Othello (Vol. 35) - Sexual Conflict
SEXUAL CONFLICT
Stephen A. Shapiro (essay date 1964)
SOURCE: "Othello's Desdemona," in The Design Within: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Shakespeare, edited by M. D. Faber, 1970, pp. 183-92.
[In this essay which first appeared in Literature and Psychology in 1964, Shapiro concentrates on the relationship between Othello and Desdemona in his exploration of Othello's character.]
The last scene of Othello poses a difficult but crucial interpretive problem. Does Othello achieve self-awareness before he dies or does he remain the victim of his tendency to dramatize and deceive himself? This question cannot be answered in such a way as to remove the possibility of the alternate solution, but a psycho-analytic exploration of the conflicts within Othello will tend to strengthen the argument that Othello remains blind, that he is the object of irony at the end.
The critics who have considered Othello from a...
[The entire page is 17035 words long]
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