SOURCE: Fultz, Lucille P. “Devouring Discourses: Desire and Seduction in Othello.” In Othello: New Essays by Black Writers, edited by Mythili Kaul, pp. 189-204. Washington D.C.: Howard University Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Fultz interprets Othello as a drama of linguistic subversion represented by Iago's desire to discursively seduce and manipulate Othello, Desdemona, and the other principal figures in the drama.]

In her “Introduction” to Othello: New Perspectives, Virginia Mason Vaughan delineates the genealogy of Othello criticism, which according to her, “remained … a bastion of formalism and psychological analysis” well into the 1980s (13). Prior to this period, according to Vaughan, Othello critics were concerned with issues of textual history and authority, while debates swirled around issues of definitive editions and textual conflations. Vaughan maps the movement of criticism from controversies surrounding “which version was better” or “closer to Shakespeare's original text” to analyses of patterns of language and imagery, symbolism, and psychological motivations of characters. A major turning point in Othello criticism occurred in the 1980s with a shift toward feminist critique, deconstruction, and performance (14-18). Georgianna Ziegler, speaking of Hamlet criticism, contends that “in every age Shakespeare's text[s] [have] been subjected to the interests and the view of that generation” (1), and Jean E. Howard observes, “[W]e need more new readings of Shakespeare: readings which continue to bring to bear on these plays the human concerns which press on us now” (145). This is particularly applicable to Othello at present.

My own critique of Othello is situated in a postmodern moment that foregrounds discursivity as constitutive of the self and the worlds the self inhabits. Such a reading seeks to expose Iago's desire to locate power in discourse, a power that ultimately leads to Desdemona's murder and Othello's suicide. In other words, this study examines the ways in which Iago discursively problematizes Othello's marriage to Desdemona. To this end, Iago engages in what Michael Neill terms an “operation … principally aimed at converting the absent/present bed into a locus of imagined adultery by producing Othello's abduction of Desdemona as an act of racial adulteration” (391). Iago's campaign against the marriage begins in the opening scene and continues until he has ensnared Othello into his trap of “racial adulteration” by convincing him that Desdemona is unfaithful to him mainly because of his race. By opening the play with Iago's base commentary on Othello's marriage, Shakespeare foregrounds marriage as the thematic and discursive issue in the play. Commenting on Iago's influence and Othello's vulnerability as an alien in Venice, G. M. Matthews contends that despite his physical and cultural difference, Othello is “a great human being who … recognizes (within the limits of his social role) only universal humane values of love and loyalty,” which he loses once he allows himself to become “vulnerable to irrational, unhuman forces, embodied in Iago” (123).

Othello offers an expansive view of the ways in which language works against certain speakers and is twisted and perverted in the mouth of a dishonest practitioner. By playing on the ambiguities and ironies inherent in language, Iago is able to use the seductive dimensons of discourse to achieve diabolical ends. Through a consciously selective use of language, Iago distorts reality and manipulates others so that they unwittingly play into his hands. In short, Iago listens for the spaces and slippages in discourse in order to play upon latent and manifest fears. As Kenneth Burke observes, “Iago, to arouse Othello, must talk a language that Othello knows as well as he, a language implicit in the nature of Othello's love as the idealization of his private property in Desdemona.” Although Iago's language is the “dialectical opposite of Othello's,” Burke continues, “it so thoroughly shares a common ground with Othello's language that its insinuations are never for one moment irrelevant to Othello's thinking” (414). Ultimately, Iago's double discourse destroys Othello and Desdemona by distorting their love and their most intimate relationship. I wish to argue that by analyzing Iago's control and manipulation of discourse, we can better understand Othello's downfall.

Othello is at one level a dramatization of the mechanism and failure of language, a dialectic between reality and “invention.” Iago's diabolical, insatiable desire, bounded only by Desdemona's death, moves within a socially established discourse that feeds on itself and devours other discourses in its wake. Language in Othello is, then, not merely a dramatic vehicle or tool; language is the element of thematic concern. Language confirms, indicts, and convicts.

The marriage of Othello and Desdemona, with which the play opens, seems to suggest that deeply entrenched prejudices—suspiciousness of other races and cultures, of those who are “alien” and do not seem to belong—are about to be overcome and there is a possibility of social transformation. But such a possibility is challenged at the very moment of its inception, even before the marriage is consummated, because Iago insists—even in the face of Brabantio's acquiescence (“Gone she is, / And what's to come of my despised time / Is nought but bitterness” [I.i.159-61]) and the Duke's sanction of the marriage on the grounds of Othello's character (“If virtue no delighted beauty lack, / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black” [I.iii.285-86)])—that marriage to a black man is not proper for a Venetian woman. Consequently, Iago jealously guards what is putatively now his exclusive sphere of influence in order to avenge himself on the Moor by challenging his humanity and coextensively his right to be wedded to Desdemona.

Through a shrewd insight into the desires and fears of others, and through a radical inversion of their discourses, Iago fulfills his own desire for revenge and control. Anthony Kubiak argues that Iago's “terrorist discourse” is far “more potent” than Othello's physical violence because it “operates through the effect of discourse on seeing.” Such a seeing, Kubiak further states, “engenders the perjury and its vengeance” (63). Thus, in order to manipulate and/or forestall truth/proof, Iago constantly resorts to this terrorist discourse by substituting a “manifest discourse” (Baudrillard, 53) for ocularity and by positing a discourse that contradicts or delays verification. In short, Iago manipulates discourse as a medium of power.

Iago's desire constitutes and controls the dramatic movement of Othello. His conviction that Brabantio will object to his daughter's marriage on racial grounds provides Iago with the terms for a disruptive discourse, the first in a series of rhetorical gestures that jeopardize rather than undermine and dissolve Desdemona's marriage to the Moor. Iago intends not merely to call attention to “a sexual union represented as a form of pollution” (Tennenhouse, 89) but to destroy the partners in this union as well. As Michael Neill observes, Iago keeps the “real imaginative focus of the action always the hidden marriage-bed … within which [he] can operate as a uniquely deceitful version of the nuntius, whose vivid imaginary descriptions taint the vision of the audience, even as they colonize the minds of Brabantio and Othello” (396).

The structure of any play resides, in large measure, in the words of characters. The structure of Othello resides in the words of the character who simultaneously has control of her or his own discourse and the discourse of others. Both Desdemona and Iago evince their ability to expropriate other characters' discourses. But in the final analysis, Iago subverts Desdemona's linguistic power, not so much by dominating her discourse directly as by controlling the discourse of those in close communication with her.

It is interesting to note that near the opening of the play, Iago tells Roderigo to call up Brabantio, rouse and incense him with “timorous accent and dire yell” (I.i.74). Iago's directive is metalinguistic, one that announces Iago's awareness of language and its power to persuade, to excite and incite. He says as much in a soliloquy:

When devils will the blackest sins put on,
They do suggest at first with heavenly shows
As I do now. For whiles this honest fool
Plies Desdemona to repair his fortunes,
And she for him pleads strongly to the Moor,
I'll pour this pestilence into his ear.

(II.iii.318-23)

The lines to Roderigo, then, indicate Iago's modus operandi. In order to “poison” Brabantio's “delight,” Iago bombards him with gross images of Othello:

Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe. …
… the devil will make a grandsire of you.

(I.i.89-92)

Iago posits physicality and sexuality as the essential markers of the Moor's humanity and continues this line of discourse in the face of Brabantio's disbelief. But Iago's language and intent are so egregiously offensive that poetic discourse cannot accommodate them and gives way to debased prose:

[Y]ou'll have your daughter cover'd with a Barbary horse, you'll have your nephews neigh to you, you'll have coursers for cousins, and jennets for germans.

(I.i.111-13)

In notable contrast to Roderigo's discourse which invokes Othello's race (“thick lips,” “lascivious,” and “extravagant and wheeling stranger”), Iago's “diseased preoccupation” (Neill, 397) with Othello's sexuality results in a bestialization of the Moor and a devaluation of his marriage by making it sound obscene. His vision, as Kubiak points out, is “transformative and perjured” (24), a vision he imposes through language. Principally, Iago's aim is to control the discursive field. Such control resides in the hybrid nature of his discourse. Thus, Othello is as much about the ways in which one discourse is able to devour other discourses as it is about Iago's diabolical revenge on the Moor. In short, Othello is about the failure or fulfillment of desire through the loss or adroit use of discursive power.

Iago, as Margaret Ranald observes, is a “skillful opportunist who turns situations to his own account.” His discursive power is cumulative; it relies on repetition and insinuation. He is aware of Desdemona's naivete about the “wickedness of the world outside” and knows “inexperience and decency blind her to the possibility that her motives might appear questionable and her actions capable of misconstruction” (136, 137). As Ranald further observes, Iago uses this naivete to undermine Desdemona's virtue and invert the “warm[th] and vital[ity]” she evinces in her spontaneous espousal of Cassio's cause (144). She is, thus, caught in a web of words spun by Iago from the matrix of male domination, “the pernicious effects of chastity … a doctrine men impose upon women” (Snow, 387). To achieve his purpose of undermining Desdemona's chastity, Iago concludes that his most effective method would be “to abuse Othello's ear / That [Cassio] is too familiar with his wife,” since Cassio has “a smooth dispose / To be suspected, framed to make women false” (I.iii.378-81). Although Othello is to be the dupe of Iago's performative gestures, it is clearly Desdemona who must suffer character assassination via the male order.

At this point, a review of Jean Baudrillard's theory of seduction might help us better articulate the theater of discourse in Othello, since his theory accommodates my reading. Baudrillard observes that “in seduction … it is manifest discourse—discourse at its most superficial—that turns back on the deeper order (whether conscious or unconscious) in order to invalidate it, substituting the charm and illusion of appearances” in contrast to “all meaningful discourse [which] seeks to end appearance.” But, Baudrillard continues, “inexorably, discourse is left to its appearances, and thus to the stakes of seduction, thus to its own failure as discourse” (53-54). It is in this light that we might examine the use of discourse in Othello, especially discourse as manipulated and enjoyed by Iago, who, as Roy Roussel observes, shows the “seducer's fascination with the spectacle of his own manipulation and control” (725). In other words, Iago is seduced by his own ability to seduce. Baudrillard describes this autoseduction as the moment when “perhaps discourse is secretly tempted … by the bracketing of its objectives, of its truth effects which become absorbed within a surface that swallows meaning. … [I]t is the original form by which discourse becomes absorbed within itself and emptied of its truth in order to better fascinate others: the primitive seduction of language” (54).

Reading Othello in the context of Baudrillard's seduction theory permits us to examine discourse motivated by desire. To begin with, it is worth remarking that marriage between Desdemona and Othello stems from Desdemona's desire for knowledge about Othello and the seductive power of that desired knowledge. For example, when asked about his use of charms to win Desdemona's affection, Othello argues that his narrative discourse was the charm, the power, he employed. Observing Desdemona's eagerness to hear him recount his exploits, Othello states that he:

Took once a pliant hour and found good means
To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart
That would all my pilgrimage dilate
Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
But not intentively. I did consent.

(I.iii.150-54)

Desdemona confirms the force of Othello's narrative discourse, its seductive power, by hinting that he propose marriage, by preferring him to men of her own race and class:

I saw Othello's visage in his mind
And to his honors and his valiant parts
Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate.

(I.iii.248-50)

“I saw Othello's visage in his mind” is the critical line because it simultaneously discloses Desdemona's awareness of Othello's race and her ready acceptance of his mind (his intellectual and narrative powers) above any thoughts of race. She insists that she has looked beyond the physical—which on the surface seems of no consequence to her—into the soul of the Moor and likes what she discovers. But her dismissal of his face underscores her recognition of the fact that Othello's race does matter. At the same time, she readily submits to his maleness as evinced by her unquestioned “duty” to him—a duty dictated by tradition and gender.

Desdemona's statement cannot be contradicted by Brabantio, but it is too much for him to accept. And he is prepared to lose his daughter rather than accept the Moor as an affine:

I here do give thee [Othello] that with all my heart
Which, but thou has already, with all my heart
I would keep from thee.

(I.iii.191-93)

Brabantio's pronouncement on his daughter's behavior in marrying Othello without permission is precisely the utterance that opens a space for Iago to work his will on the Moor and undermine the union that Iago himself finds most repugnant: “Look to her Moor, if thou hast eyes to see: / She has deceived her father and may thee” (I.iii.288-89), words Iago will later reiterate to Othello.

Othello and Desdemona use language to “deliver” what Baudrillard terms “real meaning,” “truth,” or honest discourse, in contradistinction to Iago's manifestly perjured discourse. If, as Baudrillard observes, seduction sports “triumphantly with weakness, making a game of it with its own rules,” then we cannot rightly call Othello's narrative of his personal history, recited at Brabantio's and Desdemona's requests, a seductive act. Seduction robs discourse of its “sense and turns it from truth” by causing “manifest discourse”—the surface meaning—to “say what it does not want to say; it causes determinations and profound indeterminations to show through in manifest discourse.” It is, then, the responsibility of interpretation to “break the appearance and play of the manifest discourse” (53). Interpretation is vital to a deeper understanding of the ways by which discourse operates in Othello, where, as Kubiak convincingly argues, “we can begin to see how the language of the theatre within the theatre is … always eminently terrorist because of language's failure to adequately state its intentions” (63). Yet early in Othello, language does achieve what Roland Barthes terms its “adequation of enunciation” (208) through Othello's and Desdemona's performative gestures.

For example, when Othello is accused of bewitching Desdemona, and thus marrying her without her “knowing” what was happening to her, he defends himself on discursive grounds: he argues from the force of his narrative, categorically stating that it was language's power to recreate the images of his exploits that merited Desdemona's affection. [Though he declares at one point that he is “rude” of speech “[a]nd little blessed with the soft phrase of peace” (I.iii.81-82), we are perhaps not meant to take the declaration seriously.] Othello won her father, too, initially:

Her father loved me, oft invited me,
Still questioned me the story of my life
From year to year—the battles, sieges, fortunes,
That I have passed.

(I.iii.127-30)

Othello—like any “author” recognizing that his words have not merely conveyed their intentions but have moved to another level of meaning beyond their author's expectation—realizes that the more he reiterates his deeds of valor and his triumphs over adversities, the closer Desdemona is drawn to him:

This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline;
.....She would come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse.

(I.iii.144-49)

In other words, Othello tells the Venetians, Desdemona was moved by his deeds and seduced by his discourse:

She thanked me,
And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story,
And that would woo her.

(I.iii.162-65)

In fact, Othello's rehearsal of the scene clearly reveals that Desdemona, not he, was the seducer:

Upon this hint I spake:
She [first] loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I [in return] loved her that she did pity them.
This only is the witchcraft I have used.

(I.iii.165-68)

Asked to corroborate Othello's testimony, Desdemona, like Othello, preempts her father's argument by taking the discursive initiative: she expropriates her father's discourse of “obedience” and, like Othello, demonstrates language's ability to state the bald truth as she understands it, a truth by which she lives. She brilliantly turns her father's discourse on duty back on him without hint of conscious irony, but rather by a conscious rhetorical gesture. Because she wants desperately to have his approval, she reaches for the best way to articulate that duty—by placing her duty on par with her mother's, a claim her father cannot gainsay:

My noble father,
I do perceive here a divided duty:
To you I am bound for life and education;
My life and education both do learn me
How to respect you. You are lord of all my duty;
I am hiterto your daughter. But here's my husband;
And so much duty as my mother showed
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge that I may profess
Due to the Moor my lord.

(I.iii.178-87)

Both Desdemona and Othello demonstrate that “real meaning” and “manifest discourse” are not necessarily mutually exclusive, that they can operate simultaneously toward a mutual telos at this juncture. The tragedy occurs when the two pull in opposite directions and when Othello and Desdemona, especially Desdemona, lose the discursive advantage.

Iago's observation of Desdemona's “seduction” of Othello and her discursive power over her father, no doubt, warns Iago against a direct attempt to seduce her to leave Othello. Having seen her turn male discourse back on her father and the Senate in her resolve to remain with Othello by arguing that it was she, not Othello, who did the seducing and by requesting and obtaining from that august body permission to join Othello in Cyprus, despite the fact that it is a site of battle, Iago surely realizes that Desdemona can discursively match him. Witness, for example, her astute comparison of her decision to marry Othello to a battle and her boldness in trumpeting the implications of that decision to the world:

That I did love the Moor to live with him,
My downright violence and storm of fortunes
May trumpet to the world.

(I.iii.244-46)

Iago most surely observes that Desdemona belies what Teresa De Lauretis terms “the web of the male Oedipal logic” in which “the little girl has no other prospect but to consent and be seduced into femininity” (52). Desdemona preempts her father's traditional right to make a “proper” choice for her.

Iago's power to manipulate discourse, however, gives him the dramatic edge over Desdemona. The motivation for linguistic manipulation, and thereby manipulation of human beings, stems from Iago's perception—whether real or imagined—that he has been superseded by an inferior military man, namely Cassio, and that he has been cuckolded by Othello. Furthermore, he “smarts under neglect” by a general he deems racially inferior to himself. This conviction that he has been slighted, Harley Granville-Barker contends, is the “immediate spring” of Iago's desire to denigrate the Moor (125).

Lacking a sphere of influence within the civil and military hierarchy, Iago locates his power in the manipulation of discourse. And, ironically, in the final analysis, Othello is seduced by his own discourse because the language Iago employs to defame Desdemona and challenge Othello's manhood is Othello's, albeit perverted and polluted.

Iago plays upon what Philip McGuire terms the “deliberate disjunction of action and feeling” to accomplish his goal of turning Othello into an animal. In other words, Iago employs “rhetoric to undercut reason” (205). The play is, then, to borrow from McGuire again, “an imitation of an action of knowing and judging”; an “assay on the limits of intelligence and natural passion, deception deftly and most intelligently practiced” (209) through terrorist discourse. Kubiak adds to this when he states that Iago “terrorizes Othello with the most subtle shift of seeing refracted through an almost imperceptible misdirection of the eye—a misdirection effected through Iago's words” (63-64).

Roderigo and Othello challenge or try to circumvent such terrorist discourse when they ask Iago to substantiate his verbal claims with objective proof. They, especially Roderigo, recognize the tension between Iago's discourse and objective reality; yet ironically, they must rely on Iago, whose discourse they question, to resolve that tension. Although Othello is satisfied to have Iago supply the evidence, Roderigo threatens to see for himself—to confront Desdemona directly now that he has begun to “find [him]self fopped” (IV.ii.190). When threatened by Roderigo's decision to confront Desdemona, however, Iago proves that he still controls the discourse, which he quickly interposes between Roderigo's demand for proof and his own will to power. Moreover, according to Kubiak, Iago knows that “ocularity in which [Roderigo] seeks his truth is as much a failure as the language that directs it.” Kubiak describes the failure of ocular proof in Othello as the “violence of failed seeing—the desire to see, seeing desire, seeing what one has been told (not) to” and adds that “both seeing and speaking” in Othello are ensnared by a “falsely assumed empiricism” that relies not on proof but on Iago's capacity “to reproduce or rehearse ‘the Same,’ that impossibility” (66). If sight is not to be trusted, then discourse must bear the greater responsibility for proof, which should, therefore, be an incontrovertible proof that does not rely on but rather opposes and exposes seduction. Baudrillard formulates this opposition between ocularity and discourse: “All appearances conspire to combat and root out meaning (whether intentional or otherwise), and turn it into a game … one that is more adventurous and seductive than the directive line of meaning” (54).

Roderigo first challenges Iago's discourse in Act IV when he realizes that he has been duped: “I heard too much; for your words and performances are no kin together” (my emphasis). He protests Iago's failure to deliver on his promises and decides to “make [him]self known to Desdemona”:

If she will return my jewels, I will give over my suit and repent my unlawful solicitation; if not, assure yourself I will seek satisfaction of you.

(IV.ii.193-96)

There will be no further deliberation on this issue, and Iago knows it. Now he must retreat from dilatory,¹ verbal strategy to direct action. Hence the fabrication about Cassio's delivering a message that will send Othello and Desdemona to Mauritania and the proposal to murder Cassio: “I will show you such a necessity in his death that you shall think yourself bound to put it on him” (IV.ii.231-32). Iago's “show” will, of course, be verbal.

Roderigo's recognition that Iago's words are at odds with his actions—promises without proof, discourse without substance—begins the ineluctable drive toward the failure of Iago's disruptive discourse. Roderigo's threat to confront Desdemona engenders a quick and strategic discursive move on Iago's part. Roderigo's suspicions coupled with Othello's desire for “ocular proof” sorely undermine Iago's discourse. Thus, discourse cannot serve Iago in this crisis of credibility and therefore must be “redeployed as action” (Baudrillard, 54). He must stage another scenario while he recovers the discursive ground, first, by praising Roderigo's decision and then by forestalling that decision. It is noteworthy that at this juncture, Iago shifts from poetic discourse to prose, a clear indication of his failure to control his best weapon, language, and of his diminishing power to manipulate Roderigo:

Why, now I see there's mettle in thee, and even from this instant do build on thee a better opinion than ever before. Give me thy hand, Roderigo. Thou has taken against me a most just exception; but yet I protest I have dealt most directly in thy affair.

Roderigo counters that he has seen no evidence to support Iago's claims: “It hath not appeared.” Iago concedes as much but does not stop at mere concession: he inverts Roderigo's argument:

I grant indeed it hath not appeared; and your suspicion is not without wit and judgement. But, Roderigo, if thou hast that in thee indeed, which I have greater reason to believe now than ever—I mean purpose, courage, and valour—this night show it. If thou the next night following enjoy not Desdemona, take me from this world with treachery, and devise engines for my life.

(IV.ii.200-11)

Clearly, Iago is weakened by Roderigo's threat of intervention, a threat that not only will expose his machinations vis-à-vis Roderigo but also will expose Iago's entire charade. Iago skillfully diverts Roderigo from his failure to deliver on his promises. This scene brillantly illustrates Baudrillard's observation that sedution stems from weakness, not power: “To seduce is to appear weak. To seduce is to render weak” (83). Iago is unquestionably the “seduced” in this scene because Roderigo has weakened Iago's ability to control him by words alone.

Othello is marked by a series of seductive gestures that lead to the untimely and unwarranted death of Desdemona. In Othello, the contours of desire are shaped by individual discourse and gestures of seduction. Iago's desire to bend Othello to his will is contingent upon his power of seduction. Iago's desire constitutes and controls the dramatic center, while Desdemona's position as object of male desire—her marriage to the Moor and Roderigo's desire for a sexual union with her—constitutes the thematic center of the drama. Iago's actions circulate around this marriage plot. Desdemona's elopement with a black man provides the basis for Iago's seduction of Roderigo, Brabantio, and Othello, while her position as Othello's wife provides the ground on which Iago's vengeance operates.

Iago recognizes power when he meets it. He recognizes the strength of Desdemona's resolve, which makes the Senate agree to her remaining with him even in Cyprus. Thus, Iago elects to work toward denying Desdemona her desires by manipulating those around her and by subterfuge, or what Baudrillard calls seduction or a turning “from one's own truth” or leading another “from his/her truth.” It is precisely Iago's desire to lead Desdemona from the Moor's bed that results in her tragic death. Very early on, Iago insists to Roderigo that Desdemona will turn from Othello once his narrative becomes tiresome and she is forced to see him in racial terms, that is, see him as black. He insists that Desdemona's violent love for the Moor, engendered by his “bragging and telling her fantastical lies” (II.i.213), will eventually be destroyed by ocularity: “Her eye must be fed. And what delight will she have to look on the devil?” (II.i.215-16). Being sated, Iago contends, Desdemona will see the physical reality of Othello:

When the blood is made dull with the act of sport, there should be, again to inflame it and to give satiety a fresh appetite, loveliness in favour, sympathy in years, manners and beauties: all which the Moor is defective in. Now for want of these required conveniences, her delicate tenderness will find itself abused, begin to heave the gorge, disrelish and abhor the Moor.

(II.i.216-22)

Iago articulates this thesis of Desdemona's “momentary” infatuation with the Moor and true attachment to the younger, handsome Cassio not only to Roderigo but to Othello as well. Only instead of stating it openly, he makes insidious suggestions—“Did Michael Cassio, / When you wooed my lady, know of your love?” (III.iii.93-94)—that force Othello to voice doubts about Desdemona's fidelity. The conversation proceeds with Iago's saying little by way of direct accusation but suggesting a great deal, insinuating his thoughts into Othello's psyche:

By heaven, he echoes me,
As if there were some monster in his thought
Too hideous to be shown.

(III.iii.109-11)

Finally, Othello, seduced into believing his wife has been unfaithful, becomes totally confused about his own thoughts. So muddled, in fact, is Othello at this juncture that he fails to note and pick up Iago's overt admission of treachery, “[O]ft my jealousy / Shapes faults that are not” (III.iii.148-49), or heed his warning, “O beware, my lord, of jealousy” (III.iii.167).

Othello, at first, defends Desdemona's virtue, her playful spirit and easy show of affection for others: “Where virtue is, these are more virtuous” (III.iii.188). He defends her honesty on the grounds that she chose him despite his race. But Iago returns to his discursive strategy by echoing Brabantio's warning:

She did deceive her father, marrying you;
And when she seemed to shake and fear your looks
She loved them most.

(III.iii.207-9)

Edward Snow brilliantly observes that the “decisive moment in Iago's seduction” occurs when Iago gets Othello to see Desdemona “in terms of Brabantio's warning” (399). Snow further argues that Othello's reference to Desdemona's reputation being as “black as [his] own face” suggests that he is being manipulated by a language “calculated to make him despise himself because he is black” (401).

Subtly goaded by Iago, Othello admits, “I think my wife be honest, and think she is not, / I think thou art just, and think thou art not” (III.iii.385-86). But, Othello continues, Desdemona has made an unnatural match by marrying him, her “nature erring from itself” (III.iii.229), a point Iago seizes on to undermine Othello's faith in Desdemona's love and acceptance of him. He reminds Othello that Desdemona refused numerous “proposed matches / Of her own clime, complexion and degree” (III.iii.231-32), implying that Othello is not on the same human level as the Venetian suitors.

Doubting/trusting both his wife and Iago, Othello asks Iago for a “living reason,” actual proof of Desdemona's infidelity. Iago obliges with a performance calculated to remove all doubt: Cassio's discourse of love ostensibly spoken during sleep. Iago cleverly reminds Othello that what he has reported is only a dream; Othello counters that it is “a foregone conclusion” (III.iii.429). At this juncture, Iago sets the discursive stage for the tragic conclusion. All that remains is ocular proof misdirected and interpreted by Iago. Finally, what Othello sees is infected by his desire, a desire informed through Iago's words. Othello's murder of Desdemona results from his own victimization by Iago. Iago is partially correct when he tells Emilia, “I told [Othello] what I thought, and told no more / Than what he found himself was apt and true” (V.ii.175-76).

The circulation of desire in Othello and the concomitant acts that affect desire provide an insight into Iago's decision to manipulate others discursively. Iago's narrative is directed toward a conclusion that satisfies his desire for power through discursive control, whereas Desdemona's narrative moves along an axis of desire for happiness through a shared experience. Iago's and Desdemona's interlocking desires collide through Iago's attempts to break Othello's hold on Desdemona and through Desdemona's efforts to influence Othello on Cassio's behalf. Out of this matrix of interlocking and conflicting desires comes Iago's seduction of Othello.

Iago's seductive power is situated in his ability to manipulate the sociolect,² a hybridization of a desire to manipulate and destroy Othello, who is for Iago the locus of misplaced power and the object of illegitimate desire. Iago's enterprise is, then, to desempower Othello, not by making Othello undesirable to Desdemona (which he realizes he cannot do) but by turning Othello against Desdemona.

To achieve this end, Iago employs another of his dramatic skills—acting. Granville-Barker observes that Iago assumes a dual acting role—he his both the persona Iago of the play Othello and the character who exploits the role of actor to accomplish his desired goal:

The medium in which Iago works is the actor's; and the crude sense of pretending to be what he is not, and in his chameleonlike ability to adapt himself to change of company and circumstance, we find him an accomplished actor.

(162)

Both the pleasure and the success of Iago's enterprise are contingent upon what Roussel terms the “seducer's fascination with the spectacle of his own manipulation and control” (725), while Baudrillard argues that seduction derives its “passion” and “intensity” not from an “energy of desire” but rather “from gaming as pure form and from purely formal bluffing” (82). “Gaming” and “purely formal bluffing” describe Iago's method precisely and completely.

The so-called “brothel scene” represents the triumph of Iago's gaming and bluffing. Iago's strategy proposes to expose Othello's gullibility and confirm his contention that Othello is not quite on the same human level with Desdemona and is therefore not a suitable mate for her. This strategic move by Iago clearly indicates that Othello is the object of Iago's seduction, not Desdemona. It is as though Iago seeks Othello's moral and mental downfall, in part, because he cannot match Othello's physical prowess and narrative skill. What he seeks, and what he succeeds in effecting, is the undermining of the Moor's intelligence and coextensively his humanity. The outcome of the play turns, then, on Iago's seduction of Othello and Othello's collusion in his own downfall, and that collusion becomes the ultimate sign of Iago's mastery of multiple discourses.

Notes

1. Patricia Parker notes that Iago gains power over Othello “at the threshold of the great temptation scene … through those pauses, single words and pregnant phrases which seem to suggest something secret or withheld, a withholding which fills the Moor with the desire to hear more” (54).

2. Michael Riffaterre notes that the socioelect is the site of “myths, traditions, ideological and esthetic stereotypes … harbored by a society,” as well as the site of “ready-made narrative and descriptive models that reflect a group's idea of or consensus about reality.” Iago refers to Othello in animalistic terms to play to the Venetian socioelect. His references to Othello as “an old black ram,” “the devil,” and “a Barbary horse” reveal Renaissance stereotypes and, more important, play upon the racial fears of the Western male (130).

Bibliography

Parker, Patricia. “Shakespeare and Rhetoric: ‘Dilation’ and ‘Delation’ in Othello,” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, New York, Methuen, 1985.

Riffaterre, Michael. Fictional Truth, Baltimore, John Hopkins UP, 1990.