Sapphic Love And Heterosexual Betrayal In Shakespeare's Othello

D.X. Hardgrove—

Sapphic Love and Heterosexual Betrayal in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Othello

Shakespeare’s characters of Helena (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and Emilia (Othello), despite the drastically different endings of their respective plays, share the same character arc. Both women have a close female friend with which they have homoerotic tension, and both betray that friend to gain the favor of a man they are romantically tied to. They then come to realize the gravity of what they have done and make an anguished confession of love and devotion to the friend they previously betrayed.

When Helena betrays Hermia, she does so willingly and knowingly, in hopes of gaining Demitrius’s favor. She leads him into the woods where

As desperate as Helena is during this heart-rending monologue, she (faery enchantments and plot contrivances aside) would have been much better off if she had revived this sentiment at the beginning of the play and not sold out her friend to Demitrius for the chance of winning his favor and “[t]o have his sight thither and back again,” (1.1.251) i.e., see him one last time. This is insanity. A major theme of Midsummer is that the experience of being in love is a capricious and irrational one, indistinguishable from insanity. The foolish way the men behave while enchanted is nearly identical to the way Helena begs Demitrius to “use [her] as but [his] spaniel” (2.1.205) and both are written in a way that provokes a humorous mix of pity and horror. The enchanted love and the natural love make an equal amount of sense—none—and both drive home

A reader can understand Helena as caught between these two ideas: the lecherous traitor that pursued Demitrius turns into a gentle, domestic creature when not driven by infatuation for a man.

The idea that a man’s influence is what drives women into wrongdoing parallels the Mediaeval idea that, because lesbian sex did not involve a penis, it wasn’t really sex and therefore not technically a sin. It is when Helena spurns Hermia’s company to seek a man that she commits wrongdoing, an idea that is emphasized much more forcefully in the relationship of Othello’s Desdemona and Emilia.

While Emilia stealing Desdemona’s handkerchief for her husband is, at first blush, much less egregious than Helena ratting out Hermia and Lysander, due to genre conventions, the eventual outcome of Emilia’s actions is far more serious. While the lion’s share of moral culpability falls upon Othello and Iago, it is possible that Desdemona’s murder would not have occurred without Emilia’s theft and her reaction (2.2.219) when finding out the handkerchief was instrumental in Iago’s plot suggests she feels