Helena is a young woman in Athens. She is in love with Demetrius but he is not in love with her. Instead, he loves her best friend
Demetrius, an Athenian man who is in love with Hermia.
Demetrius' treatment of Helena is harsh; he is rude to her and leaves her in no doubt that he is no longer interested in her: “For I am sick when I do look on thee,” he says.
In a nutshell, Demetrius loves Hermia, or at least the idea of marrying her, but she does not love him.
The spell on Demetrius, however, is not removed, and the play ends with Demetrius very much in love with Helena.
Demetrius, a man who seems to fall out of love as quickly as he falls in love, acts as a symbol of this fleeting nature of love. He falls in love with Helena, but then falls out of love with her and quickly falls in love with Hermia and then hates Helena. He is the delicate balance between love and hate.
In William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Helena loves Demetrius, but he doesn't love her back. In fact, he almost seems to hate her. Even though Helena tells Demetrius of Hermia's plan to elope with Lysander, hoping to win his love, it only cause him to treat her more rudely.
The opening scene
He is angry with his daughter Hermia because she refuses to marry Demetrius, the person he wants her to marry. Instead, she wants to marry Lysander who has wooed her without Egeus' permission.
Instead, he declares that if Hermia won't marry Demetrius, she will die: This is the law of Athens and his right as her father. Theseus agrees that Hermia should obey her father but offers her a third option: spending her life in a nunnery.
Because her darling Lysander has mysteriously disappeared, Hermia accuses Demetrius of murdering him and hiding the body.
Demetrius was originally Helena's suitor but he abandoned her when he was given the chance to marry her friend Hermia.
Helena plans to betray Hermia by turning her into a whore because if Demetrius finds her sleeping with Lysander, Demetrius will declare her unfaithful leaving Hermia as the only faithful woman left, and that will make him love her.
Demetrius wants Helena to follow him and help. Demetrius wants Helena to leave him alone and stop following him. Demetrius wants Helena to distract Lysander, so he can persuade Hermia to leave with him.
The women are thus in nonparallel situations, adding to the sense of structural imbalance. By establishing the fact that Demetrius once loved Helena, Shakespeare suggests the possibility of a harmonious resolution to this love tangle: if Demetrius could only be made to love Helena again, then all would be well.
They did not have sex—in Demetrius and Helena's first conversation he clearly states she is a virgin, specifically that she shouldn't be out in the woods risking the loss of her virginity to rapists. Lysander says Demetrius "made love" to her, which at that time just meant charming someone.
Lysander is the first to be possessed and falls in love with Helena, after Demetrius falls in love with Helena. Helena is shocked and thinks she is being fooled by Hermia.
First, Helena is jealous of Hermia because Helena's betrothed, Demetrius, is in love with her. She wishes Demetrius would see in her what he sees in Hermia, and she complains about this at some length.
What mistake does Puck make? He squirts the juice on the wrong man.
What will happen to Hermia if she refuses to obey her father and marry Demetrius? She will be banished to an island in the Mediterranean Sea.
When Demetrius enters wooing Hermia, Oberon discovers that Robin has anointed the eyes of the wrong Athenian. Oberon then orders Robin to fetch Helena while he anoints the eyes of the sleeping Demetrius.
Her father claims the ancient right of Athenian Law, which says that he may choose whom Hermia marries. When she refuses her father's choice, she's left with three bad options: marry someone she hates, give up men forever, or die. Hermia chooses instead to run away into the woods with Lysander.
What does Hermia think happened to Lysander? Hermia has no knowledge of the magic flower, and so sees no reason in which Lysander would leave her except for if he was dead, and the only person who would hate Lysander enough to kill him would be Demetrius. Thus, she believes that Demetrius killed Lysander.
The machinations and mistakes of Puck create hilarity and tension between all of the characters of A Midsummer Night's Dream. There is a happy ending to these events, however. At the end of the play, only Demetrius is under the spell of the love potion.
Lysander wants them to sleep next to each other, but Hermia insists that they sleep apart in order to preserve her modesty until they're married.
Why does Hermia insist Lysander sleep a little ways from her? Because Hermia is a lady and believes that it isn't ladylike to sleep in the same "bed" before marriage. Why does Puck anoint Lysander's eyes? Because Puck mistakes Lysander for Demetrius.