One approach to text of Dream with queer theory would highlight the work’s complicity in compulsory heterosexuality. Despite the chaos of the woods and the rapidly changing desires of the lovers, the endings shows the lovers neatly pairing off into hetero- pairings.
Another approach to the text with queer theory may be quick to identify two potentially sapphic relationships with Dream: first, Titania and her votaress, and second, Helena and Hermia.
Critics have pointed out that the language Titania uses to describe her relationship with the votaress is very intimate, as emphasized through the repetition of the phrase, “and for her sake” (2.1.141-142). (The monologue can be read in full at left.) In Titania’s refusal to obey her husband for a female friend, their shared gossip and laughter, and her participation in the votaress’s pregnancy, she takes on a spousal role with the votaress. Alicia Andrzejewski asserts that Titania and her votaress bear signs of a futurity for queer pregnancy. Pregnancy and the pregnant body is often viewed as part of the heteronormativity, in assumptions that, “only women get pregnant; that every pregnancy ends in the birth of a child; and that pregnancy always reproduces the family in a recognizable form.” However, Andrzejewski asserts that as the votaress’s pregnancy does not “reproduce the family in a recognizable form,” this can be an example of queer pregnancy, one that characterizes pregnancy, “as a time of female-female eroticism, intimacy, and pleasure.” Indeed, Titania’s insistence on having custody of the changeling child seems to be out of love for the late votaress, as a result of their homosocial bond.
Additionally, critics have pointed to Hermia and Helena’s relationship as intimate, in the language used by Helena to describe their bonds in Act III, Scene 2. (The monologue can be read in full below at left.) Critics have noted that Helena’s speech “invokes the language of marital bonds,” emphasizing the union of the two women through the repetition of the word “one”. In addition to “hands”, “voices”, and “minds”, Helena and Hermia’s “sides” merge, implying sexual connotations; “in the sixteenth century, ‘sides’ was synonymous with ‘loins’. Critic Melissa E. Sanchez highlights Helena as Hermia’s evolving relationship in Act III, Scene 2, from friendship to betrayal and passion, “we can understand [both] as different versions of the same fantasy of ecstatic and eternal fulfillment. Sanchez points out, “No amount of redescription will alter the fact that if people can satisfy each other they can frustrate each other,” and characterizes the aggression between the two as a form of homoeroticism. In reconciling Helena’s apparent change in characterization, to rivalry from concord, in the present tense—“She is angry, she is keen and shrewd” [emphasis added], to contrast with the following line’s past tense—one must conclude that Hermia’s violent temper has been known to Helena and is part of her image of their oneness:
“I pray you, though you mock me, gentlemen,
Let her not hurt me. I was never curst;
I have no gift at all in shrewishness.
I am a right maid for my cowardice.
Let her not strike me.
…
O, when she is angry, she is keen and shrewd.
She was a vixen when she went to school,
And though she be but little, she is fierce.” (3.2.314-318, 340-342)
Dream may also boast one of the most fabulous examples of what Karin Quimby calls the queer narrative middle. Based on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Quimby theorized that, because heteronormativity insists that any sense of queerness that is introduced in a narrative be neutralized to a heternormative ending, the middle of a narrative is where queerness abounds. In the study of narrative theory, narrative desire is traditionally thought of as the reader’s or audience’s desire for the end of the narrative. However, with the queer narrative middle, the middle of the narrative becomes the space that is desired, paradoxically, in “delay[ing]…the ultimate climax [of the narrative]. Dream sports this desire for the middle that subverts normative desire in the lovers’, including Titania and Bottom’s, rapidly changing desires; the woods take on the mythical quality of expressing the inexpressible of desire. Also, a play where the audience is shown that the nature of desire is illogical or mutable in a heteronormative world, Dream’s reasoning naturally upsets heteronormativity.