects not of their choice), but the juice does not appear to work in the same way on Demetrius. Originally in love with Helena and betrothed to her (which technically bars him from contracting a marriage with Hermia, according to Elizabethan law), he has betrayed his true love, swayed either by male inconstancy or by Egeus to pursue a woman who cannot be his. It may bode ill for Helena that Demetrius is still under the influence of the love drug (having received no antidote, unlike Titania and Lysander), but it may also be that the drug merely restores his affection to its proper place.

[jCorn1234]

Both answers were spot on, thank you once again

[wergv]

Great! Please up vote