SOURCE: “Marriage and Mutuality in Othello,” in Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare, University of North Carolina Press, 1984, pp. 125-49.

[In the essay below, Novy considers patriarchy in the marriage of Othello and Desdemona.]

In an article entitled “Marriage and the Construction of Reality,” the sociologists Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner say, “Unlike an earlier situation in which the establishment of the new marriage simply added to the differentiation and complexity of an already existing social world, the marriage partners are now embarked on the often difficult task of constructing for themselves the little world in which they will live.”¹ By this definition, Othello and Desdemona seem to begin their marriage in a situation more modern than traditional. Othello is cut off from his ancestry; Desdemona is disowned by her father. They spend most of the play in Cyprus, a setting native to neither of them. Thus they have some of both the opportunities and the difficulties of constructing their own world that Berger and Kellner discuss. “The re-construction of the world in marriage,” they continue, “occurs principally in the course of conversation. … The implicit problem of this conversation is how to match two individual definitions of reality.”²

Marriage for Berger and Kellner, as, I have argued, for Shakespeare's comedies, involves a combination of ideals of mutuality and assumptions of patriarchy, though of course patriarchy takes a different form in twentieth-century America than in seventeenth-century England. Though the balance may tip in one direction or the other, the predominance of playfulness and of festive disguise helps to remove threatening elements. In Shakespeare's tragedies, however, the combination of patriarchy and mutuality breaks down. We never see Othello and Desdemona creating together a private game-like world of conversation onstage. All the early scenes where they both speak are public, and events in the outside world remain important to their relationship. Othello's public role as warrior is part of what Desdemona loves in him. Furthermore, Berger and Kellner assume a situation in which “the husband typically talks with his wife about his friend, but not with his friend about his wife”; in Othello the opposite is true.³ One principal representative of the already existing social world stays with Othello and Desdemona—Iago. And accompanying his presence is the persistence of conventional attitudes from the outside world in Othello's mind. Othello cannot completely free himself from the conventional assumption that Desdemona's marriage to him is unnatural. He cannot keep distrust of women out of his marriage. Brabantio may not be physically present, but his message, “She has deceived her father, and may thee” (1.3.293), rings in Othello's memory. And after Othello has stopped believing anything Desdemona says, Iago's presence makes it impossible for Othello to keep out of his marriage a code of proving manhood by violent revenge. Between patriarchy and racism, the initial mutuality between Desdemona and Othello is destroyed. To restore it is the aim of Othello's suicide.

In Shakespeare's comedies we usually see mutuality being established; in Othello we hear the process described. Othello calls it, “How I did thrive in this fair lady's love / And she in mine” (1.3.125-26). While he told his life story to her father,

This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline;
But still the house affairs would draw her thence;
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
She’d come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse. Which I observing,
Took once a plaint hour, and found good means
To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart
That I would all my pilgrimage dilate,
Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
But not intentively. I did consent,
And often did beguile her of her tears
When I did speak of some distressful stroke
That my youth suffered.

(1.3.145-58)

Here Othello gives a description of a process of initiative and response leading to further response—Othello talks, Desdemona listens, Othello sees her listening and encourages it, hopes she will ask to hear more; she does, he agrees, and she responds with tears of sympathy. Othello is gratified by her initial interest in his performance and draws her out for more active participation.

While this scene fits some conventions of patriarchy—male activity and female response—the imagery by which Othello's words become food that Desdemona devours should signal that roles here are not altogether limited to conventional ones. As Brabantio says, Othello's story portrays Desdemona as “half the wooer” (1.3.176). She goes beyond the audience's responsiveness, as an earlier chapter noted, to initiate courtship by her hint. The content of their conversation in this story is Othello's experience, not Desdemona's, but we should notice how closely he has observed her, how carefully he has elicited her request. While Desdemona has been an audience to Othello's performance, he has also behaved like an audience in closely observing her. In the narrative Othello tells, he has judged Desdemona's feelings from her gestures, guessed at meaning beneath her words, and he has been right about her interest in him—beyond his dreams. Othello describes a powerful experience of emotional sharing—he has gone back to his youth and relived his sufferings and she has felt them along with him: “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them” (1.3.167-68).

Yet in spite of her active participation, Desdemona describes her loyalty to Othello as a matter of duty. Furthermore, Desdemona makes as many concessions as she can to her father in explaining her “divided duty” (1.3.181); she speaks first of her bonds as a daughter, and she compares her choice of Othello with her mother's choice of her father. One of few Shakespearean women who claim to imitate their mothers, she is trying to reassure Brabantio by putting her marriage into an orderly continuity of marriages, trying to remind him that his marriage too was won at the cost of separation from a father.

In these introductory statements by Othello and Desdemona, their marriage appears as a combination of patriarchy and mutuality. Othello makes the marriage proposal and keeps the title of lord, yet there is a genuine emotional sharing and companionship. Desdemona further emphasizes both these elements later on in this scene. “That I did love the Moor to live with him,” she says,

My downright violence, and storm of fortunes,
May trumpet to the world.

(1.3.248-50)

She joins him in his imagery as in his career. “My heart's subdued / Even to the very quality of my lord” (1.3.250-51). She identifies with him in a way that subordinates her.⁴ He does not, for example, ask that she accompany him to Cyprus until after she does, and he makes a point of saying that he asks it only as a magnanimous gesture, “to be free and bounteous to her mind” (1.3.265). Although his description of their courtship revealed the importance to him of her emotional response—the mutual dependence that they have created—he wants to deny his need of her and, most emphatically, to deny any sexual appetite that would clamor for satisfaction—“Not to comply with heat—the young affects / In me defunct” (1.3.263-64). Furthermore, while she values his world, his words here suggest that he scorns the domestic world she comes from; his curse to be imposed on himself if he neglects his duty because of her ends:

Let housewives make a skillet of my helm,
And all indign and base adversities
Make head against my estimation!

(1.3.272-74)

In their meeting in Cyprus, it is Othello who uses imagery that describes their love as a fusion of Desdemona's essence into his: he calls her “My fair warrior … my soul's joy” (2.1.180-82). In this reunion, as in his scene of self-revelation to her described earlier, social structures and temperamental differences may drop away and two people can create the illusion of unity; such scenes are the end of love as quest and of the typical plot of romantic comedy.⁵ But what can follow them? Othello's words of joy are filled with apprehension. It is as if the hardships of his life have led him always to expect disaster:

If it were now to die,
’Twere now to be most happy; for I fear
My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.

(2.1.187-91)

It is easier for Othello to imagine a Liebestod than a love enduring the test of daily life; yet he sees their love not as the passion usually identified with Liebestod but as calm, content, comfort. This suggests, perhaps, the element in their love that involves regression to a relationship like that of mother and infant.

Desdemona's response, however, is more active and creative:

The heavens forbid
But that our loves and comforts should increase
Even as our days do grow.

(2.1.191-93)

Othello quickly agrees, but the memory of his fear is there to mix with the ominous suggestions of Iago's asides.

Why is Iago so successful in his attempts to destroy the relationship between Othello and Desdemona? Many different approaches can work toward answers to this question; here I am interested in looking at what the play shows about the vulnerability of the combination of patriarchy and mutuality that we see in that relationship, and about how Iago manipulates Othello's persisting need for mutuality.

If mutuality and patriarchy are to be combined, as we have already suggested, the woman must make the gesture of subordinating herself to the man; in addition, in Othello, much more than in the comedies, the man believes he must subdue qualities in himself that he considers would make him woman-like or too dependent on a woman. Othello's need for control to assert his manliness often coalesces with the need for control to assert that he is civilized and not a barbarian slave to passion. It is important to note here the overlap between the stereotypes of the woman and of the Moor: conventional Renaissance European views would see both as excessively passionate.⁶ Othello's first appearance, contrary to this stereotype, is an amazing show of self-possession under Brabantio's attacks. Even in his description of his life history, he recounts his adventures in a controlled tone. He is, however, moved when Desdemona cries over them; if he beguiles her of her tears, she can express his emotions for him. It further suggests his control, based on his sense of social distinctions, that Desdemona first speaks of love, and Othello can see himself as loving only in response, and therefore rationally. Indeed, he is, as we have seen, curiously emphatic about his lack of sexual passion.

Othello's stress on control of passion may add to the implications of his dismissal of Cassio. Just after the announcement that Othello has proclaimed a general festivity because of the coincidence of the victory over the Turks and the celebration of his nuptial, Othello says to Cassio:

Good Michael, look you to the guard to-night.
Let’s teach ourselves that honorable stop,
Not to outsport discretion.

(2.3.1-3)

Here Othello seems to be identifying himself with Cassio, the potential drunkard, in a common need for control. A few lines later, Othello leaves with Desdemona, saying

Come, my dear love.
The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue;
That profit's yet to come ’tween me and you.

(2.3.8-10)

After the first line, this is a rather business-like description for the sexual initiation of a wedding night. Again it suggests a concern for sharing, but it is odd that he should turn pleasure into financial imagery. Iago's words a few lines later suggest one kind of language Othello has avoided using: “He hath not yet made wanton the night with her, and she is sport for Jove” (2.3.15-17).

Thus, while Cassio drinks too much and gets into a fight with Rodrigo and then with Montano, the characters and the audience are frequently reminded that Othello and Desdemona are meeting in bed for the first time. Iago, in fact, brings this juxtaposition shockingly into focus when he describes the fight to Othello, who has been called back by its clamor:

Friends all, but now, even now,
In quarter, and in terms like bride and groom
Devesting them for bed; and then but now—
As if some planet had unwitted men—
Swords out, and tilting one at other's breast
In opposition bloody.

(2.3.169-74)

What Iago has described is perilously close to the reality of the wedding night, when at least briefly rational control must be abandoned and blood must be shed.

I suggest that, partly under Iago's influence, partly because of his own emphasis on self-control, Othello feels guilty about the passion involved in his intercourse with Desdemona; he identifies with the offender who has also let passion run away with him, and in effect he makes Cassio a scapegoat for himself. When he dismisses Cassio, as later when he kills Desdemona, he insists that he is acting justly when he is really moved by his emotions. Here he returns to Desdemona saying “All's well now, sweeting” (2.3.242), because Cassio is dismissed, and so too, Othello thinks, is the disturbing image of sexuality becoming violent with which Iago has associated him. Like Stanley Cavell, I think that Othello's guilt about sexuality is an important subtext of the play;⁷ but in addition to the guilt about hurting Desdemona, which Cavell stresses, I see him as feeling guilty for loss of control of his passions, such loss of control as many medieval theologians whose views were still reflected in some Elizabethan sermons thought made sex inevitably suspect even within marriage.⁸

Of course, Othello is a play about passionate love; but part of its impact comes from the tension between that passion and the restraints that Othello is constantly trying to place on it, as suggested by his words. Furthermore, Othello's very idealization of Desdemona has a passionate component. He is passionate in wishing her to be totally fused in identification with him, in a symbiosis possible only for the mother and infant before the infant's discovery of sex. In one of his final confrontations with Desdemona, he describes her, in language that brings to mind the dependence of the infant at the mother's breast, as the place

Where either I must love or bear no life,
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up.

(4.2.58-60)

C. L. Barber has suggested that many of Shakespeare's female characters have the resonance for the hero, and for the audience, of the Virgin Mary; Shakespeare's audience still had the fantasy of a total and pure relationship such as one could have only with a mother who was perpetually a virgin, and this fantasy could no longer be dealt with through religious symbolism and ritual because of the Reformation. Thus Othello projects the kind of religious need onto Desdemona that no merely human being could fulfill.⁹

In his description of the handkerchief and its provenance, there are more suggestions of Othello's fantasy of love as fusion with a woman both maternal and virginal. He describes a gypsy sorceress as telling his mother that the handkerchief,

while she kept it,
[would] make her amiable and subdue my father
Entirely to her love; but if she lost it
Or made a gift of it, my father's eye
Should hold her loathèd.

(3.4.58-62)

In sharp contrast with Desdemona's description of her parents as bound by duty, here are the precarious bonds of magic. The mere chance loss of the handkerchief can turn one side of the polarized image—Othello's father entirely subdued to her love—to the other—loathing. Furthermore, by concluding the description with a reference to dye made from maiden's hearts. Othello calls up the image of dead women and associates it with the blood lost in the loss of virginity, which Lynda Boose has shown might well be visually suggested by the handkerchief.¹⁰ Othello's words imply that if Desdemona could keep the handkerchief, could keep her fidelity safe from any accusation, could define herself as the virgin who shed her blood for him, then she would be like his mother and would keep his love.

Othello's desire for a love that is total fusion is, in part, his attempt to escape from his underlying sense of separateness. His blackness is a visual sign of how his history differs from that of the other characters; his narrative tells of an early life far from ordinary family and domestic connections. His ties in Venice, except with Desdemona, are those made by military service, and as Brabantio's behavior shows, they are precarious. Thus it is particularly easy for Iago to play on Othello's sense of separateness with regard to Desdemona, who is not only Venetian but also a woman. Othello is defenseless against commonplaces of antifeminism when couched as the insider's sociological observation:

I know our country disposition well:
In Venice they do let God see the pranks
They dare not show their husbands.

(3.3.201-3)

It is at this key point that Iago's hints depend most on the structure of a patriarchal society; because of fathers' controls over their daughters, women can choose their husbands only through some deception—and that deception can forever after be held against them. “She did deceive her father, marrying you” (3.3.206). There is always a latent male alliance, which Iago brings to the surface here as a compensation for the sense of alienation he is arousing in Othello. By stressing Desdemona's youth, also, Iago makes her sound like a diabolically clever child:

She that, so young, could give out such a seeming
To seel her father's eyes up close as oak—
He thought ’twas witchcraft.

(3.3.209-11)

The witchcraft charges originally applied to Othello have been projected to Desdemona. Othello's sense of being an outsider is evident as he resigns himself:

Haply, for I am black
And have not those soft parts of conversation
That chamberers have, or for I am declined
Into the vale of years—yet that’s not much—
She’s gone. I am abused, and my relief
Must be to loathe her.

(3.3.263-68)

One of the reasons that Iago can play so easily on Othello's sense of separateness to break up his relationship with Desdemona is that he himself can supply a pretense of the mutuality Othello so longs for. It is ironic that Iago is one of the few characters in Shakespeare to use in his dialogue a form of the word “mutuality”; to him it is a suggestive word that can make Cassio's gestures of courtesy to Desdemona sound like foreplay: “When these mutualities so marshal the way, hard at hand comes the master and main exercise, th’ incorporate conclusion” (2.1.255-57). To Iago, sincere mutuality of feeling is impossible, and most of the time he assumes that other people are as shallow in their relationships. He reduces love to a precariously matched set of appetites that he can easily manipulate.

It is unsettling to see, with Stephen Greenblatt, how well Iago's attitude toward Othello fits some definitions of empathy.¹¹ As W. H. Auden has noted, “Iago treats Othello as an analyst treats a patient except that, of course, his intention is to kill, not to cure. Everything he says is designed to bring to Othello's consciousness what he has already guessed is there.”¹² Iago cleverly postpones making direct charges against Desdemona and Cassio. Rather he drops hints and raises questions, leaving Othello to imagine the charges himself. His technique here is particularly poignant because it plays on the attempt to read gestures and see unspoken thoughts which worked for Othello in his recounted conversation with Desdemona. While earlier we heard about Desdemona and Othello creating a mutual trust together, here we see Iago and Othello creating a union based on suspicion of Desdemona, pretended by Iago and believed by Othello. Furthermore, Iago speaks openly of his own love for Othello—knowing that Othello will respond—and uses this technique especially when Othello sounds as if he is likely to doubt him: “From hence / I’ll love no friend, sith love breeds such offence” (3.3.379-80). Othello's growing fascination with Iago's words is heightened as Iago calls up the image of Cassio and Desdemona in bed, “as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys” (3.3.403), and then the image of Cassio in bed with Iago, mistaking him for Desdemona; the dream-like image of sexual union between two men parallels and charges the emotional union that Iago is creating with Othello. The excitement of the image adds to the tension of the conversation.

The parody marriage ceremony enacted when they kneel and vow murder, and Iago says, “I am your own forever” (3.3.480), offers a return to a relationship in one respect like the one Othello earlier had with Desdemona. In the worldview Iago offers, Othello again has someone's total dedication:

Witness that here Iago doth give up
The execution of his wit, hands, heart
To wronged Othello's service!

(3.3.465-67)

Desdemona, by contrast, has given evidence that she extends her sympathy not only to Othello but also to Cassio.

In loving Desdemona, Othello has ventured outside of the man's world of war and made himself vulnerable to charges of being ruled by his emotions and therefore, in Renaissance terms, less than manly; remember his oath that if he neglects his duty because of Desdemona, “Let housewives make a skillet of my helm” (1.3.272). Iago plays on these fears as well by the way he acts the advocate of cold reason. His image of Cassio and Desdemona in bestial lust is introduced by “It is impossible you should see this” (3.3.402). The struggle between passion and control that initially was internal to Othello is now externalized; all of Iago's qualifications and admonitions to patience serve to enrage Othello further:

Iago:
And this may help to thicken other proofs
That do demonstrate thinly.
Othello:
I’ll tear her all to pieces!

(3.3.430-31)

After Othello's emotions have surfaced so powerfully that he falls into a fit, Iago begins to harp on the issue of manhood.¹³ “Would you would bear your fortune like a man. … Be a man … grief—a passion most unsuiting such a man” (4.1.61, 64, 76-77). By trying to emphasize the need for control, he is still promoting Othello's passion, but helping to channel it toward revenge:

Iago:
Marry, patience!
Or I shall say y’are all in all in spleen,
And nothing of a man.
Othello:
Dost thou hear, Iago?
I will be found most cunning in my patience
But—dost thou hear?—most bloody.

(4.1.87-91)

Under Iago's influence, Othello starts to name Desdemona in ways that fit more into the harshest potential of the patriarchal structure of marriage than into a mutuality of love. The images that he uses for Desdemona put her into categories of objects to be controlled or possessed. His sense of her as different from him becomes more and more an image of her as strange, not quite human. He compares her to a hawk, using one of Petruchio's more patriarchal images:

If I do prove her haggard,
Though that her jesses were my dear heartstrings,
I’d whistle her off and let her down the wind
To prey at fortune.

(3.3.260-63)

He cannot bear to think that total control of her is impossible—the impossibility seems to threaten reducing him to an animal as well:

O curse of marriage,
That we can call these delicate creatures ours,
And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad,
And live upon the vapor of a dungeon
Than keep a corner in the thing I love
For others' uses.

(3.3.268-73)

“The thing I love”—that is now Othello's phrase for Desdemona. Emilia and Iago echo the word, with similar undertones of sexuality and a reductive approach to women, a few lines later, when they gain possession of the handkerchief:

Emilia:
I have a thing for you.
Iago:
A thing for me? It is a common thing—
Emilia:
Ha?
Iago:
To have a foolish wife.

(3.3.301-4)

The word suggests the reduction of woman to object and particularly to sexual object that has occurred in Othello's mind under Iago's influence.

When Othello starts to doubt Desdemona, he also uses more images of dirt, often associated with sexuality. Desdemona, instead of a clear fountain, becomes “a cistern for foul toads / To knot and gender in” (4.2.61-62). This dirt also becomes associated with blackness. Here too we see Othello showing more self-hatred in his imagery as his distrust of Desdemona grows. “Her name, that was as fresh / As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black / As mine own face” (3.3.386-88).

This opposition between cleanness and dirt is another reason why the handkerchief becomes central to Othello's rejection of his love for Desdemona. “Such a handkerchief …,” says Iago, “did I today / See Cassio wipe his beard with” (3.3.437-39), and Othello explodes: “O, that the slave had forty thousand lives! / One is too poor, too weak for my revenge” (3.3.443-44). The handkerchief, something originally clean, is juxtaposed with dirt from Cassio's beard and for Othello it is as if that dirt soiled Desdemona herself.

When Othello becomes more distrusting of Desdemona, he also becomes more conscious of his passionate physical attraction to her, which earlier in the play he did not speak of, or denied.¹⁴ While initially he called her “My soul's joy,” now he speaks of “her sweet body” (3.3.346) and declares, “I’ll not expostulate with her, lest her body and beauty unprovide my mind again” (4.1.200-202). The more he imagines her guilt, the more he feels his own attraction to her; he feels it more intensely, no doubt, because it appears split off from all her good qualities in which he no longer believes. He plans to kill her as a way to control his own unruly passion for her body as he punishes her passion.

In spite of this general tendency, Othello has moments even as he is planning the murder when he sees Desdemona not as an object to be controlled or punished but as an active, even civilizing woman. “So delicate with her needle! an admirable musician! O, she will sing the savageness out of a bear! of so high and plenteous wit and invention” (4.1.184-87). Struck by his admiration of her, Othello is moved to exclaim, “But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago” (4.1.192-93). But Iago can expel this mood in a moment by returning to the patriarchal imagery of possession: “If you are so fond over her iniquity, give her patent to offend; for if it touch not you, it comes near nobody” (4.1.194-95).

As Othello is torn by the conflict between his admiration and his disgust, Desdemona's synthesis of attitudes breaks up disastrously. After the marriage Desdemona's combination of initiative—which contributes to mutuality—and pretense—which accommodates to patriarchy—dissolves, and both forms of acting contribute to Othello's anger at her. Her commitment to Cassio is carried out with such vehemence that some critics have accused her of trying to take away Othello's military authority; on the other hand, her resort to the evasive technique of lying about the handkerchief causes his anger even more intensely.

Desdemona knows that in some ways she is transcending patriarchal categories in pleading for Cassio with Othello (although of course she would not have called it that); she uses images suggesting that she sees herself in roles held predominantly by men in Renaissance society: “His bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift. / … Thy solicitor shall rather die / Than give thy cause away” (3.2.24, 27-28). Furthermore, she asks that Othello pardon Cassio not as an obedient inferior asks for a favor from a condescending superior but with the suggestion that their marriage is one of mutual generosity: “I wonder in my soul / What you could ask me that I should deny / Or stand so mamm’ring on” (3.3.68-70). At the same time she goes on to suggest a different vision of their relationship: “Why, this is not a boon; / ’Tis as I should entreat you wear your gloves, / Or feed on nourishing dishes, or keep you warm” (3.3.76-78). This imagery suggests either that she is imagining total identification with him—she is asking for this because it is what he needs—or that she sees herself as taking care of him as a nurturing mother does a child. In the light of psychoanalytic theory it is easy to conflate these two suggestions and to see the lines as hints that she too participates in the fantasy of a union with Othello as close as that of mother and infant. It is at this point that she swears “By’r Lady [By Our Lady], I could do much” (3.3.74), and Othello dismisses her by saying, “Leave me but a little to myself” (3.3.85), words that suggest he feels his identity threatened by engulfment. He has wanted fusion, yes, but it is also threatening, especially for someone who values control as Othello does.

As Othello's jealousy becomes clearer, Desdemona's attitudes are a mixture of mature strength and evasion.¹⁵ When openly accused she defends herself forcefully to Othello:

Othello:
Are not you a strumpet?
Desdemona:
No, as I am a Christian!

(4.2.82)

But after this scene she emphasizes her innocence in language that makes her seem more weak and passive:

Those that do teach young babes
Do it with gentle means and easy tasks:
He might have child me so; for, in good faith,
I am a child to chiding.
.....Am I that name, Iago?

(4.2.111-14, 118)

She has been slow to see that Othello is jealous and even slower to see that he is jealous of Cassio: she has intuitions that she is in danger in her last scene with Emilia, but she dismisses them:

Good faith, how foolish are our minds!
If I do die before thee, prithee shroud me
In one of those same sheets.

(4.3.22-24)

Early in the play she seems mature and aware of people's limitations (“I would not there reside, / To put my father in impatient thoughts / By being in his eye”—1.3.241-43) and worldly-wise enough to deal with Iago's antifeminist jokes with a cool “O heavy ignorance! Thou praisest the worst best” (2.1.143-44). She can be calm and tolerant about Othello's bad temper, although this tolerance sounds like evasion in the light of later events:

Nay, we must think men are not gods,
Nor of them look for such observancy
As fits the bridal.

(3.4.148-50)

Near the end, with Emilia, she retreats into a willful ignorance, as her disillusionment with Othello leads her to cling harder, perhaps, to a belief in women:

Desdemona:
O, these men, these men!
Dost thou in conscience think—tell me, Emilia—
That there be women do abuse their husbands
In such gross kind?
Emilia:
There be some such, no question.
.....Desdemona:
I do not think there is any such woman.

(4.3.58-61, 82)

At this point it is Emilia who takes over the articulate awareness that Desdemona showed earlier. She makes a speech attacking the institution behind Othello's assumption of his right to kill Desdemona—the double standard. Elsewhere than in this speech, the play alludes to adultery by men only in Iago's fantasies—and there, of course, he sees it as an offense against one man by another. Here, suddenly, the whole perspective changes, and we see adultery not as a world-shaking crime committed by women, but as one of a whole group of men's possible behaviors annoying to wives—in the same category as jealousy, violence, and stinginess. How different it is to see adultery as a violation of “there where I have garnered up my heart” and to see it as analogous to cutting an allowance. Emilia rejects the patriarchal valuation of female adultery as worse than male adultery:

Let husbands know,
Their wives have sense like them. They see and smell,
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. …
… And have not we affections,
Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?

(4.3.92-95, 99-100)

Othello's murder of Desdemona is the epitome of his failure to accept the fact that both of them have what Emilia calls frailties and affections. When he sees her sleeping, his words show appreciation of her beauty as a passive object, which he can describe in static, lifeless terms—sensuous conversions of passion to coldness and art—“That whiter skin of hers than snow, / And smooth as monumental alabaster” (5.2.3-4). As he becomes more aware of the irrevocability of her death, the imagery changes:

I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume. When I have plucked the rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again.

(5.2.12-14)

Yet this awareness falters: “I will kill thee, / And love thee after” (5.2.18-19). When seeing her sleeping, he talks tenderly of her, even kisses her, in spite of his intent to kill, and wants to give her time to confess her sins, but on confronting the awakened woman, who struggles for life and denies his accusations, he becomes enraged.

Again Desdemona defends her innocence stoutly in a mix of assertiveness, generosity, and naiveté:

I never did
Offend you in my life; never loved Cassio
But with such general warranty of heaven
As I might love.

(5.2.58-61)

But her earlier resourcefulness and understanding of Othello have left her. She cannot believe that he will kill her. “Why I should fear I know not, / Since guiltiness I know not; but yet I feel I fear” (5.2.38-39), she says, after he has already begun to talk of killing. The best she can do for her survival, when she learns that Othello will not believe her and Cassio is dead, is to ask for a stay of execution.

In her last words, uttered after she is apparently dead and Emilia has returned, her first impulse is to proclaim her murder and thus to maintain her own innocence. But when Emilia asks her to name her murderer, Desdemona shows that she has forgiven Othello—“Commend me to my kind lord”—and for the last time uses a lie to try to cover up—this time Othello's guilt—“Nobody—I myself” (5.2.125-26).

Othello does not see her forgiveness but rather the lie that fits with his insistence on her dishonesty. But eventually he learns the truth, when Emilia tells the story of her own responsibility in the loss of the handkerchief—at the cost of her life. Yet Othello's words at the end show that he still fails to understand Desdemona. If she were true, he says, after Emilia has challenged his charges,

If heaven would make me such another world
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,
I’d not have sold her for it.

(5.2.145-47)

And at the end he compares her to a foolishly discarded “pearl … / Richer than all his tribe” (5.2.347-48). Value is evident in these images, but it is lifeless, inanimate—a possession: “Cold, cold, my girl? / Even like thy chastity” (5.2.276-77). His identification of her chastity with the coldness of death shows his inability to connect it with the warmth of her love; it is in keeping with this that he does not understand the forgiveness that she has already granted him:

When we shall meet at compt,
This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,
And fiends will snatch at it.

(5.2.274-76)

At the end Othello seems again to regain control of himself and can finally admit his earlier lack of control, his passivity to “being wrought, / Perplexed in the extreme” (5.2.345-46). He maintains control of his own destiny by killing himself but also intends a return to mutuality. The final image of three people dead on a bed is on one level an image of the power of sexual passion to take life. Yet unlike the first two deaths, inflicted in passion, this one is calm. These deaths show not the simple destructiveness of passion but the more complicated destructiveness of passion combined with an attempt to control, closely related to social structures of sexual polarization.

Let us consider briefly three of the ways that Shakespeare's characters see sexual relations between man and woman. They can be seen as a sharing of passion and action in mutual responsiveness, as the man asserting his dominance over the woman, or as the man overcome by his passion for the woman. The second and third views come out of a mental structure of sexual polarization, in which either man = action and woman = passivity or man = control and woman = passion. In the comedies, the first view of sexuality (mutuality) balances the second (male dominance), as in The Taming of the Shrew, or the second and third (male submission to passion, represented by a woman), as in As You Like It. Comic game-playing helps keep this balance. Either male or female dominance can seem less threatening and less permanent if portrayed as a game, and the participation of the lovers in a game not understood by other characters adds to the sense of their existence in a shared world that dramatizes the strength of their relationship. This structure of play allows the lovers to try out the extremity of passion (“Then, in mine own person, I die”—As You Like It, 4.1.84) and to draw back from it (“No, faith, die by attorney”—As You Like It, 4.1.85). The fears of betrayal and rejection surface and are dealt with. Desdemona has something of the playful attitude, the ability to try out situations through imagining alternatives. But unlike the comedy heroes, Othello lacks any trace of such flexibility. “Disport” seems a bad word to him. Unlike them, also, he is matched with Iago, one of the most notable game-players in Shakespeare, who uses his abilities to create false mutuality and destroy true mutuality. Under his influence, Othello's wish to assert his dominance over Desdemona and control their passions becomes desperate and contaminated by the masculine code of revenge by murder. When he discovers his guilt, however, Desdemona becomes identified with control (“Cold, cold as thy chastity”) and himself with passion. Then with his final act he turns his activity against himself and tells us that this gesture of control is intended as a union with her.

While in the first part of the speech, his guilt about his excess of passion is apparent—“one that loved not wisely, but too well” (5.2.344)—there is a section of it in which he speaks of a kind of passion in himself that by implication becomes healing:

One whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unusèd to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their med’cinable gum.

(5.2.348-51)

He is following Desdemona in weeping and in speaking of himself as subdued. Furthermore, his image momentarily suggests a reconciliation with nature and its fluids. Othello has often used similar images of biological viscosity with disgust—“The slime / That sticks on filthy deeds” (5.2.149-50).¹⁶ Now for perhaps the first time he sees something in nature as healing. Furthermore, the gum is from Arabian trees—from an exotic, non-European land, one closer to Othello's heritage. It is a brief moment—only four lines—of relative peace—with the trees and the tears that recall Desdemona's willow song, where “Her salt tears fell from her, and soft’ned the stones” (4.2.45). Othello knows his heart is not the stone he once said it was. For these few moments he transcends the stereotype of masculine control to which he has elsewhere aspired. But he cannot accept as adequate the forgiveness that Desdemona has already granted him; he must return to the code of violence and control, and kill the passionate alien self that he earlier thought he was killing in Desdemona: “No way but this, / Killing myself, to die upon a kiss” (5.2.358-59).

The violent events of Othello dramatize, in hyperbolical form, many aspects of the predominant form of emotional symbiosis between men and women that remains in our society still. The references that I have occasionally made to echoes of the mother-child relationship in the imagery of the play are not intended as a prologue to comments about special pathologies in Othello's childhood, or Shakespeare's; rather, they are meant to underline the psychological influence that the restriction of child-rearing to women has had for centuries over the prevailing feelings of both sexes about women. Some of Othello's resonance comes from the imagery by which Othello's words about Desdemona evoke, at one moment, the way she gives him such joy as the mother gives the infant, and, at another moment, the way that his disillusionment with her re-creates the total desolation of the infant in a temporary state of frustration. I am following here the analysis of Dorothy Dinnerstein in The Mermaid and the Minotaur.¹⁷ Dinnerstein believes that the boy raised by a woman feels “that the original, most primitive source of life will always lie outside himself, that to be sure of reliable access to it he must have exclusive access to a woman” (p. 43). Before the child has a defined self “a woman is the helpless child's main contact with the natural surround. … She is this global, inchoate, all-embracing presence before she is a person, a discrete, finite human individual with a subjectivity of her own” (p. 93). She is, perhaps, more a place than a person:

There where I have garnered up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life,
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up.

(4.2.57-60)

Initially, in her warmth and sympathy for him Desdemona seems to fulfill Othello's dreams of how a woman ought to behave. Indeed, we in the audience know, though Othello does not, that she never loses that warmth and sympathy and that her only conflict with him arises because she also takes on the role of trying to help Cassio.

But that conflict does arise, and Othello's experience of it, magnified by Iago's hints, has echoes of the discovery, as Dinnerstein puts it, “that the infant does not own or control the mother's body. Because this body has needs and impulses of its own, its responsiveness to the infant's needs is never totally reliable” (p. 60). “We can call these delicate creatures ours / And not their appetites.” We never completely learn to deal with this truth, says Dinnerstein: “That the other to whom we look for nurturance has, like any sentient other, needs and a viewpoint separate from and never wholly subject to our own” (p. 240). But conventional female behavior serves to hide this fact as much as possible; “woman traditionally agrees to listen to man's opinions and keep her own to herself, lets him hog the limelight and offers herself as audience, allows herself activity only as it nourishes his projects” (pp. 239-40). Desdemona does more than this, but like many such women she possesses what Dinnerstein calls “a monstrously overdeveloped talent for unreciprocated empathy, an adult talent that she must exercise in a situation in many ways as vulnerable as a child's” (p. 236).

Desdemona's “talent for empathy”—perhaps “sympathy” is more accurate in view of her misunderstandings of him—and her inability to fight back when her life is at stake are symmetrical to Othello's military prowess and inability to sympathize when he feels wronged. His role as a soldier makes the point about the contrast between his and Desdemona's skills according to typical sex roles in the most emphatic way. Yet Desdemona admires Othello's military abilities and identifies with them so much that Othello calls her “fair warrior,” and she later calls herself “unhandsome warrior” (3.4.151). They are re-creating the traditional woman's “privilege of enjoying man's achievements and triumphs vicariously” (p. 211).

When Desdemona hears of Othello's earlier experiences, her tears serve, as Dinnerstein suggests that women's tears often do, to help a man go on—“for she is doing his weeping for him, and he is doing what she weeps about for her” (p. 226). The flashback to his earlier life in this speech is the only time in the play when we have a glimpse of Othello acting without regard to Desdemona, and even that is put in the context of their relationship by its position in the story of their courtship. Thus we see his identity as a soldier as connected with his confidence in Desdemona's admiration and sympathy from almost the beginning of the play. It is in keeping with this connection that when he loses faith in Desdemona he says farewell not only to the tranquil mind but also to “the big wars / That make ambition virtue” (3.3.349-50). After he has regained belief in Desdemona's faith, at the end, he speaks again of his service to the state and he stages his suicide as a re-creation of an earlier battle against a Turk.

Dinnerstein's analysis illuminates the connections between three attitudes that we have seen linked in Othello: emphasis on control, rejection of physicality, and rejection of women. Her analysis suggests that the kind of mutuality at the beginning of Othello, moving though it may be, contains some of the seeds of the disaster that follows. Erikson defines mutuality, we recall, as a relationship in which partners depend on one another for the development of their respective strengths: after Dinnerstein's analysis, we may be more critical of that word “respective,” if it implies a traditional differentiation of roles. As she puts it, “what each sex knows best has been distorted by … sealing off from what the other knows best” (p. 272). Finally, Othello's and Desdemona's definitions of reality diverge so much that no conversation can match them. Othello's limited development of sympathy combines with Desdemona's limited development of self-defense, and with all the powers that both of them have developed, to destroy both of them. And this destruction is more poignant because neither of them is simply stereotypical, because Desdemona has shown initiative and courage, because Othello has felt more love for her than he can kill. But finally they act out ideals of their own culture, ideals that are still part of our own culture. It is Shakespeare's genius that the play can suggest both the limitations and infantile roots of these ideals and their magnetic power.

Notes

1. Peter L. Berger and Hansfried Kellner, “Marriage and the Construction of Reality,” Diogenes 46 (Summer 1964): 9.

2. Ibid., p. 13.

3. Ibid., p. 12.

4. Cf. John Bayley, The Characters of Love (New York: Basic Books, 1960), p. 159.

5. See Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespearean Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 74.

6. On the Moor, see, for example, Eldred Jones, Othello's Countrymen (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), especially pp. 8, 22, 71.

7. Stanley Cavell, The Claims of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 490-91. Since writing this, I have discovered that this interpretation is also argued by Arthur Kirsch, “The Polarization of Erotic Love in Othello,” Modern Language Review 73 (1978): 721-40; and Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 232-54.

8. John T. Noonan, Jr., Contraception (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 252-53, 319; C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 15-17; cf. Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Sexual Relation in Christian Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), pp. 206-7.

9. C. L. Barber, “The Family in Shakespeare's Development: Tragedy and Sacredness,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 95-201.

10. Lynda Boose, “Othello's Handkerchief: ‘The Recognizance and Pledge of Love,’” English Literary Renaissance 5 (Autumn 1975): 363-67. See also David Kaula, “Othello Possessed: Notes on Shakespeare's Use of Magic and Witchcraft,” Shakespeare Studies 2 (1966): 126.

11. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 225, refers to Daniel Lerner's definition of empathy as “the capacity to see oneself in the other fellow's situation” in The Passing of Traditional Society (1958; rev. ed., New York: Free Press, 1964), p. 49.

12. W. H. Auden, “The Joker in the Pack,” in The Dyer's Hand (New York: Random House, 1963), reprinted in Othello: A Casebook, ed. John Wain (London: MacMillan, 1971), p. 217.

13. Cf. Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare's Talking Animals (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974), p. 135.

14. Cf. Jones, Othello's Countrymen, p. 97; Kaula, “Othello Possessed,” p. 121.

15. Her continued strength is emphasized by Carol Thomas Neely, “Women and Men in Othello: what should such a fool / Do with so good a woman?,” Shakespeare Studies 10 (1977): 133-58. I am much indebted to this article for its redress of critical disparagement of Desdemona, and my emphasis on her limitations is meant to be juxtaposed with Neely's lengthier discussion of her strengths.

16. Cf. William Empson, “Honest in Othello,” The Structure of Complex Words (New York: New Directions, 1951), reprinted in Wain, ed., Othello: A Casebook, pp. 109-10.

17. Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) (hereafter cited in the text by page number).