1.17 A Mid-Winter Night's Dream
All I suggested was some sexual roleplay, you’re the one who came up with Pirates of the Caribbean!
‘My God, have you two gone mad?!?!’ Frasier’s cry echoes out around the great candlelit hall, rain streaming down the windows, as he bursts in to find, to his eyes, Niles and Daphne locked in a passionate embrace. With a storm raging outside, the two have found themselves trapped together in Niles’ mansion, locked down by the elemental forces that rage outside, while inside they are both in tumult too: Niles abandoned by his capricious wife Maris, and Daphne nursing the painful rejection of a a barista called Eric, upon whom she’d transposed all the characteristics of a hero from a Viking saga.
The show’s title is an allusion, of course, to the Shakespeare play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, a carnivalesque riot of a play about the dreamlike confusions of passion and love. The play, written in 1595, approaches love as something almost synonymous with madness, attributing to the state a pre-modern conception of the loss of sense and reason that accompanies desire, both sexual and romantic, that somehow sweeps over the body. Love is a delusion, and in the case of Shakespeare, the cause is quite clear: it is a supernatural state, a beguilement of the rational mind by the fairy kingdom.
“What fools these mortals be!” says Puck, the agent of supernatural mischief; indeed, both the lovers and the rude mechanicals are portrayed as having descended into an irrational state. By removing reason, desire transforms the subject into an almost non-human state, even an animalistic one. This is quite literal in the case of Nick Bottom, transformed into an ass (a common early modern representation of foolishness or madness, as the above etching by Albrecht Dürer, from Sebastian Brant’s book The Ship of Fools, shows.) As treatment of mental illness and madness changed throughout the early modern period, it was partly this link between the mad and the animal that justified the confinement of the mentally ill. Talking of the mental “hospitals” of the 18th and 19th centuries, Foucault noted that a “model of animality prevailed in the asylums”.
The link between passion and pain, between desire and mental illness — the model of irrationality in love — lingered throughout the early modern and Victorian eras, finding new expression in the literature of the Romantic period. Its link with nature remained, this time inextricably linked both with the new race “sciences” that justified colonialism (again, deriving from this contradiction between reason and animality) and with a new focus on landscape and weather (itself underpinning new ideas of nationalism). Despite the Elizabethan title, it’s from the Romantic that this episode of Frasier draws both its references and form.
Daphne’s easy openness to love has its own dark inversion, an openness to pain. Her heartbreak at the hands of Eric helps us understand how passion, now a word connoting uncontrollable erotic desire, is ultimately derived from the idea of pain —as in, the passion of Christ. Pain and heartache opens a void which new love, or sexual desire, can easily fill, returning to the subject a sense of value that has been stripped by rejection. What is commonly known as “rebound” desire is what Frasier fears for when he realises Daphne and Niles are alone, together, in the Niles’ and Maris’ sprawling stately home. “My God!” he tells Martin, “it's a recipe for disaster! You've got a vulnerable woman and an unstable man in a gothic mansion on a rainy night! The only thing missing is someone shouting "Heathcliff!" across the moors!”
It’s a reference, of course, to Catherine Earnshaw, the protagonist of Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, a masterful depiction of desire and cruelty on the moors of Yorkshire that did much to shape the future of the Romantic novel. Heathcliff is a troubling figure, both a hero and anti-hero, and the depiction of him touches on some of those racialised conceptions of irrationality, madness and cruelty of the Victorian era. Niles, of course, is no Heathcliff; indeed, the contrast between his intensely WASPish manner and Frasier’s fear he might tap into an deep irrational nature and, in the words of Foucault, “restore man to what was purely animal inside him”. Frasier decides he must break the spell of love, and rushes with Martin to the mansion, their trip hampered by the torrential rainstorm howling outside.
The rain, of course, is an example of pathetic fallacy, the literary trope whereby the elements of the natural world are a projection of the emotional state of the characters. The term was coined by the Romantic art critic John Ruskin, less than a decade after Wuthering Heights was first published, and it has become a cliche of Romanticism ever since. In A Mid-Winter Night’s Dream, however, the role in inverted. Niles wages an internal war to repress his almost uncontrollable desire for Daphne, one not helped by her appearance in a white nightdress, holding a candlestick, all the world an English Romantic heroine, the subject of a male’s animalistic sexual desire and madness. Almost uncontrollable, but not totally, as Niles succeeds. Reminded of his marriage, he manages to prioritise the bourgeois convention of love, all possessions and stability, over his passionate desire, and he succeeds in repression. He offers himself as a chaste friend to Daphne.
No, it is Frasier himself who, driven to intercede, becomes the irrational Romantic fool. He appears at the window, slamming the glass to stop the two would-be lovers, laying before an open fire, from consummating the narrative. Inside is affectionate friendship, outside a lightning-silhouette madman, unable to rationally assess the situation. “My God, have you two gone mad?!?!” I’ll remind you, of course, that Frasier Crane is a psychiatrist.
It’s one curious aspect of the whole show. Both Frasier and Niles are psychiatrists, yet the show very rarely touches upon genuine mental illness as much more than set-up for a passing, inconsequential joke. The show retains its lightness by never truly delving into the brackish waters of mental illness, but instead by focusing on psychoanalysis, and even that rarely. It is romance, relationships, and family that provide all the material for deeper emotional conflicts within the show. Probably with good reason, mental illness is left untouched. But I am left wondering about an alternative Frasier, a Frasier that could have been, a show where, rather than doling out self-help on the radio, Frasier moves to Seattle to make a fresh start by recommitting himself to being a doctor who helps those with complex mental illness, a show that tackles the troubling, punitive history of psychiatry.
Check out my non-Frasier writing at utopian drivel.