Scholar suggests attraction a ‘hidden force’
The nature of attraction in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” was the topic of the English Department speakers series at the Haight Alumni Center Monday.
Speaker Mary Floyd Wilson, the director of English graduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discussed desire in Shakespeare’s comedy.
“Nature still has her bias,” Wilson said. “Perhaps we need to consider whether nature possesses a different logic of desire, one that has nothing to do with gender. I would like to suggest that the logic of attraction in ‘Twelfth Night’ and in many of Shakespeare’s comedies has an affinity to create a discourse on magnetism.”
Wilson focused her lecture on the idea of the lodestone, which is a magnetic mineral form of iron, and how some “hidden forces” can act as a lodestone to attract things to them
“While gender discussions of desire often focus on the allure of appearances, cross-dressed or otherwise, and the power of the gaze, particularly notions derived from neo-platonic philosophies of love, magnetic attractions can have their bases in hidden forces or unseen causes,” Wilson said. “So in the pre-scientific world of the Renaissance, it was believed that the sympathetic, but idiosyncratic virtues and qualities hidden in plants, animals, stones and humans had the power to draw other things, animals and humans to them.”
“Twelfth Night” deals with several relationships, pairing up the four main characters in a complicated love trial, Wilson said, but “the primary emotional bond in the play is between the twins, Viola and Sebastian.”
Wilson said the other characters are astonished at the similarity and magnetism of Viola and Sebastian.
“Antonio’s response reminds us that the bond between the twins may be more than superficial or even familial,” Wilson said. “They look as though they have made a division of themselves like an apple cleft in twain.”
This scene reminds people of Aristophanes’s Speech from Plato’s Symposium, which states that someone could cut humans in half, which would produce a world of halves, Wilson said.
“A world of halves seeking halves, when one of them meets his other half, the actual half of himself, the pair are lost in the amazement of love, friendship and intimacy,” Wilson said. “If twins were conceived as divisions of single cells, then it makes sense that they would seek to return to their other half, even as a force of magnetism.”
“We characterize love often as magnetic. We suggest that people have chemistry of a sort,” Wilson said. “The difference, I contend, between early modern conceptions of magnetic attractions among people, and modern thought, is almost a degree of literalism. Modern characterizations of romantic chemistry, more often than not, attempt to capture something supremely non-scientific, more metaphorical. By contrast, early modern ideas rest on foundational suppositions, that nature operates on a logic of unseen material connections that are not yet explained, that will diminish as scientific inquiry becomes more prominent.”
In conclusion, Wilson said “Twelfth Night” produces a desire in its audience to have an unexplainable bond that reaches beyond the boundaries of proof.
The next lecture in the department of English’s series will be at 7 p.m. on April 3 at the USU Eccles Conference Center. Mark Doty, the only American poet to win Great Britain’s T.S. Elliot Prize, will be the speaker.
-lindsay.anderson@aggiemail.usu.edu