SOURCE: Shurgot, Michael W. “Othello's Jealousy and the ‘Gate of Hell.’” Upstart Crow 12 (1992): 96-104.

[In the following essay, Shurgot examines Othello's sexual possessiveness, as indicated by the objectifying imagery of his speech concerning Desdemona.]

For several years I have been alternatively intrigued and horrified by some of Othello's language in Acts III and IV. At III. iii. 270ff, and IV. ii. 57ff, Othello's language not only echoes Iago's bestial attitude towards human sexuality but also suggests something I find horrid in Othello's perception of Desdemona that may be more true of married men than they wish to admit. While I recognize the critical danger of making Othello into a case study, and realize that Othello is an individual character in a particular dramatic setting,¹ I would nonetheless like to explore some of the implications of Othello's sexual images and relate these implications to Renaissance and contemporary views of sexual jealousy. I will then try to mold this information and some amateur sociological surveys among my students into a coherent hypothesis about a frightening motif that surfaces in Othello's language once he is convinced that Desdemona has betrayed him.

Most married men, myself included, believe and would assert that they love their wife as a person, and that their love is multi-dimensional: i.e., emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Male love is also, of course, sexual, grounded in a physical attraction that, if genuine, will last a lifetime and will remain the most dramatic expression of this very complex and demanding human emotion. Most married couples would admit that a healthy, mutually satisfying sexual life is absolutely essential to a marriage (cf. Juliet's erotic soliloquy in R&J, III. ii. 1-31, to choose just one Shakespearean example of this realization); and most would admit that any disruption or frustration of this sexual relationship can be fatal to a marriage. For a marriage to be mutually fulfilling and satisfying, one must feel, whether male or female, that one is loved for oneself, for the person one is, and not as a “possession.” Women especially, and rightly, resent the notion that they are “owned” by their husbands and prefer a relationship based on mutual trust and respect.

During many discussions with my students about the relationship between Othello and Desdemona, and the role of Othello's jealousy in that relationship, I have generated diverse and often heated discussions about the degree of sexual possessiveness in Othello. The most frank comments have occurred when I have suggested that some of Othello's images are specifically genital and portray Desdemona as a sexual object. At III. iii. 270-73, Othello says: “I had rather be a toad / And live upon the vapor of a dungeon / Than keep a corner in the thing I love / for others' uses.”² At IV. ii. 57-62, in the “brothel scene,” he cries: “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! / Or keep it as a cestern for foul toads / To knot and gender in!” One cannot be certain that the adverb “there” in the second excerpt is a genital reference, although the context, and Othello's earlier remark about keeping a “corner” in the “thing” he says he loves, strongly support this suggestion.³ I will return to these and related images later, but for now I want to focus on my students' responses to these lines. Many female students have argued stridently that they believe Othello's references here are definitely genital, and furthermore, that Shakespeare has captured in Othello's language a pervasive, if unspoken, element in men's sexual attitudes towards their wives; i.e., that despite their claims to the contrary, and their insistence on the multi-dimensional nature of married love, men still view their wives at some subliminal level as sexual possessions, and that this possessiveness is implicitly genital.⁴ Male students in these discussions invariably protest this opinion just as stridently as females advocate it; indeed, male students sometimes protest too much, suggesting perhaps an unwillingness to admit what they suspect may be true.

Before returning to these and other remarks of Othello, let us consider some Renaissance and contemporary material about jealousy as a context for Othello's actions and attitudes in the play. Andreas Capellanus' second rule of love states: “He who is not jealous cannot love.”⁵ Elsewhere, Capellanus writes that jealousy is “the very substance of love, without which true love cannot exist …” (17). For courtly lovers of the Middle Ages, jealousy indicated a true “passionate” love of the kind not possible between married couples; hence, husband and wife should avoid jealousy “like the pestilence,” for it is very much “frowned upon” (17). Thus for Capellanus, romantic love should not be the basis for marriage, because it leads to jealousy.

Some contemporary psychologists and researchers on marriage and jealousy agree. N. and G. O'Neill write that romantic love alone is not a sufficient basis for marriage:

Romantic love is blind and often irrational; liking, however, is rational and based upon respect rather than passion. This is not to say that passion is not important, but only to demonstrate that a love that encompasses both liking and passion is far stronger than love based solely on passion. Without liking and the respect that it implies we believe that true open love cannot be achieved, for mutual respect is essential to the establishment of identity, equality and open communication between mates.⁶

The O'Neills characterize jealousy as a “destructive cancer” which is “never … a function of love but of our insecurities and dependencies. It is the fear of a loss of love and it destroys that very love. It is detrimental to and a denial of a loved one's personal identity” (237). Abraham Maslow also identifies jealousy as inherently destructive; he places jealousy within what he calls “D-Love,” which is “dependency love, deficiency love” and always involves jealous behavior, as opposed to “B-Love,” or “being love,” which seeks the good of the partner and is devoid of jealousy.⁷

Other researchers have characterized specific male and female differences in jealous behavior. Gordon Clanton and Lynn G. Smith, editors of Jealousy, summarize pertinent conclusions reached by several researchers:

Men are more apt to deny jealous feelings; women are more apt to acknowledge them. Men are more likely than women to express jealous feelings through rage and even violence, but such outbursts are often followed by despondency. Jealous men are more apt to focus on the outside sexual activity of the partner and they often demand a recital of the intimate details; jealous women are more likely to focus on the emotional involvement between her partner and the third party. Men are more likely to externalize the cause of the jealousy, more likely to blame the partner, or the third party, or ‘circumstances.’ Women often internalize the cause of jealousy; they blame themselves. Similarly, a jealous man is more likely to display competitive behavior toward the third party while a jealous woman is more likely to display possessive overcrowded behavior.⁸

Gregory L. White finds that while “Perception of a sexual motive was the only predictor of perceived relationship threat for both males and females,” perception of a sexual motive “predicted male but not female anger.”⁹ He adds that “concern about the couple's unsatisfactory sex life may reasonably but inaccurately lead to an inference of a sexual motive in partner” (28). Such perceptions of a motive among married couples also “would seem to indicate that vaguely formed suspicions or expectations about the likelihood of partner involvement with another reflect an underlying fear of sexual inadequacy” (29).

Let us return to Othello. That his jealousy implies insecurity and dependence seems clear; he is a stranger to Venetian society, and thus vulnerable to Iago's innuendoes. Othello also fears, at least temporarily, that he is sexually inadequate. He is quite prone to anger and violence once convinced that Desdemona has betrayed him, even asking for intimate details which Iago luridly provides in his “dream.”¹⁰ Othello also seems initially quite possessive of Desdemona; immediately after reflecting on his blackness, his lacking “soft parts of conversation,” and his “vale of years,” Othello cries: “O curse of marriage! / That we can call these delicate creatures ours, / And not their appetites!” (III. iii. 268-70). Desdemona may be “delicate,” but she is also (and nonetheless) a possession. Hence, to Othello, marriage is a curse.

Consider again 270ff:

                                        … I had rather be a toad
And live upon the vapor of a dungeon
Than keep a corner in the thing I love
For others' uses.

Othello says he loves a “thing” (III. iii. 270-73). Two points are crucial here. First, as Partridge explains, “thing” is often in Shakespeare a genital reference. Consider, for example, Iago and Emilia a moment later in III. iii: “Do not you chide; I have a thing for you. / You have a thing for me? It is a common thing …” (xi. 301-02). Secondly, Othello values “things” as possessions. He rhapsodizes about the magical origins and qualities of the handkerchief, and although Iago has earlier told Othello that he saw Michael Cassio wipe his beard with it, when Othello confronts Desdemona about the handkerchief in III. iv, he seems as upset about its actual loss as about its apparent desecration by Cassio: “… and take heed on't, / Make it a darling like your precious eye. / To lose't or give't away were such perdition / As nothing else [my italics] could match” (III. iv. 65-68). A few lines later, Othello will ask “Is't lost? Is't gone?” And moments earlier in this scene, Othello spoke of the supposed purity of Desdemona's kisses as if that purity itself were a possession a thief might have stolen: “I found not Cassio's kisses on her lips. / He that is robb'd, not wanting what is stol'n, / Let him not know't, and he's not robb'd at all” (III. iii. 342-43). Thus Othello's saying he loves a “thing” suggests his characteristic possessiveness and also specifically implies that Desdemona is a genital possession.

Othello then subdivides this “thing” into “corners” one of which he now seems to imagine himself sharing for others' “uses.” (Note that this is a plural possessive, suggesting the “general camp?”) The word “uses” is most revealing and, I believe, most horrifying. Desdemona in this sentence is a “thing” to be, not loved, but “used.” Does Othello in this crisis forged by Iago reveal how he actually “loves” Desdemona? Is this the kind of truth about his married love which this crisis reveals? Does he really, or mainly love Desdemona only sexually, and can one locate in his sudden rage of Acts III and IV a passionate anger at being rejected sexually from that “thing” which he saw as existing for only his “use?”

In IV. ii. 57-62, Othello cries:

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!
Or keep it as a cestern for foul toads
To knot and gender in!

Othello's fury propels him into three consecutive “either … or” assertions which exemplify—at least here—the brutal simplicity of his mind, suggest why he resolves to murder Desdemona, and herald his painful, frightening dichotomy as he stands over Desdemona in V. ii: “Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee / And love thee after” (18-19). I have suggested above that the “there” of l. 57 is genital; if I am right, then Othello has “garner'd up” his heart, not in Desdemona the whole person, but specifically in her vagina. The following lines, especially the image of the fountain—“from the which my current runs / Or else dries up”—suggest, with the admitted difficulty of the preposition “from,” Othello's seminal fluid, which will be forever “dried up,” if Desdemona is a whore. The Riverside gloss of “fountain” as “source, spring” i.e., source or spring of his semen, further supports this reading, as does the circular shape of “cestern,” where Othello grotesquely imagines foul toads knotting, a brutal, animalistic reduction of Desdemona's genitals to a thing which he imagines himself “keeping” for “others' use” and from which he has been discarded.¹¹

I would like to conclude with two other references to Othello's speech. At IV. i. 41ff, near the end of his nearly incoherent ravings and just before his trance and fall, Othello says: “It is not words that shakes / me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and lips. Is't possible?” Noses, ears, and lips are orifices, and may be seen here (like Othello's reference to Desdemona's “precious eye” [III. iv. 66]), as vaginal displacements. In his ravings, Othello's conscious mind imperfectly masks his unconscious genital fixation.

My final example is again from the “brothel scene” in IV. ii. At l. 90, just 33 lines after the first of Othello's “there” in his assault upon Desdemona's chastity, he turns to Emilia: “You, mistress, / That have the office opposite to Saint Peter, / And keeps the gate of hell!” (90-92). “Gate of hell” is, in context, an obvious genital reference which echoes the verbal pun in “cunning whore” at l. 89, and hideously reduces Desdemona to a satanic, sexual object, her vagina an entrance into hell, which will surely corrupt other men.¹² Thus she must die.¹³

The sheer horror of Othello's so grotesquely objectifying Desdemona is compounded when one realizes that their marriage has probably not been consummated. Several factors support this probability. Iago interrupts their two nights together, first in Venice, and then on Cyprus. Othello says in II. iii: “The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue; / The profit's yet to come 'tween me and you” (9-10). After Othello re-enters to quell the fighting, Iago says: “Friends all, but now, even now; / In quarter, and in terms like bride and groom / Devesting them for bed” (II. iii. 179-81). Iago's simile presumably describes what Othello and Desdemona have just been doing: preparing to consummate their marriage. Iago insidiously concocts a perverse “bed trick” which, unlike those in Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well, frustrates rather than facilitates a marital union. Thus Othello decries as a sexual “thing” a woman he has not yet sexually loved, yet imagines having shared “stol'n hours of lust” with Michael Cassio. Othello's fantasy of Desdemona's supposedly active sexual life greatly increases his insecurity and vulnerability and thus heightens both his already intense jealousy and his thwarted possessiveness. Othello's readiness to so completely denigrate his still virginal wife intensifies the terrifying, corrosive power of the jealousy that destroys them both. Tragically, Desdemona's request to Emilia to place her wedding sheets on her and Othello's bed emphatically signals her virginity and purity. Certainly, were those sheets stained (i.e., like the handkerchief, “spotted”) with her virginal blood, Desdemona would not request them for this night.

In wine, says the proverb, there is truth; so may there be in anger.¹⁴ Othello is certainly not “all men”; but his images may reveal a sexual possessiveness common enough, at some unconscious and repulsive level, among married men towards their wives that warrants the kinds of diverse reactions among my students that I outlined above. Perhaps Othello's images capture and expose latent male sexual attitudes which wives only dimly perceive and husbands, despite or because of their protestations, only dimly acknowledge.

Notes

1. As Kenneth Burke remarks, “Shakespeare is making a play, not people.” “Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method,” in Othello: Critical Essays, ed. Susan Snyder (New York: Garland, 1988), p. 149.

2. All textual references are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

3. I do mention Eric Partridge's glosses of “thing” in Shakespeare's Bawdy (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1960), p. 149, because students must understand this word as an example of the naughty and not-so-naughty richness of Shakespeare's language. But I also say that the overtly sexual reading of these lines is not the only option.

4. I should mention that my Shakespeare classes usually include both single and married men and women ranging in age from their early to mid 20's to their mid 30's and 40's. Some of the strongest reaction to Othello's language has come from women in their 30's who are in their second marriage.

5. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. John Jay Parry, ed. Frederick W. Locke (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1957), p. 42. Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (London: J. M. Dent, rpt. 1972), writes in Third Partition, Section 3, Subsection 2, “Causes of Jealousy”: “'Tis a great fault (for some men are uxorii …) to be too fond of their wives, to dote on them …” (p. 268).

6. Nena and George O'Neill, Open Marriage (New York: M. Evans, 1972), pp. 244-45.

7. Abraham Maslow, Toward A Psychology of Being, (New York: Van Nostrand, 1968), p. 42.

8. Gordon Clanton and Lynn G. Smith, eds. Jealousy (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1977), p. 11.

9. Gregory L. White, “Jealousy and Partners' Perceived Motives for Attraction to a Rival,” Social Psychology Quarterly, 44 (1981), p. 27.

10. Matthew N. Proser, in The Heroic Image in Five Shakespearean Tragedies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), writes of Iago's dream and Othello's “participation” in it:

    Objective reality, what Othello concretely knows from personal experience outside the dream world, simply will not bear out the conclusion to which he arrives. He does precisely what Iago suggested he could not do: he “grossly gapes” upon a “scene” of lust to make his “proof,” but the real grossness lies within himself. His prurience is a shadow of Iago's lust, but it is a shadow which has been present all along, cast in his own complexion

    (129).

11. Note Othello's repetition of “keep” in these two excerpts; Desdemona's sexuality is explicitly “owned” by Othello, the sharing of which with others is apparently Othello's to determine, not Desdemona's.

12. This image is found also in King Lear, IV. vi. 124-29:

    Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
    Though women all above;
    But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
    Beneath is all the fiends': there's hell, there's darkness,
    There is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding,
    Stench, consumption.

    Consider also the couplet of sonnet # 129:

    All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
    To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

    In Boccaccio's Decameron, Third Day, Tenth Story, the monk Rustico convinces the reclusive and dim-witted Alibech that sexual intercourse is “putting the Devil back into hell.” Mark Musa and Peter E. Bondanella, eds. Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 71.

13. Regarding Othello's motivation for killing Desdemona, see Edward A. Snow, “Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello,” in Othello: Critical Essays, ed. Susan Snyder (New York: Garland, 1988). He writes: “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. … His language suggests that smothering Desdemona is a displaced attempt … 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” (p. 222). Snow's claim that Othello's sexual morality “is itself the sublimation of an irrational hatred of its object” (p. 217) may be supported by seeing Othello's intensely focused imagery of sexual disgust as indicating the depth of his hatred of Desdemona's sexuality and her sexual organs.

14. Note Othello's words in I. iii. 260-65:

                                                                          Let her have your voice.
    Vouch with me, heaven, I therefore beg it not
    To please the palate of my appetite,
    Nor to comply with heat (the young affects
    In [me] defunct) and proper satisfaction;
    But to be free and bounteous to her mind.

    I am inclined to take Othello here at his word, although one must note that he is, as Proser emphasizes, quite adept at self-characterization when the occasion arises, especially when he has a captive audience. That Othello can say these words, and apparently mean them, or think that he means them, should accentuate the sheer horror of his reducing his wife to a “thing” in a corner of which toads “knot and gender.”