SOURCE: Snow, Edward A. “Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello.” English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 384-412.

[In the following essay, Snow links Othello's jealousy to his psychologically and culturally conditioned feelings of sexual guilt and anxiety.]

We see the ground whereon these woes do lie,
But the true ground of all these piteous woes
We cannot without circumstance descry.

(Romeo and Juliet, V. iii. 179-81)¹

What puzzles the watchman of Romeo and Juliet might doubly confound the audience of Othello. In perhaps no other of Shakespeare play is there such a sense of discrepancy between the visible and the true ground of things. By the end of the play even the language of cause, motive, and reason has become suspect. “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul; / Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars, / It is the cause” (V. ii. 1-3): the mind speaks like this not to make its motives transparent but to keep them obscure. The insistence on “cause” is here an incantation, not an act of inquiry or discovery but an intense, distracting assertion.

More than Othello's particular madness is implicated in this abuse of reason. Repression pervades the entire world of Othello. The first note of the play, sounded three times in quick succession, is a refusal of knowledge: “Never tell me”; “‘Sblood, but you'll not hear me”; “If ever I did dream of such a matter, / Abhor me” (I. i. 1-6). Denial recurs in Othello's opening line—“'Tis better as it is” (I. ii. 6)—and remains present throughout the action as a kind of epigrammatic refrain.² Though Othello would see the truth, this texture of disavowal determines the limits of what can become visible for him.

Even at the end of the play, in a context of apparent revelation, the final gesture is on the side of repression. “The object poisons sight; / Let it be hid” (V. ii. 364-65). And it is not just any object that is to be hidden but the “tragic lodging” of the wedding bed—the place of sexuality itself, seen even in its legitimized form as inimical to nature and generation. The restoration of order at the end of the play thus institutionalizes the voice that speaks in the dream Iago invents for Cassio—“Sweet Desdemona, / Let us be wary, let us hide our loves” (III. iii. 419-20). In the same way, the anticipation of future clarification from Iago—“Torments will ope your lips” (V. ii. 305)—reveals the complicity of the forms of justice (and the “satisfaction” society seeks through them) in the dark and vicious place from which Iago's own villainy issues—“Yet again, your fingers to your lips? Would they were clyster pipes [enema tubes]³ for your sake!” (II. i. 176-77). The directions for Iago's torture reconstitute society in terms of the same impotent dialectic of violence and repression that caused its rupture: Iago, bleeding but not killed, is reassimilated as a tormented refusal to speak; Cassio, wounded in the thigh and “maim'd for ever,” is installed as authority and charged with enforcing the “censure” of the “hellish villain” imprisoned within. We are left with the prospect of the state now fruitlessly serving its turn on Iago (its “cunning cruelty” is to “hold him long,” just as Iago had claimed to “hold” Othello in his hate), blindly revealing in itself the evil it seeks to discover, isolate, and punish in its victim.

There is neither transcendence nor catharsis in Othello, although false appearances of both abound. The source of evil cannot even be named from within the play, much less exorcised from it. The melodramatic focus on Iago's “villainy” at the end of the play (the word and its cognates appear eighteen times in the last two hundred lines) conveys frustration and bafflement, not moral understanding. Terms of judgment such as “villain” and “damned slave” (V. ii. 242-43) have no explanatory force at all, except insofar as they unwittingly betray their origin in the same hierarchically engendered malice that produced Iago's villainy.

Cassio's exclamation, “O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil!” (II. iii. 281-83), provides a clue to how the language of diabolic agency works everywhere in the play. Iago is really only the name and local habitation of an invisible spirit within Othello and the texture of his world as well. Othello's frustrated command, “Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil / Why he hath thus ensnar'd my soul and body” (V. ii. 301-02), elicits only the laconic assertion “What you know, you know” (addressed to everyone present, not just Othello), followed by withdrawal into the silence where this inaccessible knowledge persists. The play itself answers our own demand for a scapegoat by tacitly posing a more difficult vision of agency, in which the answer to the question “who hath done this deed?” is always both “Nobody” and “I myself” (V. ii. 123-24).

The problem of Iago's motivation is symptomatic of a more general crisis of accountability in an atmosphere where “All that is spoken is marr'd” (V. ii. 357). That Iago can articulate his motives with such facility is enough to inspire profound distrust in us. We may not be able to see through these “causes” (or even be sure that there is anything at all behind them), but we sense that we cannot accept them at face value without being manipulated like Roderigo (“I have no great devotion to the deed, / And yet he hath given me satisfying reasons” [V. i. 8-9]). This distrust ultimately extends beyond Iago to every truth based on claims of self-transparency (because of him, the very word “honest” is discredited), and to the entire realm of what is “probal to thinking.” By the end of the play we have been subliminally taught to believe, like Gratiano, only in the truth that is tortured out of its victim.

Even the play's most dramatically satisfying moments of clarification and release work to dissemble the true grounds of its woe. It doesn't really matter, for instance, whether we accept or attempt to argue with Othello's final estimate of himself as one who “lov'd not wisely but too well” (V. ii. 344): the terms themselves are free-floating euphemisms designed to prevent us from even making contact with what is specific and disruptive in his story, much less understanding what is at stake in it. Likewise Othello's comparison of himself to the “base Indian” who “threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe” (V. ii. 347-48): the apparent moment of insight and repentance perpetuates (and invites us to become complicit in) the definition of Desdemona as a valuable object, a private possession that was his either to keep or dispose of.⁴ Even Emilia's moving, ethically resonant assertion of Desdemona's chastity after the murder only makes it more difficult to bring into focus the pernicious effects of chastity itself, as a doctrine men impose upon women. That Othello turns out to have been mistaken merely lets the law itself off the hook: we are diverted from a critique of the pathological male obsessions beneath the “just grounds” (V. ii. 138) upon which he would have been proceeding (at least according to the spirit of the law) had Desdemona actually been unfaithful to him. Instead of being forced to confront the predicament of every woman caught within a patriarchal society, we can indulge in “the pity of it,” and regard Desdemona as the unfortunate victim of Othello's “tragic” misconception and Iago's “motiveless malignity.”

I

Othello, then, dramatizes a false consciousness that shapes both its protagonist and the world of the play. And the play's attitude toward this meconnaissance is peculiarly Janus-faced. On the one hand it is knowingly complicit in it, all too willing to satisfy its audience's lust for theater—to give us, for instance, an Iago to provide us with “villainous entertainment” and then serve as a scapegoat for our “filthy purgation.”⁵ In this respect it is one of Shakespeare's most cynical plays, taking as it does a certain self-consciously impotent pleasure in demonstrating the moral corruption of its audience and its own form, and confirming in the process the resistance to demystification of the material that is its thematic and psychological core. At the same time, the play is uncompromisingly lucid. It treats jealousy not as a given but an object of inquiry, and pursues it beyond superficial explanations to the grounds of human tragedy. If it is more introverted and less expansive than the other tragedies, it is also more unrelenting in its focus, more insistent on bringing to consciousness things known in the flesh but “too hideous to be shown.”

Since the truth Othello poses is so radically at odds with the theatrical spectacle that invites our complicity, it is especially important to approach the play “with circumstance.” When we look for what resists dramatic foregrounding and listen for what language betrays about its speaker, then much of what is so emphatically declared and ostentatiously displayed in the world of the play—Desdemona's handkerchief is paradigmatic—begins to take on the appearance of a neurotic defense symptomatic of the “cause” it exists to conceal. In the following moment of pseudo-revelation, for example, the violence beneath the surface of the action almost breaks through into direct expression: “Ay, 'twas he that told me on her first. / An honest man he is, and hates the slime / That sticks on filthy deeds” (V. ii. 147-49). What Othello says is that Iago is a moral man (the emphasis is on “man” as well as “honest”), and hence a man to be trusted. What his words express, however, is a post-coital male disgust with the “filthy deed” of sexuality itself. And clearly the sexual image rather than the moral sentiment possesses him. Iago does indeed hold him in this hate. That such an image underlies Othello's self-righteous indignation suggests that the sexual morality he thinks (not altogether wrongly) he has preserved as an “honorable murderer” (V. ii. 294) is itself the sublimation of an irrational hatred of its object.

This pathological male animus toward sexuality is a “cause” Shakespeare pursues relentlessly through the play, into the roots not only of Othello's jealously but the social institutions with which men keep women and the threat they pose at arm's length. Time and again in Othello language condemning adultery both masks and draws authority from an underlying guilt and disgust about sexuality itself. After Desdemona's murder, for instance, Othello discloses her crime to the witnesses who have gathered: “Tis pitiful; but yet Iago knows / That she with Cassio hath the act of shame / A thousand times committed” (V. ii. 210-12). At the subconscious level (a subconscious Othello shares with his audience, reinforced as it is by Christian myth and social propriety) the “act of shame” refers not just to the act of adultery but to the sexual act itself.⁶ Cassio, who often “went between” Othello and Desdemona during their courtship, functions similarly in their marriage, mediating as an object of jealousy between Othello and his own sexual guilt. The Clown's response to Desdemona's inquiry about Cassio's whereabouts might serve as an epigraph for Othello's fantasies about being sexually displaced by him: “To tell you where he lodges, is to tell you where I lie” (III. iv. 8-9). Shakespeare is careful to indicate the latent presence of this guilt from the beginning (before the “fall” into shame), along with the tendency of the public occasion to elicit it and the public institution to lend it expression: “as truly as to heaven / I do confess the vices of my blood, / So justly to your grave ears I'll present / How I did thrive in this fair lady's love, / And she in mine” (I. iii. 122-26). Othello means the analogy to emphasize how “truly” he speaks, but Shakespeare can scarcely have meant for so unhappy an association of ideas to be taken as innocent or accidental. Here it is specifically within the context of Christianity that the impulses of the blood become “vices,” and relating a mutually thriving love becomes analogous to “confessing” them.⁷

The play consistently insinuates that Othello is apt to believe in Desdemona's unfaithfulness with Cassio because a part of him is convinced of the sinfulness of her sexual appetite and his own relationship to it:

OTHELLO:
Think on thy sins.
DESDEMONA:
                                        They are loves I bear to you.
OTHELLO:
Ay, and for that thou die'st.

(V. ii. 40-41)

“Loves I bear to you” suggests at the same time “the love I offer you [unrelentingly],” “passions in me [sexually engendered by you] that I disclose to you,” and “feelings I give birth to in you.” For all these “sins” Desdemona must die. Her profession of innocence only confirms the masculine anxieties Othello is trying to put to rest by murdering her. Othello seems to imply that Desdemona's innocence is her guilt, a shamelessness that marks her as a hopeless reprobate. Other passages suggest that his distrust of her gives covert expression to his disapproval of her newly manifested sexual nature, as well as her failure to conceal or repress it, or to feel anything like guilt or shame about it:

OTHELLO:
Give me your hand. This hand is moist, my lady.
DESDEMONA:
It yet hath felt no age nor known no sorrow.
OTHELLO:
This argues fruitfulness and liberal heart;
Hot, hot, and moist. This hand of yours requires
A sequester from liberty: fasting and prayer,
Much castigation, exercise devout,
For here's a young and sweating devil here
That commonly rebels. 'Tis a good hand,
A frank one.
DESDEMONA:
You may, indeed, say so;
For 'twas that hand that gave away my heart.
OTHELLO:
A liberal hand. The hearts of old gave hands;
But our new heraldry is hands, not hearts.

(III. iv. 36-47)

Othello sees that Desdemona's uninhibited sexuality argues not only innocence but “fruitfulness and liberal heart”: that it opens her to life as a woman, and is the origin of her emotional commitment to him. Yet his anxieties force him to take this virtue as her vice, and to recommend religious instruction to cure her of it. Othello understands well the form of Christianity that functions not to absolve guilt but to instill it where there is an obstinate innocence.

II

It follows that Desdemona's assurances of loyalty are of little avail because to Othello she has “sinned” as a wife rather than an adulteress:

OTHELLO:
Why? what art thou?
DESDEMONA:
                                                  Your wife, my lord, your true
And loyal wife.
OTHELLO:
Come, swear it, damn thyself

(IV. ii. 34-35)

Similarly, it is more as a husband than a cuckold that Othello becomes obsessed with Desdemona's ritual execution and the “aptness” of it:

IAGO:
Do it with poison; strangle her in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated.
OTHELLO:
Good, good; the justice of it pleases; very good.

(IV. i. 207-10)

Consciously, her bed (Othello will prove especially susceptible to the notion that it is “hers” rather than theirs) has been contaminated by her adulterous liaison with Cassio; but at the unconscious level where Iago is working his magic, it is contaminated because of the stolen hours of lust she and Othello enjoyed there on the much-delayed wedding-night. The handkerchief “spotted” (III. iii. 435; cf. the passage below) with strawberries and dyed with mummy “conserv'd of maidens' hearts” (III. iv. 74) is potent as visible proof of Desdemona's adultery largely because it subconsciously evokes for Othello the blood-stained sheets of the wedding-bed and his wife's loss of virginity there.⁸ The proof of innocence secretly confirms the crime. Desdemona's denial of the handkerchief's loss sounds like a barely disguised disavowal of lost maidenhead/maidenhood itself:

OTHELLO:
Is't lost? is't gone? Speak, is't out o' th' way?

.....

DESDEMONA:
It is not lost; but what and if it were?
OTHELLO:
How?
DESDEMONA:
I say, it is not lost.

(3.4.80-85)

The doctrine of married chastity that the handkerchief symbolizes involves a similar disavowal, and proves vulnerable for precisely that reason.

The idea of strangling Desdemona yields to bloodier fantasies as the perverse judicial satisfaction of reenacting the crime in the punishment takes over Othello's imagination: “Strumpet, I come. / Forth of my heart those charms, thine eyes, are blotted; / Thy bed, lust-stain'd, shall with lust's blood be spotted” (V. i. 34-36)⁹ Just as Desdemona's wedding bed was stained with the blood that gave evidence of her guilt (and his), that same bed must be stained with the same blood as her punishment.¹⁰

The interlocking symmetry of the phrases “lust-stain'd” and “lust's blood” reinforces the sense of a confusion in Othello's mind between blood stains and lust stains. This confusion implies a tendency to equate the act of deflowering with the moment of sexual climax, which suggests in turn how phallic Othello's idea of sex is, and how subsequently unreal and threatening Desdemona's own sexual experience is to him (“What sense had I of her stol'n hours of lust?”). One also suspects the presence of a repressed tendency to fantasize both sides of the sexual exchange at once, and interpret each in terms appropriate to the other. Thus Desdemona's virginal blood can become in Othello's fantasies a lustful orgasmic discharge, the female equivalent of his semen—as if by deflowering her he released the sexual flow in her, and transformed her from a chaste object of desire into a sexually demanding woman.¹¹ In like manner, he can perceive the blood as his own, so that it becomes a focal point for fantasies related to both the threat that entering Desdemona poses for him and the phallic violence the act arouses in him. The language of Othello consistently links submerged references to sexual initiation and phallic virility with imagery of castration and unmanning.¹² The contradictions are only one aspect of the male obsession with “lust's blood” (“O blood, blood, blood!”) that the play seeks to understand.

Othello's overdetermined stake in both Desdemona's crime and its punishment is underscored by the ambiguities that allow “lust-stain'd” to mean not only “stained with her lust” but “stained by [the agency of] mine,” and “lust's blood” to refer not only to what must be extracted from Desdemona but what will do the extracting. Othello himself is possessed by what he seeks to put to death in Desdemona (“Some bloody passion shakes your very frame”); the judicial satisfaction he imagines is a bloody ejaculation, a punishment for her sexual crime that manifests his own (“Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace, / Shall nev'r look back, nev'r ebb to humble love, / Till that a capable and wide revenge / Swallow them up”).

The fantasy of the wedding night is still submerged in the actual murder, but it has been refined to become a ritual of disavowal and undoing: “Yet I'll not shed her blood, / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, / And smooth as monumental alabaster. / Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men” (V. ii. 3-6). “Yet I'll not shed her blood” is a resolve not to repeat his earlier mistake. Othello is attempting to recover what he lost when he deflowered Desdemona, and to deny what he thereby discovered and released in her—and in himself as well. “Therefore,” he commands, “confess thee freely of thy sin; / For to deny each article with oath / Cannot remove nor choke the strong conception / That I do groan withal” (V. ii. 53-56). His language suggests that smothering Desdemona is a displaced attempt (like taking by the throat and smiting the malignant Turk) to put to death something in himself, something that has been sexually engendered in him. He understands that a principle is involved (“else she'll betray more men”), and that in killing her he is acting not just for himself but for men in general. Not only did she betray Brabantio for Othello and Othello for Cassio, but she caused all these men to betray themselves and each other.¹³ The stability of the male world—its certainties, its prerogatives, and its precious sense of honor—depends on the suppression of what has emerged in and through Desdemona.

From this point of view, the act of deflowering Desdemona, and a baffled attempt to undo it, are beneath Othello's meditation on the irreversibility of “killing” her:

If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me; but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume. When I have pluck'd thy rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again,
It needs must wither. I'll smell thee on the tree.
O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade
Justice to break her sword. One more, one more.
Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee
And love thee after.

(V. ii. 8-19)

Othello manages to have it both ways in this necrophilic fantasy. This “death” will quiet rather than arouse her, purify rather than pollute her. “Kill thee / And love thee after” suggests both “kill thee and still love thee” and “kill thee and then love thee”—as if through killing her again, in this way, he could reverse the effects of the first deflowering, where he loved her only to “kill” her, and after “killing” her found her and his feelings toward her changed. The phrase also locates the split in the male psyche that is responsible for these fatal paradoxes: sexual desire is characterized as a hostile impulse that must be voided before “love” can return. The difficult grammar of Desdemona's protest, “That death's unnatural that kills for loving” (V. ii. 42), further reveals the twisted meaning of sexual climax that Othello is trying to disavow even while he reenacts it on a murderously literal plane: “death” punishes the beloved for her aroused sexuality and for “bearing” it to the self. “Killing” Desdemona (either again and again or once and for all) is a way of extinguishing what threatens to turn her from a passive object of desire into an actively dangerous lover; at the same time it is a displaced means of killing the feelings that threaten to engulf his own inner being.¹⁴

III

Othello's jealousy, then, is immune to reason largely because of unconscious pressures that underlie it and unconscious scenarios that have been superimposed on it. Iago's plan is to get Othello to imagine Cassio in his (Othello's) place.¹⁵ What makes the strategy so effective is the way it brings Othello to see himself in this fantasized Cassio. The identification is already intimated in Iago's first rough improvisations, where an ambiguous pronoun displaces onto Othello the guilt Iago intends to make him suspect in Cassio: “How? how?—Let's see—/ After some time,¹⁶ to abuse Othello's ear / That he is too familiar with his wife” (I. iii. 394-96).

When Othello subsequently demands of Iago, “make me to see't!” (III. iii. 364), Iago complies by engendering in his mind the image of copulation with Desdemona (regardless of who “covers” her), evoking a violent, scarcely expressible rage (“Death and damnation! O!”; “O monstrous! monstrous!”). 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. This internalized image of the sexual act is the object that “poisons sight,” the “monster” in the brain “too hideous to be shown” (III. iii. 107-08). Iago similarly enrages Brabantio by making copulation with his daughter happen in his imagination, and in such a way that he becomes more than just an onlooker: “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe” (I. i. 88-89). We shall see in a moment how the prohibitive father who has been cuckolded and displaced takes over Othello's viewing self. Iago's subsequent meditation on the impossibility of “satisfying” the desire to catch Desdemona in the act manages to insinuate that the real barrier is Othello's participation in what he wants to see:

OTHELLO:
Would I were satisfied!
IAGO:
I see, sir, you are eaten up with passion;
I do repent me that I put it to you.
You would be satisfied?
OTHELLO:
                                                            Would? nay, and I will!
IAGO:
And may; but how? How satisfied, my lord?
Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on?
Behold her topp'd?
OTHELLO:
Death and damnation! O!
IAGO:
It were a tedious difficulty, I think,
To bring them to that prospect; damn them, then,
If ever mortal eyes do see them bolster
More than their own. What then? How then?
What shall I say? 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.

(III. iii. 390-405)

“Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on? / Behold her topp'd?” The question evokes the desire to observe one's own participation in the sexual act.¹⁷ It is as if this desire were inherent in the “dominant” position: the magic of the line hinges on the interaction between the obscurely latinate “supervisor,” and the vulgar but precise “topp'd.” “Damn them, then, / If ever mortal eyes do see them bolster / More than their own” similarly intimates that Othello is being made to see the forbidden image of his own sexual experience (“It is impossible you should see this”), and made to respond to it with the feelings of the cuckold surreptitiously gazing on the adulterous scene. In Freudian terms, Iago is alienating Othello from the sexual act by making him participate in it from the place of the superego. (Shakespeare's “supervisor,” in fact, neatly condenses the watching, controlling, and judging functions that Freud defines as the superego's three attributes.) Iago's repetition of “satisfied” and “satisfaction” implies a displacement of sexual desire onto the act of looking, knowing—where it becomes intrinsically unsatisfiable, a kind of perverse anti-sexuality or death-drive. By the end of the play, the language of erotic satisfaction will have been almost entirely appropriated by the judicial mechanisms that seek to punish sexuality—“Good, good; the justice of it pleases; very good.”

By the time Othello confronts Desdemona in Act IV, he is compulsively acting out under the pretext of irony a latent sense of his own marriage as an adulterous affair, a matter between a whore and her customer:

OTHELLO [to Emilia]:
Some of your function, mistress;
Leave procreants alone, and shut the door;
Cough or cry “hem,” if anybody come.
Your mystery, your mystery; nay, dispatch.

.....

OTHELLO:
What, not a whore?
DESDEMONA:
                                                                                No, as I shall be sav'd.
OTHELLO:
Is't possible?
DESDEMONA:
O, heaven forgive us!
OTHELLO:
                                                                                I cry you mercy then.
I took you for that cunning whore of Venice
That married with Othello.—You, mistress,
                                                                                                                        [Enter Emilia]
That have the office opposite to Saint Peter,
And keeps the gate of hell! You, you! ay, you!
We have done our course; there's money for your pains.
I pray you turn the key and keep our counsel.

(IV. ii. 27-94)

Othello's cynicism overreaches itself here to betray a more deeply-rooted misogyny. “Procreants” becomes synonymous with “adulterers,” a term of bitter, self-contemptuous abuse. It is as if “marrying with” Othello, now a euphemism for copulation in his foul thoughts, were what Desdemona's prostitution consisted in. When Othello sardonically takes on the role of Desdemona's bawd before Lodovico, one can similarly detect beneath his contempt the pressure of his own sexual knowledge of her:

DESDEMONA:
                                                                      I will not stay to offend you.
LODOVICO:
Truly, an obedient lady:
I do beseech your lordship call her back.
OTHELLO:
Mistress!
DESDEMONA:
                                                                      My lord?
OTHELLO:
                                                                      What would you with her, sir?
LODOVICO:
Who, I, my lord?
OTHELLO:
Ay, you did wish that I would make her turn.
Sir, she can turn, and turn; and yet go on
And turn again; and she can weep, sir, weep;
And she's obedient, as you say, obedient;
Very obedient.

(IV. i. 247-56)

Desdemona's almost eager subjection to her husband's will becomes for Othello a demonstration of her promiscuity. “Obedient,” as Othello insists, is the key word. It recalls the public declaration of the “duty” due her lord and husband with which Desdemona betrayed her father, “Do you perceive in all this noble company / Where most you owe obedience?” (I. iii. 179-80), as well as her parting words to Othello as Iago begins to pour his pestilence in his ear, “Be as your fancies teach you; / What e'er you be, I am obedient” (III. iii. 88-89). The word is thus a touchstone for her wifely compliance to Othello, not for her adulterous impulses.¹⁸ And Othello's innuendo that “she can turn, and turn; and yet go on / And turn again” makes clear that Desdemona's sexual obedience is what he is primarily obsessed with. The logic of the male response to woman's sexuality is contradictory: Othello's obsession with his ability to arouse and manipulate Desdemona's sexual appetite (“Ay, you did wish that I would make her turn”) leads him to dwell on it as something not under his control but beyond his capacity to satisfy (“and yet go on / And turn again”). Once planted in his mind, the adulterous relationship quickly grows into something Cassio and Desdemona have committed “a thousand times.”

IV

“I took you for that cunning whore of Venice / That married with Othello”: as so often before, Othello lives his life as a story, seeing himself as he appears in the eyes of an audience. Yet he really alludes to two stories at once, and the doubleness corresponds to the duplicity of his jealously. On the surface he speaks of the story of a well-known whore of Venice who made a fool and laughing-stock out of him by pretending to be “a maiden never bold of spirit” and deceiving him into marriage. At this level his rage is an indication of his essentially narcissistic investment in Desdemona. But this story that so wounds his ego is in a sense only a screen for (and a defense against) his private acceptance of the more deeply estranging story that is told to Brabantio at the beginning of the play, in which Othello himself is the villian who corrupts Desdemona and charms her into acting the part of a common whore (as if “That married with Othello” were an explanation of what Desdemona did to become known as “that cunning whore of Venice”): “your fair daughter, / And this odd-even and dull watch o' th' night, / Transported with no worse or better guard / But with a knave of common hire, a gundolier, / To the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor” (I. i. 122-26). Ambiguous pronouns like the one that links Othello and Cassio in Iago's improvisations suggest this story will connect Brabantio and Othello—that it will poison Othello's delight (or is it Brabantio's?) because it will be told to him as well as about him:

          Call up her father,
Rouse him, make after him, poison his delight,
Proclaim him in the streets; incense her kinsmen,
And though he in a fertile climate dwell,
Plague him with flies. Though that his joy be joy,
Yet throw such changes of vexation on't,
As it may lose some color.

(I. i. 67-73)

Iago similarly “calls up” the father within Othello. The process by which Othello comes to see Cassio in his place is largely a matter of coming to see that place from Brabantio's. His subsequent identification with the Cassio who displaces him is similarly reinforced by his sense of himself as Brabantio's Cassio. The first truly ominous note in the play is struck when the cuckolded father maliciously urges his “precedent” on the newly-married husband, warning: “Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see. / She has deceiv'd her father, and may thee” (I. iii. 292-93). The decisive moment in Iago's seduction of Othello comes when he is able to make Othello look at himself and Desdemona in terms of Brabantio's warning:

IAGO:
She did deceive her father, marrying you,
And when she seem'd to shake and fear your looks,
She lov'd them most.
OTHELLO:
And so she did.
IAGO:
                                                                      Why, go to then.
She that so young could give out such a seeming
To seel her father's eyes up, close as oak,
He thought 'twas witchcraft—but I am much to blame;
I humbly beseech you of your pardon
For too much loving you.
OTHELLO:
                                                                      I am bound to you for ever.

(III. iii. 206-13)

The details of Iago's language reinforce the self-displacing, anxiety-producing identification with the father, “And when she seem'd to shake and fear your looks, / She lov'd them most” echoes Brabantio's “to fall in love with what she fear'd to look on,” while Iago's image for Desdemona's deception of her father—“To seel her father's eyes up, close as oak”—echoes Othello's earlier, strenuously disavowed image of the emascualting effects of married love: “When light-wing'd toys / Of feather'd Cupid seel with wanton dullness / My speculative and offic'd instruments” (I. iii. 268-70).

Immediately after Iago succeeds in making Othello see Desdemona's love for him through her father's eyes, Othello first actively entertains the possibility of her marital infidelity:

OTHELLO:
I do not think but Desdemona's honest.
IAGO:
Long live she so! and long live you to think so!
OTHELLO:
And yet how nature erring from itself—

(III. iii. 225-27)

The crucial thought, “For nature so prepost'rously to err” (I. iii. 62), echoes Brabantio: “That … perfection so could err / Against all rules of nature” (I. iii. 100-101). With his sure sense of how men's minds work, Iago can deftly transform this train of thought about woman's proverbial frailty into an expression of the masculine insecurity that underlies it:

Ay, there's the point; as (to be bold with you)
Not to effect many proposed matches
Of her own clime, complexion, and degree,
Whereto we see in all things nature tends—
Foh, one may smell in such, a will most rank,
Foul disproportions, thoughts unnatural.

(III. iii. 228-33)

Again, Brabantio has already provided the language for this doubt:

For I'll refer me to all things of sense,
If she in chains of magic were not bound,
Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy,
So opposite to marriage that she shunn'd
The wealthy curled darlings of our nation,
Would ever have, t'incur a general mock,
Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou.

(I. ii. 64-71)

What speaks here is a contempt latent in Othello himself, although it comes to consciousness through the voices of Iago and Brabantio: “How can you continue to idealize her, how can you deny she's a whore? She loves you, doesn't she? She was attracted to what she should have feared, and took pleasure in what should have disgusted her, didn't she?”

From this point of view Othello's Moorishness merely forces him to live out with psychotic intensity the metaphors of self-contempt that every civilized white man can be brought to experience in his sexual relations with a woman. Augustine remarks that we are all Ethiopians, black in our natural sinfulness but allowed to become white in the knowledge of the lord.¹⁹ But Shakespeare's play questions how we come to regard the natural as sinful, and as a consequence invent for ourselves such unhappy doctrines of redemption. (“O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause transform ourselves into beasts!”) Othello's worship of Desdemona's “whiteness” sets him at odds with his physical being, a conflict which reflects a society whose attitudes toward woman have been shaped by the doctrine of chastity. Because Othello is black, the perversity of the value system tends to come into focus. When Tarquin refers to the “blackness” of his deed, we take it as a “natural” expression of sin; but when Othello refers to a reputation that has become “black as mine own face,” we feel that he is being manipulated by a language calculated to make him despise himself.

The image of blackness with which Othello describes the change his suspicion of Desdemona has wrought in him is fraught with complex, unacknowledged feelings about his own sexual nature: “My [Q2: Her] name, that was as fresh / As Dian's visage, is now begrim'd and black / As mine own face” (III. iii. 386-88). On the surface this is an expression of male vanity: Desdemona's chastity is the logical focus of the passage, yet it is significant to Othello only as a mirror for his own idealized self-image. But what seeks expression through his wounded pride, like repressed material through a defense erected against it, is sexual confusion and self-contempt. The possibility of Desdemona's infidelity causes him to see himself (as if for the first time) as black, and to regard that blackness as a measure of sexual corruption as well as social disgrace. One associates Diana more readily with virginity than married chastity, and “freshness” more with things unplucked than preserved.²⁰ Othello appears subconsciously concerned with the sexual exchange that has passed between Desdemona and himself, not Cassio—an exchange that has caused him to view himself as well as her as no longer chaste.²¹ “Begrim'd” suggests contamination by external contact; “black” is an intrinsic quality, hence contaminating to the touch: Q2's “Her” has no authority, and is almost certainly an editorial attempt to make sense of F's “My” (the lines are missing from Q1); but the conflict between the two readings (Q2 providing what the context so obviously calls for, and what is thus in a sense intrinsic to the F reading) catches perfectly the confusion that besets this disputed place of ownership and identity: my name, before I lodged it in her; her name, before it received and became mine.²² His investment of himself in her purity has resulted in a mutual contamination instead of a marriage of true minds. The abstract, idealized visage in his mind has become the revolting face of his physical self.

V

One component of Othello's jealousy, then, is a patriarchal conscience telling him that Desdemona's illicit behavior with Cassio is only a repetition of what she first did with Othello, and that he himself has released in her the boundless appetite she now satisfies with Cassio. If introjecting the father's voice allows the individual entrance into the symbolic order, it would also seem to ensure his unrest within it. Certainly jealousy rather than romantic love engrosses Othello in marriage, and turns him from “an extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere” (I. i. 136-37) into a “horn-mad” husband, a domestic type.

Brabantio's final words before disappearing from the play are an open expression of the Oedipal curse every sexual relationship undergoes in the process of being assimilated by the patriarchal order of things: “Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see; / She has deceiv'd her father, and may thee” (I. iii. 292-93). Speaking as the cuckolded father, Brabantio construes Desdemona's choice in terms of an Oedipal anxiety that reduces woman's capacity for active commitment to a reminder of past betrayals and a premonition of future ones.

Desdemona, for her part, cannot avoid reinforcing the male anxieties her power to choose activates. When she attempts to mediate between father and husband and negotiate her own passage from daughter to wife, her tact only manages to exacerbate the sense of Oedipal betrayal she wishes to forestall:

          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 the lord of my duty;
I am hitherto your daughter. But here's my husband;
And so much duty as my mother show'd
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge that I may profess
Due to the Moor, my lord.

(I. iii. 180-89)

The increasingly complex hypotaxis of this speech gradually transforms the orderly passage from generation to generation into an ever-present, eternally recurrent Oedipal triangle, in which Brabantio can serve as an analogue for both the husband of his daughter and the father of his wife. Desdemona seems to equate her filial duty to Brabantio with her mother's marital duty to him, and then promptly uses the equation to leave him for Othello. The movement from “you are the lord of my duty” to “so much duty … I may profess / Due to the Moor, my lord” makes it sound like Desdemona owes the same “duty” to father and husband, and that she does not so much divide it between them (like Cordelia) as take it away from one and give it to the other. As she takes her mother's place in the syntactical flow, Othello displaces Brabantio in the position of lordship over her. The speech never envisions a bond outside the filial structure, where the erotic impulse might be free to take its own course.

This failure tells us more about Desdemona's situation than her personality. The conflicts between father and husband and the duty owed to each reside not in unconscious motives but in the language men insist she speak when their anxieties are at stake. In a more impulsive mood, Desdemona speaks of her love for “the Moor,” not the duty she owes her “lord.” When Othello subjects their love to Oedipal complications, however, he does so willfully, and it is not merely language that moves him to do so. The story he tells Desdemona about the handkerchief also entangles the erotic impulse in filial relationships, and brings to the fore just those anxieties which such a “recognizance and pledge of love” is intended to dispel:

          That handkerchief
Did an Egyptian to my mother give;
She was a chamber, and could almost read
The thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept it,
'Twould make her amiable, and subdue my father
Entirely to her love; but if she lost it,
Or made a gift of it, my father's eye
Should hold her loathed, and his spirits should hunt
After new fancies. She, dying, gave it me,
And bid me, when my fate would have me wiv'd,
To give it her.

(III. iv. 55-65)

The succession of generations here is a curiously matrilinear affair, the male participating only as the mother's son, and then only to facilitate the passage of the magical object of power over men from woman to woman.²³ The succession of personal pronouns makes the Egyptian charmer merge into the mother, and the mother into the wife, who never really appears in her own person within the sequence. Othello essentially remains the son in the gesture of giving the handkerchief, and the mother receives it again through Desdemona: “She, dying, gave it me, / And bid me, when my fate would have me wiv'd, / To give it her.”

Othello's later account of the handkerchief as “an antique token / My father gave my mother” (V. ii. 216-17) implies a more orderly patrilinear descent through the generations, as befits his concern there with maintaining his self-respect in the eyes of his audience. But a lineage in which each son establishes his authority over his wife by entrusting to her the object his father entrusted to his mother leaves out of account how it passes back from the mother to the son. The fantasy of direct patriarchal descent must elide the Oedipal betrayal that necessarily mediates the son's accession to the father's place. The son must receive the emblem of the father's sexual power from the mother. This gap in the second story is what the first narrates. Although it would be missing the point to try to distinguish the true version of the story from the false, the first version clearly engages Othello's imagination more deeply, and his psychic investment in it appears much greater.

It should therefore come as no surprise to discover in Othello's most virulent outbursts against Desdemona primitive fantasies of a more ancient maternal betrayal: “But there, where I have garner'd up my heart, / Where either I must live or bear no life; / The fountain from the which my current runs / Or else dries up: to be discarded thence!” (IV. ii. 57-60).²⁴ Conversely, when Desdemona's behavior toward Othello evokes the maternal role, she is most in danger of activating in him the anxieties Iago manipulates. On behalf of Cassio, for example, she pleads:

          Why, this is not a boon;
'Tis as I should entreat you wear your gloves,
Or feed on nourishing dishes, or keep you warm,
Or sue to you to do a peculiar profit
To your own person. Nay, when I have a suit
Wherein I mean to touch your love indeed,
It shall be full of poise and difficult weight,
And fearful to be granted.

(III. iii. 76-83)

Her suit excites Othello's jealousy not only because of the concern it shows for Cassio but also because of its evocation of the overprotective mother and the son's anxious fantasy of threatening sexual demands. Othello's reply sounds like the adolescent's attempt to appease this figure, and suggests how precarious and pathetic the sense of manhood wrested from it is: “I will deny thee nothing; / Whereon, I do beseech thee, grant me this, / To leave me but a little to myself” (III. iii. 83-85).

VI

Yet the play also stresses how little these male fantasies have to do with Desdemona's mundane reality as a specific woman. Even when her suit on Cassio's behalf starts to wear on our nerves as well as Othello's, the focus is not so much on a fault in her character as on the pathological reverberations that even a woman's trivial indiscretions have in the minds of men. Something of Desdemona's predicament can be gathered from the treatment she often receives from her literary critics. A recent psychoanalytic interpretation of the play, for instance, reports that Desdemona reassures Cassio by saying “quite plainly” that she “intends breaking her husband to her will or dying in the attempt.”²⁵ This leads to a portrait of Desdemona as a “masculine” woman with a “castrative” need to “dominate Othello in terms of phallic rivalry.”²⁶

What is the reality of the behavior this critic finds so pathologically unfeminine? Desdemona is in high spirits the day after the wedding night, confidently assuring Cassio of Othello's esteem. Her mood is what chiefly suggests that the marriage has been happily consummated, and that in the process Desdemona became “half the wooer”:

Be thou assur'd, good Cassio, I will do
All my abilities in thy behalf.
.....I know't; I thank you. You do love my lord;
You have known him long, and be you well assur'd
He shall in strangeness stand no farther off
Than in a politic distance.
.....Do not doubt that; before Emilia here,
I give thee warrant of thy place. Assure thee,
If I do vow a friendship, I'll perform it
To the last article.

(III. iii. 1-2, 10-13, 19-22)

This is the voice not of a shrewish wife but of a free, ethically empowered subject. Desdemona has obviously acquired a sense of her “abilities” to assure men, to warrant them of their place. This power depends upon her own self-confidence, which in turn depends upon her trust in Othello and her place in his confidence. One could scarcely imagine a more optimistic “morning-after” effect: her elopement with a Moor, her public declaration of love in the face of her father's displeasure, and the consummation of her marriage have left her with no detectable Oedipal guilt, no latent sense of social disgrace, no virginal resentment, and nothing like wifely subservience or docility. Instead she is self-assured, spirited, free to speak in her own voice and confident in her ability to speak for Othello. If ever things bode well in the play for love, it is here, in the guilt-free atmosphere that Desdemona generates—a mood almost immediately destroyed as Othello and Iago return from the world of men, where they have been inspecting fortifications:

OTHELLO:
Was not that Cassio parted from my wife?
IAGO:
Cassio, my lord? No, sure, I cannot think it,
That he would steal away so guilty-like,
Seeing your coming.
OTHELLO:
I do believe 'twas he.

(III. iii. 37-40)

Eventually, however, Desdemona's reassurances to Cassio do overreach themselves, and the ominous note of maternal domination is sounded:

                    Assure thee,
If I do vow a friendship, I'll perform it
To the last article. My lord shall never rest,
I'll watch him tame, and talk him out of patience;
His bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift,
I'll intermingle everything he does
With Cassio's suit.

(III. iii. 20-26)

Innocent as these words are, their image of the conjugal bed as a place of forced instruction suggests the Witches of Macbeth:

I'll drain him dry as hay:
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his penthouse lid;
He shall live a man forbid;
Weary sev'n nights, nine times nine,
Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine.

(Mac., I. iii. 18-23)

The underlying male fear is thralldom to the demands of an unsatisfiable sexual appetite in woman. It is crucial to realize, however, that the threat appears not when something intrinsically evil emerges in Desdemona's will, but when the conventional boundaries of marriage close in upon it. Speaking for herself, Desdemona begins with a strong judicious vow: “If I do vow a friendship, I'll perform it to the last article.” But as she begins to speak as Othello's wife, her resolve loses its ethical resonance, and becomes instead a kind of petty, nagging persistence: “His bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift, / I'll mingle everything he does / With Cassio's suit.” Only when she is absorbed by the role men create to limit her freedom and power does she become the thing they fear and despise (“Players in your huswifery, and huswifes in your beds”).

The tragedy of the play, then, is the inability of Desdemona to escape or triumph over restraints and Oedipal prohibitions that domesticate woman to the conventional male order of things. At first her erotic vitality enables her to transcend society's barriers and fearlessly merge with a self radically other than her own:

That I did love the Moor to live with him,
My downright violence, and storm of fortunes,
May trumpet to the world. My heart's subdu'd
Even to the very quality of my lord.(27)
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. 248-54)

But the erotic principle in her is gradually transformed by “the curse of marriage” to a preoccupation with a fetish that confines her to a sphere of childlike, narcissistic isolation: “but she so loves the token / (For he conjur'd her she should ever keep it) / That she reserves it evermore about her / To kiss and talk to” (III. iii. 293-96). From proclaiming her love as a free individual she is reduced by the domain of married chastity to defending her virtue as an object passively dedicated to her husband:

OTHELLO:
Are not you a strumpet?
DESDEMONA:
                                                                                                    No, as I am a Christian.
If to preserve this vessel for my lord
From any other foul unlawful touch
Be not to be a strumpet, I am none.

(IV. ii. 82-85)

This tangle of denials and contingencies is the language of self demanded by Desdemona's marital role. Her loss of self-confidence and forthrightness under the pressure of Othello's accusations only emphasizes a process intrinsic to the institution of marriage in a patriarchal society. Under such conditions an assertion of innocence logically comes out sounding like a negation of identity (“I am none”). Desdemona can only defend herself against male anxieties that fear and despise her as a “thing of nothing” by nullifying herself.

By the time of the Willow Scene Desdemona's confidence in her love's future has been reduced to superstitious foreboding, a morbid preoccupation with unrequited love, and a fatalistic desire to recapture the experience of the wedding night:

EMILIA:
I have laid those sheets you bade me on the bed.
DESDEMONA:
All's one: Good faith, how foolish are our minds!
If I do die before thee, prithee shroud me
In one of those same sheets.

(IV. iii. 22-25)

Despite obvious sympathy for Desdemona, Shakespeare treats this sentimental investment in the wedding sheets as being clairvoyantly in touch with Othello's murderous fancies. Indeed, it virtually summons up the figure of the husband-executioner:

          Prithee to-night
Lay on my bed my wedding-sheets—remember;
And call thy husband hither.(28)

(IV. ii. 104-06)

                                                  Strumpet, I come.
Forth of my heart, those charms, thine eyes, are blotted;
Thy bed, lust-stain'd, shall with lust's blood be spotted.

(V. i. 34-36)

Desdemona speaks more truly than she realizes when she tells Othello, “Be as your fancies teach you; / What e'er you be, I am obedient” (III. iii. 88-89).²⁹ One of the things that makes the vision of Othello so terrible is the sense of complicity of everything we expect to assert a reality-principle—the voice of reason, the laws of state, Christian values, and finally even Desdemona's love—in Othello's destructive fantasies. At the end of the play only Emilia manages to speak from a place outside the general confusion, and as she declares her truth she intuitively grasps the scope of the forces that seek to keep her silent: “Let heaven and men and devils, let them all, / All, all, cry shame against me, yet I'll speak” (V. ii. 221-22).

VII

It has become a commonplace of Othello criticism that Iago is the “shadow-side” of Othello, “that side of man which is hidden from the light of day, but which cannot be denied.”³⁰ But he fulfills this function within Othello's psyche not as the dark, impulsive id but the punitive, sex-hating superego. It is Iago who “knows” that Desdemona and Cassio have committed “the act of shame” a thousand times, Iago who “hates the slime / That sticks on filthy deeds,” Iago who gets Othello to see himself as “black” and counsels him to murder Desdemona in the bed she has “contaminated.” The id's representative in Othello's psyche is poor civilized Cassio (it is he who does what Iago knows), or at least the Cassio generated in Othello's mind by Iago's lie. All we know of the so-called “id” is what comes to us through the mediation of a prurient, paranoid superego, just as the disavowals and repressions of the civilized world of Venice make it impossible to imagine what a genuine “Moorish” impulse might be.

So to attribute the destructive impulses unleashed in Othello to man's “bestial nature,” to the sexual impulse breaking through the civilized barriers that usually contain it, is to turn the vision of the play on its head. Shakespeare locates the principle of evil and malice at the level of the superego, the agency that enforces civilization on the ego. What erupts in Othello's jealousy is not primitive, barbaric man but the voice of the father, not “those elements in man that oppose civilized order”³¹ but the outraged voice of that order. Brabantio is scandalized by a betrayal that is sexuality itself, a female sexuality he discovers in his daughter as a will independent of his own and a revolt against his authority as both a father and a ruling member of Venetian society. He experiences his daughter's behavior not only as a personal grief but as a scandal that threatens the basis of the patriarchal social order:

Mine's not an idle cause. The Duke himself,
Or any of my brothers of the state,
Cannot but feel this wrong as 'twere their own;
For if such actions may have passage free,
Bond-slaves and pagans shall our statemen be.

(I. ii. 95-99)

Othello initially appears to take Desdemona's part, pleading with the lords of Venice either to “Let her have your voice” or to “let her will / Have a free way,” depending on which version of the text we follow.³² But by the time he enters in the last scene, preparing himself for her execution, he, like Hamlet, has become possessed by the displaced father's perspective and the prophetic truth of his warning. Brabantio's “cause” has become his own: he is determined to stifle Desdemona's newly-liberated voice, to stop up the “free passage” that he himself has opened in her, and thus undo the breach her sexuality has created in the stable male order of things. It is a terrible irony that with this introjection of the father's prohibitive cause, the note of alienation (the outsider's insecurity, the theatrical display of belonging) virtually disappears from Othello's voice. As he proceeds to execute first his wife and then himself, that bond-slave and pagan who would be stateman, he finally seems to feel at home in the Venetian world. However “mad” he may be as he approaches Desdemona's bed to murder her, he knows that he is acting in the name of men, as minister of their justice and their faith. At the end of the play, as he finally addresses his audience with the intimacy of an equal (“Soft you; a word or two before you go”); he is confident that damned though he may be, he has done the state some service, and they know it.

Notes

1. All references are to The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974); all italics are added.

2. “It cannot be” (I. iii. 333), “why, 'tis not possible” (II. i. 220), “I cannot believe that in her” (II. i. 249), “You must not think then that I am drunk” (II. iii. 118-19), “No, sure, I cannot think it” (III. iii. 38), I'll not believe it” (III. iii. 279), “Is't possible?” (III. iii. 358), “Is't possible?” (III. iv. 68), “I'faith, is't true?” (III. iv. 75), “Is't possible?” (IV. i. 42), “Fie, there is no such man; it is impossible” (IV. ii. 134), “I do not think there is any such woman” (IV. iii. 83). I am indebted to Regenia Gagnier for pointing this motif out to me.

3. Some editors also gloss clyster-pipes as syringes for vaginal douches. The OED records no such use of the word, but the doubling of function is certainly there in Iago's fantasy, and suggests the place of evil where his motives originate: note the anal-sadistic, excremental interpretation of genital sexuality, and the corresponding fusion of homosexual and misogynistic impulses.

4. Othello's sense of Desdemona as a pearl he threw away contrasts with Brabantio's sense of his daughter as a jewel that was stolen from him and with Cassio's sense of Bianca as a bauble that hangs annoyingly around his neck. But the differences, as so often in the play, mask a fundamental sameness: in this case a common male attitude about women as objects either of value or adornment.

5. The phrases in quotation marks are Kenneth Burke's: see his “Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method,” Hudson Review 4 (1951), p. 165-203. I am much indebted to Burke's critique of scapegoat rituals and the dramatist's use of them.

6. An insightful account of the officially sanctioned view of sexuality as shameful and adulterous, even—or especially—when it occurs within marriage, is provided by Stephen Greenblatt in “Improvisation and Power,” forthcoming in his book Renaissance Self-Fashioning.

7. Greenblatt has an especially acute discussion in “Improvisation and Power” of the theme of confession in Othello and its bearing on the play's insights into the malign influence of Christian doctrine on human life. But it is important not to scapegoat Christianity in turn, making it (as Greenblatt seems to do) the “cause” of sexual disgust. The dialectic in Shakespeare between the psyche and the institutions it creates and is shaped by cannot be so easily resolved.

8. For a discussion of Desdemona's handkerchief in the context of the ritual display of wedding-night sheets as “ocular proof” of the consummated marriage and the bride's virginity, see Lynda E. Boose, “Othello's Handkerchief: ‘The Recognizance and Pledge of Love,’” English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975), pp. 360-74.

9. The language suggests that Desdemona is a “strumpet” not so much because of her imagined infidelity as because of her sexual allure and the power it has to make him “come.” The “again” in “Get me some poison, Iago, this night. I'll not expostulate with her, lest her body and her beauty unprovide my mind again. This night, Iago” (IV. i. 204-06) suggests that Othello is thinking even here of what happened to him on his wedding night. His reiteration of “this night” picks up the phrase that has come to signify the (sexual) demand women make upon men: cf. Desdemona's “To-night, my lord?” (I. iii. 278) and “Shall it be to-night at supper?” (III. iii. 57), and Bianca's “say if I shall see you soon at night” (III. iv. 198) and “An' you'll come to supper to-night, you may” (IV. i. 159-60). I shall argue that the murder to be consummated “this night” involves a repetition and undoing of the sexual experience that took place “that night.”

10. For the connection between deflowering and capital punishment in Shakespeare, cf. the opening of Romeo and Juliet:

    SAMPSON:

    'Tis all one; I will show myself a tyrant: when I have fought with the men, I will be civil with the maids; I will cut off their heads.

    GREGORY:

    The heads of the maids?

    SAMPSON:

    Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads, take it in what sense thou wilt.

11. The “napkin” spotted with strawberries evokes the menstrual cloth as well as the wedding sheets, thereby facilitating an identification between virginal and menstrual blood in the male subconscious. The handkerchief is thus a nexus for the three aspects of woman—chaste bride, sexual object, and maternal threat—which the institution it represents seeks to separate.

12. This association of ideas runs throughout Shakespeare. In Romeo and Juliet the sexual match is to be played for a “pair of stainless maidenheads,” while Pompey in Measure for Measure claims to be able to cut off a man's head only “if the man be a bachelor.” And in 1 Henry IV, immediately after Falstaff stabs Hotspur in the thigh and carries him off the stage, Hal and Prince John enter with bloody swords, the former approving of the latter's initiation into the world of martial valor: “Full bravely hast thou flesh'd / Thy maiden sword.”

13. Originally it was Brabantio who “lov'd” Othello, and “oft invited” him (I. iii. 128). Desdemona surreptitiously displaces her father in this originally male relationship; this makes both Brabantio's feelings of betrayal and Othello's corresponding guilt profoundly double-edged. There is similar irony in Desdemona's attempt to mediate between Othello and Cassio, since it was she who came between them in the first place—not as a rival object of love but as the intrusion of sexuality into the stable, “innocent” world of male bonds. Many of Shakespeare's heroines face this danger. Portia takes Bassanio away from Antonio, and Juliet comes between Romeo and Mercutio; in both cases the potential of male guilt and resentment threatens the heterosexual bond. In The Winter's Tale Polixenes speaks matter-of-factly to Hermoine of his childhood friendship with Leontes as a time of innocence that would have continued indefinitely had not women intervened in their world and separated them from each other. It is during this conversation that jealousy begins to take hold of Leontes.

14. Cf. Mercutio: “If love be rough with you, be rough with love; / Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down” (Rom., I iv. 27-28).

15. This plan is abetted by the language of a hierarchical, status-conscious society that thinks more in terms of positions than of the persons who temporarily occupy them: “Although 'tis fit that Cassio have his place—/ For sure he fills it up with great ability” (III. iii. 246-47); “Sir, there is especial commission come from Venice to depute Cassio in Othello's place” (IV. ii. 200-21).

16. The question is, after how much time? Iago seems to regard good timing here as a feel for the right amount of time; but in fact he begins his abuse of Othello in the scene that follows the consummation of the latter's twice-interrupted wedding rites. Is it the passage of time within the relationship, the wearing away of the original romantic impulse by the realities of married life, or the trauma of the sexual event, that makes Othello vulnerable to Iago's suggestions? Shakespeare's handling of the “dilatory” time that separates the implied consummation of the sexual relationship from what follows it in the play deliberately exacerbates this question.

17. “Supervisor” is the Q reading; F has “Would you the super-vision grossy gape on, / Behold her topp'd?” If F is a sophistication, as the majority of editors suppose, the implication is that Q's “supervisor” evoked for a contemporary reader trying to make sense of Shakespeare's text not the onlooker but the spectacle of Desdemona being topped; this in itself suggests how the word overdetermines Othello's imaginative involvement in what it makes him see. The line also seems to express a desire to prostitute Desdemona—a fantasy befitting someone conscious of having gained, in the words of the motto which the Moorish prince chooses in Merchant of Venice, “what many men desire.” The same fantasy may also emerge in censored form in Othello's “I had been happy, if the general camp, / Pioners and all, had tasted her sweet body, / So I had nothing known” (III. iii. 345-47).

18. Summoned by a husband who has become convinced that she is a “subtle whore,” Desdemona responds with a marital submissiveness that ironically confirms the image of the courtesan Othello has become obsessed with:

    DESDEMONA:

    My lord, what is your will?

    OTHELLO:

                                            Pray chuck, come hither.

    DESDEMONA:

    What is your pleasure?

    (IV. ii. 24-25)

19. For the passage from Augustine, see G. K. Hunter, “Othello and Color Prejudice,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 53 (1967), 153, and Arthur Kirsch, “The Polarization of Erotic Love in Othello,” Modern Language Review 73 (1978), 728.

20. Cf. The deathbed soliloquy: “When I have pluck'd thy rose / I cannot give it vital growth again, / It needs must wither.”

21. Comparison with The Rape of Lucrece, the precursor of Othello in its dark treatment of the ideology and the psychology of chastity, may suggest how overdetermined Othello's emotion is in these lines. His words fuse the experiences of Lucrece, the violated wife (“My name, that was as fresh / As Dian's visage, is now begrim'd and black …”), and Tarquin, her guilty violator (“As mine own face”), with the point of view of Collatine, the wronged husband. The return of material from The Rape of Lucrece consistently suggests the psychic unity of the husband-wife-adulterer configuration in Othello. As Othello approaches Desdemona in the final scene as the outraged husband, the posture he strikes recalls the rapist Tarquin approaching Lucrece to satisfy his lust (“Fair torch burn out thy light, and lend it not / To darken her whose light excelleth thine”); while his suicide, although motivated by a combination of remorse and lost honor that fuses Tarquin and Collatine, resembles in its methods, its theatrics, and its reflexive structure that of Lucrece herself (“He, he, fair lords, 'tis he, / That guides this hand to give this wound to me”).

22. Phallic connotations often attach to the idea of “good name” in Othello: preoccupation with reputation is treated as a social fetish to which the language of sexuality is drawn as if by a mysterious law of nature. Cf. Othello's response to the brawl that erupts on Cyprus: “What's the matter / That you unlace your reputation thus, / And spend your rich opinion for the name of a night-brawler?” (II. iii. 194-97). Coming from a man who has just been roused from his wedding bed, these lines suggest a response on the part of the public voice to what the private self has been engaging in.

23. The handkerchief nevertheless remains a thoroughly partriarchal fantasy-object. Through it woman seeks power over man only as the object of his desire, not (like Lady Macbeth) to exercise her will through his but merely to make herself “amiable” to him and remain the single object of his unconstant “fancies.” In spite of the feminine lineage with which Othello's story invests the handkerchief, in reality it is he who gives it to Desdemona to inhibit and obligate her.

24. Contrast the almost parthenogenic fantasy of male descent at the beginning of the play: “I fetch my life and being / From men of royal siege” (I. ii. 21-22).

25. Robert Dickes, “Desdemona: An Innocent Victim?” American Imago 25 (1968), 285.

26. Dickes, 287, 293.

27. “Very quality” is the F reading; Q reads “utmost pleasure.” It is sometimes claimed that Q is the Shakespearean version, and F an attempt to transform Q's frank, sexually assertive young woman into a more “proper” bride. But F is a more radical expression of the ontology of sexual exchange; it stresses the active investment in Othello's masculinity that Desdemona's acquiescence to it entails. (When Juliet similarly anticipates the “manning” of her blood by Romeo, she is thinking not only of being dominated by him but of feeling her own phallic stirrings achieve mastery.) It also extends the ambiguities of identification and object-relation in her earlier wish that “heaven had made her such a man,” and looks forward to Othello's “O my fair warrior” as he greets her at their reunion on Cyprus. Q's “utmost pleasure” loses F's rich fusion of submission and self-assertion by fixing Desdemona (however outspokenly) in the conventional feminine role. The sentiment it gives her is more appropriate to the docile figure to which she has been reduced in the final scenes than to the resonant figure she projects in the earlier ones.

28. Desdemona says “thy husband” rather than “my husband,” but the elision of the one into the other has been conspicuously prepared for in the immediately preceding exchange:

    EMILIA:

    Good madam, what's the matter with my lord?

    DESDEMONA:

    With who?

    EMILIA:

    Why, with my lord, madam.

    DESDEMONA:

    Who is thy lord?

    EMILIA:

                                  He that is yours, sweet lady.

29. Cf. the philosophy Othello enthusiastically accepts from Iago: “knowing what I am, I know what she will be” (IV. i. 73). The irony is that what he refuses to know about himself generates the groundless fantasies that eventually become all he knows of Desdemona.

30. Maude Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (Oxford, 1934), p. 245; Thomas F. Connolly, “Shakespeare and the Double Man,” Shakespeare Quarterly 1 (1950), 31.

31. K. W. Evans, “The Racial Factor in Othello,” Shakespeare Survey 5 (1965), 139.

32. The first version is F's, the second Q's. Most editors who comment on the variant regard it as the result of authorial revision.