Effects Of Love In A Midsummer Night's Dream

Have you ever fallen in love with someone who has no interest in you and doesn’t love you back? Did that person suddenly start loving you out of nowhere? In A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, Helena’s hunger for love brings out a desperate side in her and takes her through interesting adventures with love. One can infer that love is hurtful by how Helena reacts to love in a foolish manner and remains skeptical about it even near the end of the play. The strong effects of love makes Helena a bit foolish and blind in the ways she reacts to it. In scene one of act one, the readers learn that Helena still loves Demetrius even though he loves her friend, Hermia, now. When Helena is first introduced, she demonstrates her jealousy and insecurities by asking Hermia for some of her beauty to win Demetrius back. Hermia and Lysander inform her that they are running away, and that

Theseus and Hippolyta wake up Lysander, Hermia, Helena, and Demetrius because Hermia has to make her final decision. With the love juice on his eyelids still, Demetrius confesses that he no longer loves Hermia and wants Helena to be the love of his life. Theseus overrides Egeus’s wishes, and he says the three couples will have a triple wedding. After Theseus, Hippolyta, and Egeus leave, all of them are unclear what exactly happened. Helena even says, “And I have found Demetrius like a jewel,/mine own, and not mine own” (4.1.176-177). She is making an analogy, saying that Demetrius is like a diamond that she found. She possesses it since she found it, but someone can easily come and take the diamond away and claim it as their own instead. She only has Demetrius’s love because of the love spell on him, for he doesn’t actually love her without it. Helena isn’t totally bought in with this idea of love because of the mistreatment she received from it earlier in the