SOURCE: Little, Arthur L., Jr. “‘An essence that's not seen’: The Primal Scene of Racism in Othello.” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (fall 1993): 304-24.

[In the following essay, Little studies the way in which the audience and the other characters in Othello react to Othello's blackness in a metaphorical rather than a literal sense.]

Shortly after Iago convinces Othello that evidence of Desdemona's guilt needs only ocular proof, Iago tells Othello that a woman's honor is “an essence that's not seen” (4.1.16).¹ From this point on, Othello attempts to see this unseen essence, zealously searching for the origins of Desdemona's honor, i.e., the original symbolic intactness of her hymeneal or undivided body. His psychological and discursive examination of this unseen body simulates the play's interrogations of Othello's own metaphorical black body, unseen and missing despite his literal black presence. The Duke offers the official reading of Othello's body when he proclaims to Desdemona's father, “If virtue no delighted beauty lack, / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black” (1.3.284-85).² In other words, Othello's literal blackness should not be read as ocular proof of Othello's metaphorical blackness. But, as Othello's countrymen will finally have it, no amount of rhyming or coupling (or punning) will leave unseen the black Other whom the audience suspects is hidden within Othello. Like Othello's search for Desdemona's honor, the play probes into his blackness, always scrutinizing and presumably moving towards the origin and essence of his black presence.

Several recent essays have addressed Othello's blackness as a serious and complex trope. Emily Bartels argues that the Moor becomes demonized and implicated in the growing desires of England to delineate territory and establish borders between the Other and the self. Michael Neill traces how the play and its directors, engravers, and critics have fetishized and agonized over the racially adulterated marriage bed. And, by way of the idea of cultural monsters, Karen Newman exemplifies how femininity and blackness are made to complement each other in the play's construction of horrific desires.³ None of these essays addresses the question of how Othello goes about the (re)discovery of Othello's origins. I am not asking how Shakespeare's play allegorizes blackness. Critics have entertained such readings from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. To the extent that blackness in Othello is allegorical, it functions as Shakespeare's pre-text, what the audience knows before it comes to experience the play.⁴ Shakespeare's play is the text that will at once unsettle and fill in, substantiate and resolve what the audience suspects it already knows about the essence of blackness as the savage and libidinous Other. But blackness is also Shakespeare's pretext in the more common sense of this word. Blackness is Shakespeare's pretense, the metaphor to which onlookers, both the audience and characters onstage, can pretend to react only as the image is produced before them.⁵ The ongoing interplay between response and creation is what I mean more broadly by the “primal scene.” The “primal scene of racism,” then, denotes the site (as well as the sight) where an audience at one and the same time reactively and proactively constructs the signification of race—in this instance, blackness. I am insisting on a noncausal relationship: an audience does not simply become reflexive after blackness is visualized. Response and creation are concurrent.

More specifically, I am using “primal scene” as it derives from psychoanalysis, which is generally interested in the relationship between response and creation and which therefore provides a conceptual field for thinking through the ways in which this relationship manifests itself in Shakespeare's play. Since Freud, who first identified the primal scene (the Urszene), the concept has become more interdisciplinarily and critically applied and implied in the work of theoretical critics such as Ned Lukacher and William Beatty Warner.⁶ The primal scene denotes the moment when a child imagines or (by accident) actually sees his or her parents engaged in sexual intercourse. The child attempts to repress this moment, but it becomes known and seen through his or her repeated effort to hide it. It manifests itself in representations that are never exact, never literal, but always distorted. Because of this distortion, the primal scene does not point to a first scene so much as to the absence of the originary one, whose prior existence is evinced by some present scene. And because of a range of scene is forever figured and disfigured by this moment. As Warner says, the scene “has a decisive effect upon the person, his neurotic symptoms, his relationships with others, his style of thinking and feeling—in other words, it is a contributing factor in much of what we take an individual person to be.”⁷ The primal scene is both real and fantastical, both literal and metamorphical. It is also, like Othello’s blackness, something that the onlooker both responds to (i.e., represses) and creates (i.e., repeats). And Othello’s blackness, like the primal scene, remains from beginning to end a site of interplay between the literal and the metaphorical. As Lukacher has argued, in the primal scene “every disclosure [is] also a concealment, and every literal truth a figural lie.” The primal scene, writes Lukacher, exists in the constant enfolding of “historical memory and imaginative construction”;⁸ in the language of my essay, it exsists in the always present relationship between pre-text (memory) and pretext (construction), or between response and creation.

The three crucial structural elements of Shakespeare’s play are Othello’s blackness, his marriage to a white Desdemona, and his killing of her. These elements are, of course, related. The meaning of Othello’s murdering Desdemona depends upon their marriage, and the marriage’s meaning is the thoroughly invested in Othello’s blackness. Each element is in effect a repetition of the other two, with Othello’s blackness understood as the originary moment of the play’s anxieties. Certainly by the end of the play, Othello’s allegorical blackness is presumably literal and real, that is, he comes to be seen as having invested blackness with the audience’s allegorical presumption. Notwithstanding, the Urszene that represses and repeats—responds and creates—the meaning of all three of the structural elements derives from the sexual coupling of Othello and Desdemona. I am arguing that the scene of sexual intercourse between them functions, for the on- and offstage audiences alike, as the sexual site and sight of the play’s racial anxieties.⁹ I am arguing further that the way the play responds to and creates these anxieties is by mocking the sexual coupling of Othello and Desdemona and by associating it with other culturally horrifying scenes of sexuality, especially bestiality and homosexuality.

I

Othello has a black protagonist.¹⁰ But what does this black inscription mean? The pre-texts of Shakespeare’s play had already made the black persona synonymous with the Other. Frequently the Other’s status as a cultural, aesthetic, or textual truth is created by the dominant discourse as it returns to and rehearses the Other’s presumed originary history—that is, the moment when the Other first plays through the event that has made him or her essentially different. This originary history comes to signify the Other’s difference. (Historically in England and the United States, women, blacks and homosexuals have often been subjected to such originary inquisitions.) In the period from the late sixteenth through the middle of the seventeenth century, one finds the otherness of the black persona increasingly transformed into a truth. Originary myths and theories linked to blackness to Africa’s proximity to the sun.¹¹ Especially during the early part of this period, England popularized the classical myth of Phaeton as a story about the origins of blackness. As Ben Jonson tells the story in his Masque of Blackness (1605), before Phaeton’s “heedless flames were hurled / About the globe, the Ethiops were as fair / As other[s].” Now, “black with black despair,” Ethiopian dames roam the world in search of their missing beauty, their lost identities.¹² Although the popularity of the Phaeton myth was superseded by others stories and theories, it remained in circulation at least until the late seventeenth century. In John Crowne’s masque Calisto (1675), for example, one African nymph laments to another, “Did not a frantic youth of late / O’erset the chariot of the sun?... It is he that hath undone us.... And now we range the world around... To see if our lost beauty can be found.”¹³ More than signifying a different identity, blackness throughout the seventeenth century came to represent a lost identity.

The mythic reading of blackness was only one of several originary explanations. As “scientific” evidence increasingly became the offical, or real, proof of the day—and as England’s black population flourished—there developed a need for more such scientific histories.¹⁴ Of particular interest was George Best’s Discourse (published in 1578 and reprinted in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations in 1600), which meticulously maps out God’s condemnation of Ham, who, against the commandment of God and his father Noah, copulated with his wife while in the ark. God presumably punished Ham by making his son, Chus, and all Chus's offspring “so blacke and lothsome, that it [i.e., their blackness] might remaine a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde.” Best also tells of another spectacle: “I my selfe have seene an Ethiopian as blacke as a cole brought into England, who taking a faire English woman to wife, begat a sonne in all respects as blacke as the father was. …” He concludes by arguing that the blackness of the child was owing to some “natural infection” of the father.¹⁵ Sir Thomas Browne confronted the same issue in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), where he raises objections to many of these earlier explanations and offers that “in the generation and sperm of Negroes, that being first and in its natural white, but upon separation of parts, accidents before invisible become apparent; there arising a shadow or dark efflorescence in the outside.”¹⁶

These typifying examples assume that whiteness functions as the originary truth and that blackness signifies some later horror, a kind of accident or aberration. Further, a traumatic sexual encounter informs many of these scenes, hinting at something sexually bungled or impolitic. As Newman says about both Othello and European travel accounts of Africa, “always we find the link between blackness and the monstrous, and particularly a monstrous sexuality.”¹⁷ The disobedient Ham secretly copulates with his wife, who then gives birth to a black child. Best has what I would argue is a voyeuristic encounter with miscegenation, saying in effect that he has seen a white English woman give birth to a black child; his not ending the sentence until he has explained the source of the infection (the black father) also licenses him to see this scene, this moment of the infectious Other. And Browne's biological explanation brings before the onlooker's eyes the initially unseen bad seed (the bad copulation), thereby repeating in his writing the move from invisibility to visibility. Blackness becomes represented as the scene of a black birth. Black identity seems all too naturally to find its origins in an imaginary scene of some horrific copulation.

The impetus for these originary explanations is, of course, to find the missing essence of blackness. If found, this missing essence (or scene) would provide ocular proof that the savage and libidinous nature of the black persona is literal and not simply metaphorical. Jacques Derrida has argued that culture desires to transform itself from the literal and personal into the metaphorical and universal, but (as he demonstrates throughout his work) culture never fully accomplishes this and everywhere betrays signs of the ongoing interplay between the two.¹⁸ While such an interplay may be said to be everywhere, Othello's blackness functions as a metadramatic example. Throughout Othello the literal and metaphorical repeatedly express and repress each other, defining and denying each other's evidential presence. Arthur Kirsch makes this point clear. Iterating how the play implicates its audience in the “primordial prejudices” against the black man, Kirsch states that

that process is kept constantly in our consciousness by Othello's literal appearance, by the pervasive imagery of blackness and fairness and of true and false vision, and by Iago's increasingly ominous and explicitly diabolic threats to turn the spiritual metaphor [of blackness as sinfulness] into an “ocular proof.”¹⁹

Kirsch is right to note a tension in the play between literal and metaphorical representations, but there remains the issue of audience accessibility—then or now—to a blackness unadulterated by this emphatically visual metaphor.

Kirsch himself is not immune to such literal and personal readings of the metaphorical. Even though he shows an awareness of metaphorical and cultural scripting, he locates Othello's hamartia not in some complex interplay between Othello's literal and metaphorical blackness but precisely and literally in Othello's own body. Kirsch writes: “The tragedy of Othello is that finally he fails to love his own body, to love himself, and it is this despairing self-hatred that spawns the enormous savagery, degradation, and destructiveness of his jealousy.”²⁰ He argues that Othello is “in a state of despair” because he has “lost” his religious faith,²¹ the very faith that has damned blackness. Othello is understood to have at his core an essential absence, to have as his essence a lost and unlovable blackamoor “self”—savage, degraded, and destructive—that always already exists as a subject within quotation marks. He has no literal self that is not already metaphorically lost or missing.

Othello is caught in a discourse of lack. (The full effect of the Duke's witticism in the third scene of the play depends on the audience's knowledge of this entrapment.) Either he is “far more fair than black” and therefore does not have a metaphorical black identity, or he really is black and is therefore entrapped by those pre-textual histories of blackness as an essential absence. Whether attention is focused on a theological or aesthetic racism, the presence of Othello's self depends (in the play and in criticism) upon the success of culture in rendering invisible itself and its “racialist ideology.”²² It depends, finally, upon the ability to accuse Othello the man rather than the culture that damns him from the start, thereby making personal the definition of Othello as savage and libidinous Other. To define Othello's blackness as personal is to argue that it does not metaphorically represent blackness but is literally the thing itself.

Critics tend toward such readings of Othello's person, searching for the lack or loss of the civilized that they know is deep within him.²³ Such critiques are commonly posed in the form of a question that ends with a recognition of Othello's gullibility or vulnerability. One example of this type of reading is Carol Thomas Neely's 1980 essay “Women and Men in Othello,” the subtitle of which repeats Emilia's accusatory question: “What should such a fool / Do with so good a woman?”²⁴ What is it—so the question goes—that makes possible such inconceivable deeds? Here, as so often in these studies, Othello's anxiety is equated with his self-hatred or self-recognized inferiority, and his blackness becomes personal as opposed to cultural. But, I would argue, Othello's conviction that Desdemona would prefer Cassio cannot be sustained as evidence of Othello's prejudice against himself. These issues are not one and the same. In Shakespeare's Venetian world Othello's belief in Desdemona's preference is not a reflection of his self-hatred; rather, the alleged inferiority of black to white is a cultural cliché.

The literal presence of Othello's black, male body, especially as defined in relation to Desdemona's white, female body, emerges as the crucial scene in need of erasure in order to satisfy the fictions of a Western European cultural order. Neill reads the play through what “we can now identify as a racialist ideology [that] was beginning to evolve under the pressures of nascent imperialism.” He links Desdemona's “imagined adultery” to her “act of racial adulteration,” which is seen in the play as “violating the natural laws of kind.” These natural laws do more than subsume the unnatural—these laws are the very creation of the unnatural. Neill iterates this point when he speaks of the play's making of aberrations, “monsters that the play at once invents and naturalizes, declaring them unproper, even as it implies that they were always ‘naturally’ there.”²⁵ Such an argument shows the interminable interplay between the natural and unnatural, as well as the fiction's pretext of bringing into presence and visibility the essence of Othello's blackness which the audience knows is always already there.

The sexual relations Othello imagines between Desdemona and Cassio are no simple matter in Shakespeare's play. Othello dramatizes the ideological and sexual reciprocity between the absence of one couple—Desdemona and Cassio—and the presence of another—Desdemona and Othello. It is, however, the presence or absence of Othello's blackness that shapes the emotional, psychological, and intellectual center of the play.

II

Blackness figures as an unending exchange between Othello's literal black presence and his metaphorical black absence; throughout, his blackness continues to elude. It is not an isolated issue in the construction of this single character;²⁶ it informs and is informed by every other object and event in the drama. And what brings objectness (presence and visibility) to his blackness is nothing less than his own confrontation with objects—namely, the bed and the handkerchief. These objects are thoroughly inscribed in both the presence and the absence of his blackness, an identity at which the play will often only hint. Unlike his blackness, the bed and the handkerchief are so explicitly and frequently imaged throughout the play that they do not seem so critically elusive.²⁷ In the end, however, the meaning of the bed and the handkerchief, like that of Othello and Desdemona's marriage, hinges on what the audience already knows to be the meaning (or emotional content) of Othello's blackness.

As both Michael Neill and Lynda E. Boose have argued, the bed (along with its sexual couple) finally emerges as an object that the play has all along been bumping into or trying to maneuver its way around.²⁸ It stands before the audience as visible and climactic. I am inclined to agree with Stanley Cavell, whose “hypothesis about the structure of the play is that the thing denied our sight throughout the opening scene—the thing, the scene, that Iago takes Othello back to again and again, retouching it for Othello's enchafed imagination—is what we are shown in the final scene, the scene of murder.”²⁹ But, as Neill demonstrates, it is first and foremost the bed—and not the murder—that the play persists in dangling before our eyes and repeatedly snatching away. While Lodovico's response to the tragic loading of this bed—“The object poisons sight; / Let it be hid” (5.2.360-61)—may attempt to return the bed to its hiddenness, it also figures this bed as an object always represented as a textual negotiation between presence and absence.³⁰

The handkerchief even more than the bed is an object that repeatedly appears and disappears. It acts as a kind of prefatorial object, providing a visible token of one of Shakespeare's pre-texts, Leo Africanus's A Geographical Historie of Africa (1600).³¹ In his Historie, Africanus relates the custom in which “a certaine woman standeth before the bride-chamber doore, expecting till the bridegroome hauing defloured his bride reacheth her a napkin stained with blood, which napkin she carrieth incontinent [i.e., immediately] and sheweth to the guestes, proclaiming with a lowd voice, that the bride was euer till that time an vnspotted and pure virgine.”³² Steeped in consummation ritual from a culture of the Other, the napkin has at least a dual function: it speaks to Othello about the displacement of his marriage and to the audience about the exoticism and out-of-placeness of Othello's blackness in Western European culture. Rather than having a meaning that “may well lie hidden in rituals and customs which were accessible to Elizabethans but have since been lost,”³³ the handkerchief most likely already functioned when the play was written as Shakespeare's token of lost or hidden rituals.

Like the napkin in Africanus's text, which exhibits the woman's loss of virginity, the napkin in Shakespeare's play is thoroughly invested with issues of loss and displacement.³⁴ First of all, only after Othello and Desdemona lose the handkerchief does it become a significant object. This happens, of course, almost immediately. Lost a few lines after its first appearance, the handkerchief enters the play as a displaced object (3.3.285-88) and is, in essence, about its own absence. Further, its origins are textualized in loss of life:

… There's magic in the web of it.
A sibyl that had numbered in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sewed the work;
The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk,
And it was dyed in mummy which the skillful
Conserved of maidens' hearts.

(3.4.69-75)

Othello himself comes into possession of it as he loses his mother: “She, dying, gave it me” (l. 63).

And the nature of its enchantment depends upon whether it is lost or, instead, properly bestowed. Othello tells Desdemona that if his mother “lost it / Or made a gift of it, [his] father's eye / Should hold her loathèd” (ll. 60-62). Bianca also reads the handkerchief as a sign of loss. When Cassio gives it to her and asks her to copy the pattern, she blames his absence on the handkerchief and its owner: “This is some token from a newer friend. / To the felt absence now I feel a cause” (ll. 179-80). The pattern continues. There is a certain lack of objectness to this cloth. Rather than representing some real corporeal thing—a body part, for example³⁵—the napkin instead turns Othello's enchafed mind back to the presence or absence of a first sexual scene between Desdemona and himself.

In its origins as well as in its ritualistic propriety, the handkerchief conjures up an originary sexual scene. It encourages the audience's return to Africanus or to some such pre-text and to narratives of foreign rites of devirgination found in those pre-texts. More incisively than any other critic, Boose has argued for a relationship between the cloth and some scene of sexual intercourse. She quite rightly links the handkerchief to the “ritual origins of marital blood pledge [that] stretch back into man's ancient consciousness.” As she points out, the allusion to the phallic worms that made the cloth and the “mummy … Conserved of maidens' hearts” which made the spotted-strawberry (or bloody) pattern on it “repeats the picture of the handkerchief.” And as “an antique token / [His] father gave [his] mother” (5.2.216-17), this napkin represents “that which every husband ‘gives’ his bride.”³⁶ Peter L. Rudnytsky argues more explicitly for the handkerchief as a substitution for the primal scene.³⁷ As Boose and Rudnytsky insist, the absent/present napkin, like the matrimonial bed itself, works to summon the audience again and again to the missing scene of the sexual coupling.

The handkerchief does not simply substitute for the sexual scene of Othello and Desdemona. Rudnytsky reads the cloth as a symbol of “all the ‘displacements of affect’” throughout the play, that is, as the thing that replaces what the audience is not allowed to see; but the significance of the napkin is less in its being a symbol and more in its being a distorted representation than Rudnytsky's argument allows.³⁸ The trivial handkerchief displaces the sexual scene; it parodies the more momentous and much larger wedding-bed sheets. The mere presence of the handkerchief pushes the matrimonial bed and couple from a private into a public arena, where their marriage is itself subjected to and doomed by public scrutiny and cultural prejudice. The rites of marriage instead of belonging to Othello and Desdemona alone, seem always to be displaced and possessed by whoever possesses the napkin. The displaced cloth comes to represent the displaced bed, which represents the displaced couple; and these objects and the couple of Othello and Desdemona are significant because they are displaced.

Displacement, like Browne's reading of the accident of blackness, is signified by its visibility. The primal scene is the site and sight of such displacements, such emergences from invisibility. The couple that effects such a displacement is, of course, Othello and Desdemona. Notwithstanding, their difference depends upon the sameness of Desdemona and Cassio, who throughout serve as a kind of originary couple. Cassio, like Othello, is a foreigner in the Venetian community, but while Othello represents the sinister outsider, the Florentine Cassio signifies a kind of white knight from abroad. He is the courtier par excellence, who is more “gentleman” than any Venetian. Of the women and men found in this play, Desdemona and Cassio function as this Venetian playworld's most natural pair. As Stephen Greenblatt has argued, “it is eminently probable that a young, beautiful Venetian gentlewoman would tire of her old, outlandish husband and turn instead to the handsome, young lieutenant.”³⁹ Cassio and Desdemona have about them a social legitimacy that grants them cultural invisibility: without Desdemona's marriage to Othello, she and Cassio would be the play's most probable and conventional couple.

Iago iterates as much shortly after Desdemona arrives in Cyprus and engages in banter with Cassio; Iago watches and comments on their ingenuous parody of courtly affectation. And when at the end of his chorus the sound of Othello's horns is heard and Iago proclaims, “The Moor! I know his trumpet” (2.1.175-76), Iago takes the trumpet as the cue for his own Jerichoan destruction of Othello and his world. He takes it also as a signal to begin his own revelatory trumpeting of Othello's strumpet. Iago's call for destruction first and foremost announces the metamorphosis of Desdemona from a virgin to an adulterous whore. The perfection of Desdemona and Cassio that could have been is forever lost: they are the originary couple that cannot be recovered. The courtly and proper couple is effectively displaced into the sexual and improper couple of Othello and Desdemona. Genteel courtship has been displaced by the bedroom, the most telling and exhibitionistic topos of the primal scene.

In most of the essays that have acknowledged or discussed the concept of a primal scene in this play, Othello is described as suffering from some maternal anxiety. All too commonly he figures as a child still erotically attached to his mother and forever entangled in some primal childhood experience.⁴⁰ These readings are informative and sometimes provocative, but I do take a few exceptions to them. First, they rely too heavily on the explicit or implicit creation of Othello's childhood.⁴¹ Second, their projections of Othello's childhood lead them to construct the present Othello as a child. And third, their arguments locate Othello's primal scene in the imagined adulterous relations between Desdemona and Cassio. These studies fail to realize that Desdemona and Cassio are Othello's pretext (and pre-text). They are the play's originary couple, and they are also the fiction through which Othello is able to confront his own adulteration of Desdemona. Edward A. Snow's attention to the primal scene in Othello is more textually grounded. He attempts neither to transmogrify Othello into a child nor to imagine a childhood for him. He argues that “Othello becomes absorbed in a fantasy that makes him the guilty and at the same time punitive onlooker in the primal scene of his own marriage.”⁴² Finally, however, Snow's psychoanalytic portrait of Othello is more interested in Othello's psychological self than in the interplay between his psychological and cultural selves or his literal and metaphorical selves.

As already noted, the improper relationship between Othello and Desdemona is in its essence a displacement of the proper relationship between Desdemona and Cassio. Warner theorizes that “the primal scene is always already displaced from its originary oneness”; it is, he argues, “the figure of an always divided interpretative strategy that points toward the Real [i.e., its originary oneness] in the very act of establishing its inaccessibility.”⁴³ The originary oneness of Desdemona and Cassio haunts the “divided” (1.3.179) relationship of Othello and Desdemona. Othello attempts to recover this oneness through his reunion with Desdemona in Cyprus (which has the potential to become the prelapsarian or fantastical other place often evoked in Shakespearean romantic comedy), but he finds their oneness repeated and displaced by the relationship between Desdemona and Cassio. This latter couple, however, can now offer only a monstrous and grotesque parody of Othello's union with Desdemona because, given Desdemona's (obscene) marriage, the proper coupling of Desdemona and Cassio is now recoverable only as a scene of sexual adulteration or deviance. Iago attempts to make Othello see his (Othello's) complicity in Desdemona's adulteration.

III

It is Iago who most adroitly pushes Othello towards the (re)discovery of his black origins. Beginning with Act 3, scene 3, he taunts Othello with the division, difference, and irrecoverable sameness between the sex scene of Desdemona and Cassio and the sex scene of Othello and Desdemona, thus returning Othello to the horror of his relationship with Desdemona. This focal scene opens with Iago's distortion of Cassio's conversation with Desdemona and closes with the homosocial and homosexual marriage between Othello and Iago. Primal-scene imagery dominates the scene: from the pain of Othello's “watching” (l. 284) to his demand for “ocular proof” (l. 357) and satisfaction (l. 387) to Iago's pornographic teasing of Othello and pornographic indictment of Desdemona—“How satisfied, my lord? / Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on? / Behold her topped?” (ll. 391-93)—through Iago's evocation of bestiality, “Where's satisfaction? / It is impossible you should see this, / Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys, / As salt as wolves in pride, and fools as gross / As ignorance made drunk” (ll. 398-402). Behind these representations is the sex scene between Desdemona and Cassio, which becomes more and more transformed into a kind of pornographic freak show.⁴⁴

Throughout this scene, Iago manipulates the originary and invisible scene of Desdemona and Cassio. Like the absent/present bed and handkerchief, the sexual coupling of Desdemona and Cassio comes into the play as a missing scene. When Iago remarks that he himself “cannot think it / That [Cassio] would steal away so guilty-like” upon seeing Othello approach (3.3.38-39), Iago constructs Cassio's departure as signifying the post-coital moment of Desdemona and Cassio. This occurrence in and of itself is about an originary loss, a scene manqué, and this is all the more true following Iago's intimation that Cassio, in his role as go-between for Othello and Desdemona, probably began sexual relations with Desdemona long before her marriage to Othello. Othello comes to understand the sex scene between Desdemona and Cassio not from having seen it but from having missed seeing it.

The most memorable gesture in this scene of Othello and Iago's theatrics is Cassio's alleged dream, which Othello demands to have represented and which Iago feigns a reluctance to repeat:

… I lay with Cassio lately,
And being troubled with a raging tooth,
I could not sleep.
There are a kind of men so loose of soul
That in their sleeps will mutter their affairs.
One of this kind is Cassio.
In sleep I heard him say, “Sweet Desdemona,
Let us be wary, let us hide our loves!”
And then, sir, would he gripe and wring my hand,
Cry “O sweet creature!” Then kiss me hard,
As if he plucked up kisses by the roots
That grew upon my lips; laid his leg o'er my thigh,
And sigh, and kiss, and then cry, “Cursèd fate
That gave thee to the Moor!”

(ll. 410-23)

“O monstrous! monstrous,” responds Othello. “Nay,” says Iago, “this was but his dream” (l. 424). Iago's account works through a series of repetitions. He foregrounds his own telling of the story by emphasizing how much he begrudges telling it, and then, after setting the scene, speaks about men such as Cassio who in their sleep will “mutter their affairs,” presumably things they would normally not publicize or confess. Only after repeatedly drawing attention to more aggressive acts of speaking—“mutter,” “say,” “cry”—does Iago quote Cassio, whose words reveal the hidden sex scene between Desdemona and Cassio. An oral anxiety permeates various levels of Iago's narrative—his “raging tooth,” which somatically replicates and evinces the story he tells; his supposedly begrudged telling of the story to Othello; Cassio's painful and accidental confession in his dream; and the kiss on which this oral anxiety comes to focus: “Then kiss me hard, / As if he plucked up kisses by the roots / That grew upon my lips.” The repetition of this oral anxiety brings a sense of coherence to the pastiche that comprises Iago's narrative.

The image hidden from, but being made visible for, Othello is supposedly of Desdemona and Cassio, while Iago actually presents a homoerotic scene involving the sexual interaction between Cassio and himself. Rudnytsky, who attributes too narrow an objective to Iago, says that Cassio's dream “shocks both Othello and the audience with its sexual explicitness, while in reality proving nothing.”⁴⁵ To read this moment as “proving nothing” both ignores Othello's own response to it and minimalizes its implication in Othello's desire for ocular proof. More perceptive is Neill, who does not elaborate but who at least acknowledges the “homoerotic displacement of the kisses that grow upon Iago's lips.”⁴⁶

I would like to go further than Neill and suggest that Othello's “monstrous” response, rather than missing the sex scene of Iago and Cassio, can be seen as immediately directed towards this sexual coupling. This too is a scene of displacement: Iago displaces Desdemona; homosexuality displaces heterosexuality. Iago structures the scene so that the primal story intensifies as the scene continues, moving from Othello's “seeing” the missing Desdemona-Cassio scene to Othello's demand for ocular proof—a proof that is represented to him as a scene of bestial sexuality and then as a scene of homosexuality. This final gesture is quite explicitly Iago's coup de théâtre. The uncovering of the homosexual scene as the play's most pornographic and immediate sexual event (except for Othello's and Desdemona's deaths) brings into focus the many emphases throughout on adultery and bestiality. Not only in Shakespeare's play but in his culture as well, homosexuality is often made to signify the climactic scene of horrific sexuality.⁴⁷

The sex scene of Iago and Cassio repeats and displaces the sex scene of Desdemona and Cassio which, of course, displaces that of Othello and Desdemona. At the same time, however, the scene itself reverts, returning finally to the nuptials alluded to in the first scene. These nuptials are repeated in Iago's parodic marriage to Othello. This marriage (with its caustic vows) conjures up and explodes any inclination to situate Othello and Desdemona in romantic comedy. The contextually grotesque marriage between Othello and Iago repeats and displaces the missing ceremony between Othello and Desdemona.

What we see explicitly in 3.3 appears more obliquely in 4.1, where Iago draws Othello back into the primal and homosexual story, a story Iago uses to reinforce and intensify his other stories about (an adulterous and bestial) blackness. When the scene opens, Othello and Iago talk about an “unauthorized kiss” and about a man and woman being naked in bed together without any intention of engaging in an illicit sexual affair (ll. 2-8). All this culminates with Othello's epileptic response to this imagined sex scene: “Lie with her? Lie on her?—We say lie on her when they belie her.—Lie with her!” (ll. 36-37). After Othello recovers, Iago stages the conversation between himself and Cassio which will supposedly provide Othello with evidence of the sexual liaison between Desdemona and Cassio. The conversation is actually about Bianca, to whom Cassio is said to be engaged. Cassio, denying any rumors about his betrothal to a woman he calls a whore, says that he would not be so “unwholesome” (l. 121), that is, he would not be so “unwhoresome” as to go against social expectation by actually marrying her.

While Othello mistakes the explicit subject being discussed by them, this scene about marriage and whoredom is nevertheless relevant to the perception of his marriage to Desdemona. This scene about Cassio and his mistress replays for the audience the Cyprus arrival scene between Cassio and Desdemona. It also repeats and displaces Othello and Desdemona's marriage, which it reduces to a parodic image of sexual whoredom. Finally, it recalls the homoerotic scene in the third act, as Othello experiences first and foremost, as in Iago's dream narrative, an encounter between Iago and Cassio. And this time he does not merely hear about their coming together but is made to see it. Furthermore, when Othello thinks Cassio's gestures mimic those of Desdemona and imagines Cassio (as Desdemona) saying “O dear Cassio!” (l. 136), he seems to remember that earlier ventriloquial and homoerotic scene in which Cassio falls about Iago's neck, plucks him forward, and cries, “O sweet creature!” Othello also recalls the plucked orality of the earlier scene: “Now [Cassio] tells how she plucked him to my chamber” (ll. 140-41). Othello's voyeuristic drama ends when Bianca enters carrying the handkerchief, the ocular proof of what Othello thinks he has missed seeing all along. Bianca has taken Desdemona's place. With the handkerchief in her hand, she becomes the visual testimonial that Desdemona has been transformed (or deformed) into a whore.

On the level of story, Othello poses a question for its protagonist—about the (in)fidelity of Desdemona—that eludes any response of empathic intellection from the on- or offstage audience, since the audience knows (with as much surety as any play permits) the answer to Othello's question, which is never a question for the audience. On the level of discourse, however, where the couple of Desdemona and Cassio is entangled in the couple of Othello and Desdemona, Othello's question forces the audience to confront those cultural matrices that give rise to and continually repeat the possibility of such a question. Discursively, no moment exists prior to the adulteration already scripted into Othello and Desdemona's relationship. The couple admits as much when Desdemona says before her death that her sins are the loves she bears Othello and he agrees, saying that she will die for those loves (5.2.40-41). Even in their bedchamber their love in its personal essence is an adulteration.

More is at issue than Othello's psychological or sexual profile, as I suggested earlier when taking issue with Snow's essay. Othello's adulteration of Desdemona is not so exclusively personal. Anxieties about the scene of Othello and Desdemona are promulgated before the couple actually has the possibility of staging such a scene. Iago's first words in the play speak of the coupling of Othello and Desdemona: “'Sblood, but you'll not hear me! If ever I did dream / Of such a matter, abhor me” (1.1.4-5), using words that draw on a primal discourse of blood, dreams, and whoredom (pun on “abhor”). Before identifying Othello and Desdemona by their names, Iago conjures them up in the familiarly ominous images of the primal scene. Long before Iago tells Cassio's dream in Act 3, the dream of Othello and Desdemona has been put into discursive circulation. This dream is not simply Iago's; when Brabantio hears that Desdemona has eloped with Othello, he confesses, “This accident is not unlike my dream” (1.1.139). Brabantio's dream is one that presumably murders him before the “sight” (i.e., of the couple on the bed) would, according to Gratiano, have forced him to “do a desperate turn” (5.2.204-6). Each of these dreams is a “foregone conclusion” (3.3.425), a fait accompli, before the play ever opens.

IV

Despite Othello's repeated deliberations over the scene of Desdemona and Cassio, critics turn again and again to the scene of Othello and Desdemona, attempting to see or not see its presence in Shakespeare's play. From the absent/present bed and handkerchief to the repetitious and displaced sexual events throughout, the theater audience perceives the play's obsessive focus on the sex scene of this couple. As Rudnytsky argues,

The same primal scene fantasies animating Othello as a character are aroused in the audience or readers of Shakespeare's play. Like Othello, who desires to obtain the “ocular proof” of his wife's adultery, we long to pry into the secrets of the matrimonial bed-chamber.⁴⁸

Perhaps second only to the conundrum of Hamlet's delay (the number of Lady Macbeth's children being a distant third) is the status of the sexual relations between Othello and Desdemona. Boose contends that every student or critic of the play is forced to inquire into this couple's sexual status, arguing that the question is “built into the text” and that

the dramatic construction of Othello … is one that seduces us into repeating Iago's first question to Othello: “Are you fast married?” What is important is not any presumed answer to the question, which can probably be argued either way. What is important is the fact that we need to ask it.⁴⁹

Very much to Boose's point are the titles of two essays, T. G. A. Nelson and Charles Haines's “Othello's Unconsummated Marriage” and, written in response, Norman Nathan's “Othello's Marriage is Consummated.”⁵⁰ The consummation question is no more incidental to interpretations of the play than the other primal constructs already discussed in this essay. Do they or do they not consummate their marriage? Hidden in the question is the desire for the evidence needed to praise or condemn Othello, Desdemona, and even the play itself. (Nathan, for example, has argued that “a lack of consummation cannot be a part of Shakespeare's play,” if only because of what would happen to the “quality of the play.”⁵¹)

Whether Othello and Desdemona consummate their marriage is, finally, immaterial, in that the consummation has more to do with ideology than with any physical act. Othello and Desdemona as a cultural idea or ideal is what the play is always displaying. The closing scene provides an emphatic example. The idea of an intense sexual experience, or even of a sexual betrayal, permeates, shapes, and gives meaning to the physical elements of the final scene, as the language that has hitherto been able to differentiate between sexual death and mortal death breaks down. The collapse is articulated quite succinctly when Desdemona comments (just before Othello murders her) that “that death's unnatural that kills for loving” (l. 42). The coupling of Othello and Desdemona here reaches its most explicit and pornographic moment in the play as Othello uses murder to both preempt and repeat the moment of sexual intercourse.⁵² The marriage is both consummated and not consummated. The ideological or symbolic story allows such paradoxes.

The final scene is informed by overdetermined symbols: the bed, the handkerchief, bestiality, homosexuality, and the devil.⁵³ Symbolic rape also figures in this scene in which Othello violates Desdemona's body.⁵⁴ The anxiety of the black man overpowering the white woman does not allow for any real ideological dissociation between sexual intercourse and rape. Othello finally overreaches the circumscription of his black sign; he is not simply the black devil but the “blacker devil” (l. 131). Along with him is his “demi-devil” (l. 300) in the figure of Iago, who is no diavolo incarnato since, despite his disposition, his body remains free of the physical signs of the devil's body (l. 285). (Desdemona escapes critical scrutiny from the onstage audience in this scene; she is finally martyred and apotheosized: “O, the more angel she” [l. 130].) This scene does more, however, than merely reiterate the metaphorical constructs used in the play to repeat and displace the sexual coupling of Othello and Desdemona.

Metaphorical representations are only part of the story. Instead of transforming the sex scene of Othello and Desdemona into something symbolic, the play moves ineluctably towards the literalization of their sexual moment. The symbolic reading of the black devil or beast overpowering the white woman is already in place. When Othello kills Desdemona, his literal blackness becomes metaphorical, or, better still, he becomes the literal embodiment of a metaphorical blackness. At this moment any cultural sympathy that an audience may have had for him is seriously compromised. The play reaches a “shocking literalization” in its closing moments.⁵⁵ Othello's murderous deed brings a literalness to all those metaphorical constructs that have become so familiar during the play's repetition and displacement of Othello's blackness.

Othello comes to signify his blackness; he is made to fill in the missing scene of his black self. Because the physical blackness of this “fair” courtier is always visible to the audience, he threatens the proper codes of Venetian discourse. As a mercenary he helps return this Venetian culture to its deeply embedded racial codes by smiting himself, the Other. Once Othello (dis) figures himself as begrimed and black as his own face (3.3.384-85), the establishment of his blackness as literal and personal, that is, as properly his own, becomes a matter of allowing each person on- and offstage to remember and reconstruct for him/herself the literal evidence of what was thought to be only a metaphor. Blackness is not simply a metaphor, a cultural sign or response to a specific body or soul. It is also a personal thing, an individual body or soul that creates and gives credence to the already present cultural meanings of blackness. Shakespeare's onstage audience renders Othello an even blacker devil than what may simply be signified by the metaphor of blackness. During the play, Othello does become a beast, a sexual deviant, a whoremonger, a devil, and a rapist, evoking also in these closing moments the fantasies of a necrophiliac: “Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee, / And love thee after” (5.2.18-19).⁵⁶ He becomes the text that Shakespeare's audience already knows. As Iago himself says, “What you know, you know” (l. 302). By adopting all these roles, Othello devours the metaphors of blackness into his “hideous” body, which, like jealousy, “doth mock / The meat it feeds on” (3.3.166-67).

Othello is made to create the ocular proof that legitimizes an audience's guarded response to his blackness. (This is true despite whatever sympathy or antipathy one may have for Othello.) I am not suggesting that the play succeeds in demonizing Othello or that it even has the demonization of Othello as its ultimate objective. Like the fictions about bestiality or homosexuality evoked or generated by the play, blackness is never literal in Othello. If anything, blackness figures as the ocular sign of a cultural need to create and destroy monsters: create them so that they may not create themselves, destroy them so that they may not procreate or multiply. In the nascent imperialism of early seventeenth-century England, this process is not merely birth control but ideological control. The black presence in Shakespeare's play makes visible and then amalgamates and critiques those impolitic fictions that become engendered and intermixed in the name of cultural order. Bestiality, homosexuality, and black sexuality (or blackness) are essentially one and the same horrific trope. The act of making fair fair and black black itself becomes a dramatic metaphor hinting at the ways Realpolitik uses metaphor in the spirit of literalness.

This does not mean that blackness in Othello is less concerned with race than with metaphor. The play is imbued with Othello's black sexuality. But unlike many of its pre-textual narratives that presume to look into the bedroom in order to pontificate on the mythic, moral, or scientific origins of blackness, Othello does not really hide or repress its pornographic reasons for invading the privy chamber of black sexuality. In fact, by having Iago anticipate a birth scene that never materializes, the play forces into the foreground the presumed incidental pornography of writers such as Best, Africanus, or even Shakespeare himself in Titus Andronicus.⁵⁷ From the opening words of Othello to its closing moments, the play simulates some imagined or actual pornographic scene. Nothing distracts attention from it. Boose is only partly right when she argues that the audience finally “finds itself stirred by, trapped within, and ultimately castigated for its prurience.”⁵⁸ It is important not to think of prurience alone. The play's pornography is deeply embedded in the ideological portrayal of Othello's blackness, even when his literal body is not the object on exhibition. Greenblatt exemplifies this in the ecstatic image at the conclusion of his Othello essay: he writes that the play's “liberation from the massive power structures that determine social and psychic reality” ends “in an excessive aesthetic delight, an erotic embrace of those very structures.”⁵⁹ Kirsch speaks even more excitedly and personally. He concludes that Othello himself “enacts for us, with beautiful and terrifying nakedness, the primitive energies that are the substance of our own erotic lives.”⁶⁰ The critique of Othello in the play and in criticism depends very much upon the audience knowing, i.e., fantasizing about, the eroticism of the Other. Prurience alone does not entrap the audience. The members of the audience are captivated and caught by the play's public knowledge that, long before Othello was ever conceived, they have already privately conjured up or dreamt about the seductive Other. The play argues that this is the crucial primal scene of racism which needs to be seen and decoded, this scene where culture creates but fails or refuses to see any reciprocity between its knowledge of cultural Others and its own erotic fantasies and anxieties.

Notes

1. Quotations of Othello follow Alvin Kernan's Complete Signet Classic edition (New York: New American Library, 1963).

2. Cf. the Song of Solomon: “I am blacke (O ye daughters of hierusalem) but yet fayre and well fauoured” (Bishop's Bible [1568], 1:5).

3. See Bartels, “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 41 (1990), 433-54; Neill, “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello,” SQ, [Shakespeare Quarterly] 40 (1989), 383-412; and Newman, “‘And wash the Ethiop white’: femininity and the monstrous in Othello” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The text in history and ideology, Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor, eds. (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 141-62. See also Ania Loomba's Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), a work recently brought to my attention.

4. I am in part alluding to Edward Said's Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), especially his chapter “Knowing the Oriental” (pp. 31-49). Said is interested in exploring how European cultures (especially in the nineteenth century) come to know the “Oriental” as Other. He argues that “knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control” (p. 36). Said also writes about how Europeans came to believe that their representations of the Oriental could actually lead to their discovery of the Oriental's “Platonic essence” (p. 38).

5. Relatedly, Said writes, “knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world” (p. 41). Jacques Derrida has also written about racism as “a memory in advance” in “Racism's Last Word,” Critical Inquiry, 12 (1985), 290-99, esp. p. 291.

6. Lukacher, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986); and Warner, Chance and the Text of Experience: Freud, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare's “Hamlet” (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986). The terms “applied” and “implied” are deftly explained by Shoshana Felman in her essay “To Open the Question” in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, Shoshana Felman, ed. (1977; rpt. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 5-10. She argues that the critic's role is “not to apply to the text an acquired science, a preconceived knowledge, but to act as a go-between to generate implications between literature and psychoanalysis—to explore, bring to light and articulate the various (indirect) ways in which the two domains do indeed implicate each other, each one finding itself enlightened, informed, but also affected, displaced, by the other” (p. 9). My essay assumes an implicable relationship between psychoanalysis and literature. Furthermore, here the “primal scene” as a theoretical model is a scene of implication—one of enlightenment, affectation, etc. For me Othello makes most critical sense through an implicable model.

7. Warner, p. 47.

8. pp. 23-24.

9. I am thus expanding Michael Neill’s argument, which focuses on the offstage audience, turned into voyeurs by the play.

10. Samuel Taylor Coleridge popularized a tradition of whitewashing, interpreting Othello as tawny rather than black, arguing that Othello was not a “veritable negro.” For some variations on this theme (in addition to a few other views), see the appendix on “Othello’s Colour” in Horace Howard Furness’s New Variorum edition of the play (Philedelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1886), pp. 389-96. In the same genre is M. R. Ridley, who does not attempt to whitewash Othello but argues instead that some blacks have the classic features of the Europeans and not the “sub-human” ones of Africans; see his Arden edition of the play (London: Methuen, 1958), p. li.

11. Cf. the Prince of Morocco in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, ed. Kenneth Myrick (New York: New American Library, 1965): “Mislike me not for my complexion, / The shadowed livery of the burnished sun, / To whom I am a neighbor and near bred” (2.1.1-3).

12. Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 47-60, ll. 136-42.

13. The Dramatic Works of John Crowne, ed. James Maidment and W. H. Logan (1874; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), pp. 219-342, esp. p. 321.

14. See Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships Between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton: N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), esp. pp. 119-62. She argues that during the sixteenth century, history, which had been situated somewhere between literature and science, began to shift towards the scientific. On the “scientific” philology of the sixteenth century, see also Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithica, N.Y., and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 176-214.

    For more on the presence of blacks in Renaissance England, see Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), esp. pp. 1-26 and 87. See also Newman (cited in n. 3, above), pp. 147-49.

15. Quoted in Newman, pp. 146-47.

16. The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Charles Sayle, 16 vols. (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1927), Vol. 2, pp. 367-95, esp. p. 380. For all his empiricism, his explanatory images do not seem so far removed from the images associated with Phaeton. See Browne's two chapters on “the Blackness of Negroes” and his chapter on the color black more generally. Quite interestingly, Browne argues against those who find blackness a “curse of deformity.” He writes that beauty is not in one's color but in “a comely commensurability of the whole unto the parts, and the parts between themselves.” Blacks, he emphasizes, are “not excluded from beauty” (pp. 383-84).

17. p. 148. Derrida's argument about the discursive manipulation of race underscores my argument here: “The point is not that acts of racial violence are only words but rather that they have to have a word. Even though it offers the excuse of blood, color, birth—or rather because it uses this naturalist and sometimes creationist discourse—racism always betrays the perversion of man, the ‘talking animal’” (p. 292 [cited in n. 5, above]).

18. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator's Preface” to Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), pp. ix-lxxxvii, esp. pp. lxxxiii-lxxxiv. See also Terry Eagleton's recapitulation of Paul de Man's critique of literature and language in Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983). Eagleton writes that de Man has discovered “nothing less than a new way of defining the ‘essence’ of literature itself. All language, as de Man rightly perceives, is ineradicably metaphorical, working by tropes and figures; it is a mistake to believe that any language is literally literal” (p. 145). Similarly, the language of Othello's blackness can never become literal. Hidden in the play's move towards literalness is the fiction of symbolic blackness as real blackness. This fiction is the essence of racism, and, as Bartels has argued, the language of racism professes to be descriptive and literal but is really prescriptive and metaphorical (p. 433). See also Derrida, “Racism's Last Word,” p. 292.

19. Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge, London, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), p. 21.

20. pp. 32-33, emphases added.

21. p. 30.

22. The expression “racialist ideology” is from Neill (cited in n. 3, above). It may also be inferred from Neill that England during this time really began to confront the socioethnic presence of a racial self/Other; see esp. p. 394. Cf. Jacques Derrida, “Living On/Border Lines” in Deconstruction and Criticism, Harold Bloom et al., eds. (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), pp. 75-176: “Visibility should—not be visible. According to an old omnipotent logic that has reigned since Plato, that which enables us to see should remain invisible: black, blinding” (pp. 90-91).

23. It is arguable, of course, that Shakespearean criticism does not single out Othello for its personal readings. Notwithstanding, critical discourses that allow one to work around the cultural construction of blackness as though it is merely allegorical and can ultimately be divorced from a critique of Othello's personal self only exemplify the way such cultural thinking has already personalized (and made chaste) its metaphors of the black Other. This comment is in part inspired by Stephanie H. Jed's Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1989).

24. Neely's essay appears in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, eds. (Urbana, Chicago, and London: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1978), pp. 211-39. Many critics use this kind of question to explicate Othello's character. For two other notable examples, see Marvin Rosenberg's The Masks of Othello: The Search for the Identity of Othello, Iago, and Desdemona by Three Centuries of Actors and Critics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1961), p. 185; and Stephen Greenblatt, “The Improvisation of Power” in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 222-54.

25. pp. 394, 399, and 412. Cf. Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), where he argues that laws do not simply regulate sexuality but create and deploy it.

26. Martin Orkin maintains that “the possibility of racism” is “only one element in the unfolding of Othello's crisis” (“Othello and the ‘Plain Face’ of Racism,” SQ, 38 [1987], 166-88, esp. p. 175). Orkin argues that the play is actually an affirmation of Othello's blackness. While Orkin's essay includes a comprehensive survey of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writings on the subject of blacks, his conclusions do not sufficiently respond to the uneasy depths of Shakespeare's cultural interrogation.

27. I am thinking here of the number of times particular words occur in the text. The bed and sheets are mentioned twenty-five times and the handkerchief twenty-eight, versus only eleven mentions of blackness.

28. Neill, passim; and Boose, “Othello's Handkerchief: ‘The Recognizance and Pledge of Love,’” English Literary Renaissance, 5 (1975), 360-74, esp. p. 370.

29. “Epistemology and Tragedy: A Reading of Othello” in Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare's Othello, Harold Bloom, ed. (New York, New Haven, and Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1987), pp. 7-21, esp. p. 14.

30. Neill, p. 402.

31. A discussion of Historie and the handkerchief is in T. G. A. Nelson and Charles Haines, “Othello's Unconsummated Marriage,” Essays in Criticism, 33 (1983), 1-18, esp. p. 8. Africanus's Historie was in circulation from 1550 onwards—available mainly in Latin but also in Italian and French, and translated into English by John Pory in 1600. For a comparison of Africanus's Historie and Shakespeare's play, see Rosalind Johnson, “African Presence in Shakespearean Drama: Parallels between Othello and the Historical Leo Africanus,” Journal of African Civilization, 7 (1985), 276-87. See also Bartels (cited in n. 3, above), who emphasizes and then theorizes about the differences between these two texts (pp. 435-38).

    There is also a comparison to be made between Iago, who claims, “I am not what I am” (1.1.62), and Africanus, who writes, “When I heare the Africans euill spoken of, I wil affirme my selfe to be one of Granada: and when I perceiue the nation of Granada to be discommended, then I professe my selfe to be an African” (quoted in Bartels, pp. 436-37).

32. Quoted in Nelson and Haines, p. 8.

33. Boose, p. 361.

34. Peter L. Rudnytsky is one of the few critics who take seriously not only the handkerchief but its absence. While his reading concurs with the one I am presenting in this essay to the extent that he links the cloth to the primal scene, for him the primal scene is ultimately the “maternal penis,” this “always absent thing” (“The Purloined Handkerchief in Othello” in The Psychoanalytic Study of Literature, Joseph Reppen and Maurice Charney, eds. [Hillsdale, N.J.: The Analytic Press, 1985], pp. 169-90, esp. p. 185). Such a reading risks ascribing to the napkin a real objectness. See also Susan Gubar's “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity” in Writing and Sexual Difference, Elizabeth Abel, ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 73-93, where she discusses concepts of absence/presence and (in)visibility with regard to blood-stained nuptial bed sheets.

35. For more bibliography as well as for further discussion of the breast, penis, nipples, glans, and some of the other corporeal objects critics have associated with the cloth and its design, see Boose, p. 371.

36. p. 367.

37. pp. 184-85. Rudnytsky thinks of the “primal scene” as the scene of Desdemona and Cassio. Understanding the primal scene to signify the originary moment of the ocular crisis, I am arguing that the primal scene is the scene of Othello and Desdemona. It should be noted, however, that the meaning of the primal scene depends upon the ultimate inseparability of these two scenes.

38. Rudnytsky's reading is similar to that of Kenneth Burke, who, according to Boose, thought of the strawberried cloth as “some sort of displaced genital symbol of Desdemona” (p. 371).

39. p. 39 (cited in n. [16], above). For more discussion about the issue of probability and improbability in Othello (especially as it is treated by critics from Thomas Rymer through Harley Granville-Barker), see Joel Altman, “‘Preposterous Conclusions’: Eros, Enargeia, and the Composition of Othello,” Representations, 18 (1987), 129-57.

40. The essays to which I am referring are Randolph Splitter, “Language, Sexual Conflict and ‘Symbiosis Anxiety’ in Othello,” Mosaic, 15 (1982), 17-26, esp. p. 24; Kirsch (cited in n. [11], above), pp. 23-24; and Rudnytsky, p. 177. See also Rudnytsky, pp. 181 and 185. The maternal/birth anxiety looks back into Othello's psychological “history” and, in the opinion of these critics, springs from his traumatic or unresolved relationship with his mother.

41. Even though Rudnytsky is anxious about such characterological, biographical critiques, he attempts to unproblematize himself in the name of psychoanalytic truth: “Shakespeare's characters are not, of course, real people, and in a literal sense possess neither childhoods nor unconscious fantasies. But there is compelling evidence to suggest that Shakespeare anticipated Freud's discoveries about the importance of early experiences and the unconscious” (p. 177).

42. “Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello” in Othello: Critical Essays, Susan Snyder, ed. (New York and London: Garland, 1988), pp. 213-49. The transmogrification of Othello into child as a kind of grotesque image is made especially pointed in the similar attempt to associate Othello with the senex iratus figure. Kirsch himself argues that “January figures were commonly depicted in the second childhood of senility” (p. 23). The depiction of Othello as a comic or farcical body entrapped in tragic form, making him incongruous with the heroic classicism of tragedy, serves most demonstratively to create Othello as a parodic or monstrous figure—in patriarchal language, to portray Othello as a distracted boy in a man's story; see also Kirsch, pp. 21-22.

43. Warner (cited in n. 6, above), pp. 73-74 and 24, respectively.

44. See, for example, Lynda E. Boose's more extensive discussion of pornography in Othello in “‘Let It Be Hid’: Renaissance Pornography, Iago, and Audience Response” in Autour d'Othello, Richard Marienstras and Dominique Goy-Blanquet, eds. (Presses de L'UFR Clerc Université Picardie, 1987), pp. 135-43. Her essay examines both the assumptions of our voyeuristic compliance in the play and those imperatives that, throughout, command the visual attention of the audience on- and offstage. Her observation that the “forbidden” gets repeatedly eroticized is suggestive of the primal-scene claims of my essay.

45. p. 184. Many critics hesitate to see or take seriously the homoeroticism evoked by Iago. For example, Splitter has argued that “Othello sees what he wants to see and remains blind to the existence of Iago in the bed” (p. 24). Bruce R. Smith has argued that this scene has more to do with Iago's “militant maleness” than Iago's homosexuality (Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England [Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991], pp. 61-64). Smith does not grasp Iago staging what is presumably a culturally horrific representation. Jonathan Dollimore misses this scene, too, in his section entitled “Forget Iago's Homosexuality” in Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Dollimore may be on target in his refusal to fashion Iago as a “repressed homosexual,” but Dollimore fails to see the homosexual scene, saying (as does Rudnytsky) “that such a conclusion would obscure much and reveal little.” Dollimore also does not recognize the symbolic importance of homosexuality itself, conceding that there may be some hint of a homoeroticism between Othello and Iago “if only because the homoerotic, like other forms of eroticism, might in principle be anywhere, attached to anyone, and in an indeterminate number of contexts” (pp. 157-62). While there may be an element of accuracy in this remark, it also comes dangerously close to eliding the way(s) in which culture so frequently specifies and overdetermines homosexuality and the homosexual subject. True, Iago's homosexuality is not necessarily at issue here; but this reading of the scene should not detract from the homosexual construction of Iago's narrative.

46. p. 400. See also pages 121-22 in Neill's “Changing Places in Othello,” Shakespeare Survey, 37 (1984), 115-31. This essay contains a more elaborate analysis of displacement in Othello. See also Patricia Parker, “Shakespeare and Rhetoric: ‘Dilation’ and ‘Delation’ in Othello” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 54-74; and Altman (cited in n. [31], above).

47. In his study of “homosexuality” in the Renaissance, Alan Bray discusses the intertextual associations among such terms or concepts as bestiality, whoredom, rape, adultery, and incest and emphasizes how an act of homosexuality quite frequently figures as the culmination of these “perversions.” Paraphrasing Du Bartas, Bray writes, “through rape, adultery and incest they came at last—‘glutted with all granted loves’—to homosexuality” (Homosexuality in Renaissance England [London: Gay Men's Press, 1982], pp. 14-15). See also Du Bartas's chapter entitled “The Vocation” in his Suite de la second semaine (1603), where Du Bartas revels in the punishment of the “homosexual,” the most profane of sinners (The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur Du Bartas, ed. Susan Snyder [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979], ll. 1189-320). Excluding incest (on an overt level), Othello is quite thoroughly implicated in this particular construction of homosexuality. Notwithstanding, Bray is surprisingly silent about Othello and about homosexuality in Shakespeare more generally. On the subject of homosexuality and its association with bestiality, see also Smith, esp. pp. 174-80.

48. p. 181.

49. “Renaissance Pornography,” pp. 135-36.

50. Nelson and Haines's article is cited in note [23], above; Nathan's appears in Cahiers Elisabéthains, 34 (1988), 79-82. In his article Nathan challenges not only Nelson and Haines's position; he also takes issue with Pierre Janton's article “Othello's Weak Function,” in which Janton, taking one of his cues from Iago's reference to Othello's “weak function” (2.3.345), writes that Othello's marriage is unconsummated since “Othello's libidinous aggressivity” remains unchanneled because of Othello's impotence (CahiersE, [Cahiers Elisabéthains] 7 [1975], 43-50).

51. pp. 81-82. In short, Nathan argues that the tragic genre would prove inappropriate for such a comedic or farcial story and that the “characters of Othello and Desdemona would be greatly weakened” (p. 82).

52. Splitter makes a similar argument (p. 23).

53. The bed is, of course, the scene's dominant object, and the handkerchief is mentioned several times during the final moments. The bestial image is most explicitly present in Othello's reference to himself as a “circumcisèd dog” (5.2.354). And the homoerotic, at least the use of homosexual marriage, is discursively evident once Emilia enters and she and Othello engage in a repartee that amounts to a refrain in which Emilia asks, “My husband?” and Othello responds, “Thy husband” (ll. 136-51). This exchange (read with a penchant for wordplay) recalls for me the marriage between Othello and Iago. My concern is not with these symbolic representations per se but with the fact that they are all in some way scripted into the final scene.

54. There is an image of rape in Othello's choice of a defloration metaphor to refer to his murder of Desdemona: “When I have plucked the rose, / I cannot give it vital growth again” (ll. 13-14). Neill comes to a similar conclusion in his reading of critical responses to this closing scene. He quotes, for example, a nineteenth-century Russian writer who comments on the portrayal of Othello by Ira Aldridge, the first black actor to perform the role: “That savage flesh did its fleshly work.” Neill remarks that in this commentator's account “the play exhibits nothing less than the symbolic rape of the European ‘spirit’ by the ‘savage, wild flesh’ of black otherness” (“Unproper Beds,” p. 391). The sense of rape evoked by this scene is also apparent in many of the engravings and paintings of it. For some examples, see frontispieces to the Rowe (1709) and the Bell editions (1785) and a print by H. Hofmann. The first two of these depict Othello standing over a sleeping Desdemona, her breasts exposed. In the Hofmann portrait Othello stands over a rather peaceful and angelic Desdemona; he holds a knife in one hand, and protruding from his cloak is a large, dark sword hilt that is unmistakably figured as a giant phallus. For reproductions of these images, see Shakespearean Criticism, Vol. 4, Mark W. Scott, ed. (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1987), pp. 393, 426, and 587, respectively. For some additional examples, see Neill, pp. 386-89. The image of rape in the play is first conjured up by Brabantio, who argues that Othello has “abused [Desdemona's] delicate youth with drugs or minerals / That weaken motion” (1.2.73-74). Both the Signet and Riverside editions gloss “motion” as denoting mental capability; the interpretation of “motion” as referring to physical capability does not contradict this reading.

55. Neill, “Unproper Beds,” p. 402.

56. See Greenblatt (cited in n. [16], above), who argues of this passage that “it is as if Othello had found in a necrophilic fantasy the secret solution to the intolerable demands of the rigorist sexual ethic” (p. 252). The necrophilia works only (and almost gratuitously) as a way of further exploiting the play's exclusion of Othello as inscribable within any “rigorist sexual ethic.”

57. Black identity and black sexuality are at issue in Titus Andronicus but to a different end than in Othello. In Titus the birth of Aaron's child allows the on- and offstage audience to look beyond the sexual affairs of Aaron and Tamora (see 4.2 and 5.1). The audience can focus its moral outrage on the black child produced by Aaron and Tamora's relationship. An interesting commentary on this use of Aaron's child emerges in the BBC production (1985) when the camera lingers long and frequently on Aaron's child, who is eventually killed and displayed by Marcus as a court spectacle. In Othello, Iago promises that Othello's demonic seed will bring forth gennets, monsters, and nightmares (1.1.110; 1.3.394-95; and 1.3.365-66, respectively). The play threatens to bring forth a child but does not deliver; it actively resists the demonic moralization that is all too easily inscribed on the black body of Aaron's child. Othello keeps the pornographic story in front of the audience.

58. “Renaissance Pornography,” p. 136.

59. p. 254.

60. p. 39 (cited in n. [11], above).

    I wish to thank King-Kok Cheung, Valerie Smith, and Robert N. Watson, all of UCLA, who were generous enough to read and offer constructive and encouraging criticism of an earlier version of this essay. I also wish to thank UCLA graduate students Dwight McBride and J. C. Stirm for their insightful remarks.