Sexual Anxiety and The Male Order of Things in "Othello"

Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Thigs in "Othello"
Author(s): EDWARD A. SNOW

Source: English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 10, No. 3, TENTH ANNIVERSARY — ISSUE
THREE: Studies in Shakespeare (Autumn 1980), pp. 384-412
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43446996
Accessed: 25-11-2019 16:23 UTC
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EDWARD A. SNOW
Sexual <ł Anxiety and the ^híale Order of 'Th

in Othello
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
confound the audience of Othello. In perhaps no other of

Wr confound Shakespeare HAT puzzlesplaytheisplaythereaudience
Shakespeare such a sensetheofisdiscrepancy
watchmanbetween
there of such Othello. of a sense Romeo In of and perhaps discrepancy Juliet might no between other doubly of
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 knowl-
edge: "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 pres-
ent throughout the action as a kind of epigrammatic refrain.2 Though
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.
[384]
Edward A. Snow 385
Othello would see the truth, this texture of di
limits of what can become visible for him.
Even at the end of the play, in a context of a
final gesture is on the side of repression: "The
it be hid" (V. ii. 364-65). And it is not just any o
but the "tragic lodging" of the wedding bed
itself, seen even in its legitimized form as inim
tion. The restoration of order at the end of the
the voice that speaks in the dream Iago inve
Desdemona, / Let us be wary, let us hide our l
the same way, the anticipation of future clarif
ments will ope your lips" (V. ii. 305) - revea
forms of justice (and the "satisfaction" society
the dark and vicious place from which Iago 's o
again, your fingers to your lips? Would they w
tubes]3 for your sake!" (II. i. 176-77). The direc
reconstitute society in terms of the same imp
and repression that caused its rupture : Iago, ble
assimilated as a tormented refusal to speak; Cas
and "maim'd for ever," is installed as author
forcing the "censure" of the "hellish villain" im
left with the prospect of the state now fruitless
(its "cunning cruelty" is to "hold him long," ju
"hold" Othello in his hate), blindly revealing in
discover, isolate, and punish in its victim.
There is neither transcendence nor catharsis i
appearances of both abound. The source of ev
from within the play, much less exorcised fro
focus on Iago 's "villainy" at the end of the pla
nates appear eighteen times in the last two hun
tration and bafflement, not moral understand
such as "villain" and "damned slave" (V. ii. 242-
force at all, except insofar as they unwittingly
same hierarchically engendered malice that pro
Cassio 's exclamation, "O thou invisible spirit
name to be known by, let us call thee devil!" (I
3. Some editors also gloss clyster-pipes as syringes for vagin
such use of the word, but the doubling of function is certainly th
the place of evil where his motives originate: note the anal-sad
of genital sexuality, and the corresponding fusion of homose
386 English Literary Renaissance
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 dis-
credited), 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 Gra-
tiano, 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 ob-
ject, a private possession that was his either to keep or dispose of.4 Even
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 funda-
mental sameness: in this case a common male attitude about women as objects either of value
or adornment.
Edward A. Snow 387
Emilia's moving, ethically resonant assertion o
after the murder only makes it more difficult
pernicious effects of chastity itself, as a do
women. That Othello turns out to have been m
law itself off the hook: we are diverted from a
cal male obsessions beneath the 4 just grounds"
would have been proceeding (at least according
had Desdemona actually been unfaithful to him
to confront the predicament of every woma
archal society, we can indulge in "the pity of i
as the unfortunate victim of Othello's "tragic"
"motiveless malignity."
I
Othello , then, dramatizes a false consciousness that shapes both its pro-
tagonist and the world of the play. And the play's attitude toward this
méconnaissance 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 entertain-
ment" 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 pro-
cess the resistance to démystification 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 pur-
sues 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 con-
sciousness 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 ap-
proach 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 ostenta-
tiously displayed in the world of the play - Desdemona 's handkerchief is
paradigmatic - begins to take on the appearance of a neurotic defense
5. The phrases in quotation marks are Kenneth Burke's: see his " Othello : An Essay to Illus-
trate 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.
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 mur-
derer" (V. ii. 294) is itself the sublimation of an irrational hatred of its
object.
This pathological male animus toward sexuality is a "cause" Shake-
speare 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 Des-
demona 's murder, for instance, Othello discloses her crime to the wit-
nesses 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
6. An insightful account of the officially sanctioned view of sexuality as shameful and adul-
terous, even - or especially - when it occurs within marriage, is provided by Stephen Green-
blatt in "Improvisation and Power," forthcoming in his book Renaissance Self-Fashioning.
Edward A. Snow 389
blood, / So justly to your grave ears I'll present /
fair lady's love, / And she in mine" (I. iii. 122
analogy to emphasize how "truly" he speaks
scarcely have meant for so unhappy an associatio
innocent or accidental. Here it is specifically
Christianity that the impulses of the blood bec
a mutually thriving love becomes analogous t
The play consistently insinuates that Othello i
demona 's unfaithfulness with Cassio because a p
of the sinfulness of her sexual appetite and his
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 shamm 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 gopd hand, 1
A frank one.
Desdemona: You may, indeed, say so;
For 'twas that hand that gave away my heart.
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 Chris-
tian 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.
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 recom-
mend 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 wed-
ing-night. The handkerchief "spotted" (III. iii. 435; cf. the passage be-
low) 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:
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.
Edward A. Snow 391
Othello: Is't lost? is't gone? Speak, is't out o
Desdemona: It is not lost; but what and if it w

Othello: How?
Desdemona: I say, it is not lost. (3.4.80-85)
The doctrine of married chastity that the ha

involves a similar disavowal, and proves vulne
reason.
The idea of strangling Desdemona yields to bloodier fan

perverse judicial satisfaction of reenacting the crime in t
takes over Othello's imagination: "Strumpet, I come. /
heart those charms, thine eyes, are blotted; / Thy bed, lu
with lust's blood be spotted" (V. i. 34-36 )9 Just as Desdem
bed was stained with the blood that gave evidence of
his), that same bed must be stained with the same blood
ment.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 experi-
ence 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 appro-
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. Ill 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.
pria te 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 sub-
merged 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 attempt-
ing to recover what he lost when he deflowered Desdemona, and to
deny what he thereby discovered and released in her - and in himself
11. The "napkin" spotted with strawberries evokes the menstrual cloth as well as the wed-
ding 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."
Edward A. Snow 393
as well. "Therefore," he commands, "confess th

For to deny each article with oath / Cannot rem
conception / That I do groan withal" (V. ii. 53-
that smothering Desdemona is a displaced attem
throat and smiting the malignant Turk) to pu
himself, something that has been sexually enge
stands that a principle is involved ("else shell b
that in killing her he is acting not just for himsel
Not only did she betray Brabantio for Othello
but she caused all these men to betray themse
stability of the male world - its certainties, its
cious sense of honor - depends on the suppress
in and through Desdemona.
From this point of view, the act of deflow
baffled attempt to undo it, are beneath Othello
versibility 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 lig
Thou cunning 'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume. When I have pluc
I cannot give it vital growth again,
It needs must wither. Til smell thee on the tr
O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade
Justice to break her sword. One more, one
Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill
And love thee after. (V. ii. 8-19)
Othello manages to have it both ways in this n

"death" will quiet rather than arouse her, pu
13. Originally it was Brabantio who "lov'd" Othello, and

Desdemona surreptitiously displaces her father in this origin
both Brabantio 's feelings of betrayal and Othello's corresp
edged. There is similar irony in Desdemona 's attempt to med
since it was she who came between them in the first place -
the intrusion of sexuality into the stable, "innocent" worl
speare's heroines face this danger. Portia takes Bassanio away
between Romeo and Mercutio; in both cases the potential of m
the heterosexual bond. In The Winter's Tale Polixenes speaks m
childhood friendship with Leontes as a time of innocence that
had not women intervened in their world and separated them
conversation that jealousy begins to take hold of Leontes.
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 pro-
test, "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 "bear-
ing" 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 en-
gulf his own inner being.14
Ill
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).
14. Cf. Mercurio: "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.
Edward A. Snow 395
When Othello subsequently demands of Iag
(III. iii. 364), Iago complies by engendering i
copulation with Desdemona (regardless of wh
a violent, scarcely expressible rage ("Death
monstrous! monstrous!"). Othello becomes ab
makes him the guilty and at the same time
primal scene of his own marriage. This int
sexual act is the object that "poisons sight," th
"too hideous to be shown" (III. iii. 107-08). Iag
bantio by making copulation with his daughter
tion, and in such a way that he becomes mor
"Even now, now, very now, an old black ram /
ewe" (I. i. 88-89). We shall see in a moment how
who has been cuckolded and displaced takes
self. Iago 's subsequent meditation on the impo
the desire to catch Desdemona in the act manag
real barrier is Othello's participation in what
Othello: Would I were satisfied!
Iago: I see, sir, you are eaten up with passio
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"
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 Shake-
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 "super-
visor," 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 com-
pulsively 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 procréants 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]
speare'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).
Edward A. Snow 397
That have the office opposite to Saint Peter,

And keeps the gate of hell! You, you! ay, y
We have done our course; there's money for
I pray you turn the key and keep our coun
Othello's cynicism overreaches itself here t

rooted misogyny. "Procréants" becomes syn
ers," a term of bitter, self-contemptuous ab
with" Othello, now a euphemism for copulat
were what Desdemona 's prostitution consi
sardonically takes on the role of Desdemona
one can similarly detect beneath his contempt
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
Lodovico: Who, I, my lord?
Othello: Ay, you did wish that I would mak
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 h

for Othello a demonstration of her promiscuit
insists, is the key word. It recalls the public dec
her lord and husband with which Desdemona b
you perceive in all this noble company / Wh
ence?" (I. iii. 179-80), as well as her parting
begins to pour his pestilence in his ear, "Be as
/ What e'er you be, I am obedient" (III. iii. 8
touchstone for her wifely compliance to Othell
impulses.18 And Othello's innuendo that "she
yet go on / And turn again" makes clear t
18. Summoned by a husband who has become convinced th

demona responds with a marital submissiveness that ironi
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)
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 pre-
tending to be "a maiden never bold of spirit" and- deceiving him into
marriage. At this level his rage is an indication of his essentially nar-
cissistic 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 knpwn 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 con-
nect 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
Edward A . Snow 399
which Othello comes to see Cassio in his place

coming to see that place from Brabantio's. Hi
tion with the Cassio who displaces him is simi
sense of himself as Brabantio's Cassio. The first
the play is struck when the cuckolded father
"precedent" on the newly-married husband, w
Moor, if thou hast eyes to see. / She has deceiv'
thee" (I. iii. 292-93). The decisive moment in Iago
comes when he is able to make Othello look at h
in terms of Brabantio's warning:
Iago: She did deceive her father, marrying yo
And when she seem'd to shake and fear your
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 Des demona' 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 defdy 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 111 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
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 Modem Language Review 73 (1978), 728.
Edward A. Snow 401
as a "naturar' expression of sin; but when Ot

tion that has become "black as mine own face,
manipulated by a language calculated to mak
The image of blackness with which Othello d
suspicion of Desdemona has wrought in him is
unacknowledged feelings about his own sexu
name, that was as fresh / As Dian 's visage, is
As mine own face" (III. iii. 386-88). On the surf
of male vanity: Desdemona 's chastity is the log
yet it is significant to Othello only as a mir
self-image. But what seeks expression through
repressed material through a defense erected a
fusion and self-contempt. The possibility of
causes him to see himself (as if for the first tim
that blackness as a measure of sexual corrup
grace. One associates Diana more readily with
chastity, and "freshness" more with things unp
Othello appears subconsciously concerned w
that has passed between Desdemona and him
change that has caused him to view himself as
chaste.21 "Begrim'd" suggests contaminatio
"black" is an intrinsic quality, hence contamin
"Her" has no authority, and is almost certai
to make sense of F 's "My" (the lines are mi
conflict between the two readings (Q2 provi
obviously calls for, and what is thus in a sense
catches perfectly the confusion that besets this
20. Cf. The deathbed soliloquy: "When I have pluck'd thy ro

again, / It needs must wither."
21 . Comparison with The Rape of Lucrece, the precursor of Ot
ideology and the psychology of chastity, may suggest how ov
is in these lines. His words fuse the experiences of Lucrece, t
was as fresh / As Dian 's visage, is now begrim'd and black . .
("As mine own face"), with the point of view of Collatine, t
of material from The Rape of Lucrece consistently suggests the
adulterer configuration in Othello. As Othello approaches Des
outraged husband, the posture he strikes recalls the rapist
satisfy his lust ("Fair torch burn out thy light, and lend it n
excelleth thine"); while his suicide, although motivated by a c
honor that fuses Tarquin and Collatine, resembles in its meth
structure that of Lucrece herself ("He, he, fair lords, 'tis he, /
wound to me").
ship 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 revolt-
ing face of his physical self.
One component of Othello's jealousy, then, is a patriarchal con-

science 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 under-
goes 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 anxie-
ties her power to choose activates. When she attempts to mediate
between father and husband and negotiate her own passage from daugh-
ter 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:
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.
Edward A. Snow 403
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
I am hitherto your daughter. But here's my h
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 spee

the orderly passage from generation to generati
eternally recurrent Oedipal triangle, in which
an analogue for both the husband of his daught
wife. Desdemona seems to equate her filial duty
mother's marital duty to him, and then promp
leave him for Othello. The movement from "
duty" to "so much duty ... I may profess / Due
makes it sound like Desdemona owes the sam
husband, and that she does not so much divid
Cordelia) as take it away from one and give it t
her mother's place in the syntactical flow, Othe
in the position of lordship over her. The speech
outside the filial structure, where the erotic im
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 im-
pulsive 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 lan-
guage 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 charmer, and could almost read
The thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept it,
T would make her amiable, and subdue my father
Entirely to her love; but if she lost it,
Or made a gift of it, my father's eye
Should hold her 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 patri-
linear 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!"
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 Mac-
beth) 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.
Edward A. Snow 405
(IV. ii. 57-60).24 Conversely, when Desdem

Othello evokes the maternal role, she is most i
him the anxieties Iago manipulates. On behal
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 Oth-
ello's, the focus is not so much on a fault in her character as on the path-
ological 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 "in-
tends 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 "cas-
trature" 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
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.
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, 111 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 empow-
ered subject. Desdemona has obviously acquired a sense of her "abili-
ties" 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 over-

reach themselves, and the ominous note of maternal domination is
sounded:
Assure thee,
If I do vow a friendship, 111 perform it
To the last article. My lord shall never rest,
Edward A. Snow 407
111 watch him tame, and talk him out of pati
His bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift,
111 intermingle everything he does
With Cassio 's suit. (III. iii. 20-26)
Innocent as these words are, their image of the

of forced instruction suggests the Witches of M
111 drain him dry as hay:
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his penthouse lid;
He shall live a man forbid;
Weary sevn nights, nine times nine,
Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine. (Mac., I. iii
The underlying male fear is thralldom to the de

sexual appetite in woman. It is crucial to rea
threat appears not when something intrinsica
demona 's will, but when the conventional boun
in upon it. Speaking for herself, Desdemona beg
cious vow: "If I do vow a friendship, 111 perfor
But as she begins to speak as Othello's wife, her
resonance, and becomes instead a kind of pet
"His bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift,
he does / With Cassio 's suit." Only when she
men create to limit her freedom and power doe
they fear and despise ("Players in your huswifer
beds").
The tragedy of the play, then, is the inability of Desdemona to es-
cape or triumph over restraints and Oedipal prohibitions that domesti-
cate 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
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 stir-
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 ever-
more 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 forthright-
ness 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
rings 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.
Edward A. Snow 409
sentimental investment in the wedding sheets a

touch with Othello's murderous fancies. Indeed,
up the figure of the husband-executioner:
Prithee to-night
Lay on my bed my wedding-sheets - rememb
And call thy husband hither.28 (IV. ii. 104-06)
Strumpet, I come.
Forth of my heart, those charms, thine eyes,
Thy bed, lust-stain 'd, shall with lust's blood be
Desdemona speaks more truly than she r

Othello, "Be as your fancies teach you; / W
obedient" (III. iii. 88-S9).29 One of the things th
Othello so terrible is the sense of complicity of
to assert a reality-principle - the voice of re
Christian values, and finally even Desdemon
destructive fantasies. At the end of the play
speak from a place outside the general confu
her truth she intuitively grasps the scope of the
her silent: "Let heaven and men and devils, let
shame against me, yet 111 speak" (V. ii. 221-2
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
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 gen-
erates 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.
who "hates the slime / That sticks on filthy deeds," Iago who gets
Othello to see himself as "black" and counsels him to murder Desde-
mona 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
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.
Edward Aš Snow 411
in the stable male order of things. It is a terribl

introjection of the father's prohibitive cause,
(the outsider's insecurity, the theatrical display
disappears from Othello's voice. As he proceed
wife and then himself, that bond-slave and paga
man, he finally seems to feel at home in the Ve
"mad" he may be as he approaches Desdemona 's
knows that he is acting in the name of men, as m
and their faith. At the end of the play, as he fina
with the intimacy of an equal ("Soft you; a w
go"); he is confident that damned though he may
state some service, and they know it.
GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY
Appendix: Two Cruxes in Othello
1. "Look on the tragic lodging (Q) / loading (F) of this bed."
Lodging means "the beating down of corn (by wind or rain)." The pun on "
and the apparently accidental suggestion of "quarters" in "lodging" have bee
jected to as distractions that the F reading happily does away with, whether b
thorial or editorial design. Both these accidents of language, however, gather up
portant motifs: cf. Iago 's discourse on the "garden" of the body and the planting of
uality there, and the Clown's conversation with Desdemona concerning Cas
whereabouts ("To tell you where he lodges is to tell you where I lie"). "Lodging"
allows for a final subliminal emphasis on the place of the wedding bed, and on the t
investments that have been made in the sexual relation it symbolizes ("But th
where I have garner 'd up my heart, / Where either I must live or bear no lif
Textual and thematic support, however, can also be marshalled in favor of
"loading." It sounds a note of burdensomeness that is emphasized again at the en
the speech, in the play's final line: "This heavy act with heavy heart relate." It
sexualizes the line, and renders it vaguely obscene, as in The Rape of Lucrece, a
that was surely on Shakespeare's mind as he wrote the final act of Othello: "She b
the load of lust he left behind, / And he the burthen of a guilty mind." What culmi
in this version of the line are the images of insemination, conception, and monst
or abortive birth that run throughout the play. We are left with a final referen
the "burden" of sexuality, and a final view of the wedding bed bearing not new
but death and self-destruction. The three bodies now stain the wedding sheet
the "lust" that already spots them, and subliminally the audience may view them
Othello does Desdemona 's blood-stains) as confirmations of sexuality 's guilt.
The crux, therefore, generates a complex of ideas that suggest what it is that we are
being admonished to look on and turn away from. The ideal would be to combine both
readings, not choose between them. Nor does it require an esoteric post-structuralist
theory of the text to do so. The internal evidence that supports both "loading" and
"lodging" suggests that the variant may be the result of authorial revision, which all
editors agree accounts for many of the differences between Q and F. The existence
of two authorial readings does not necessarily imply a preference for one over the
other (especially in the case of two texts whose relationship is as problematical and
multi-layered as the Q and F versions of Othello); it can just as easily indicate two
equally desired readings, a species of pun which the exigencies of text and perform-
ance will not permit.
2. ... of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian (Q) / Judean (F)
Richer than all his tribe;
External evidence tends to favor Q's "Indian

covered in the writings of Shakespeare's con
norant of the value of the gold and precious ston
either give to European explorers or trade awa
are the "pearl of great price" and the "pearls
ment. Moreover, the oblique reference to Judas
jealousy had his wife killed) is reinforced by t
that have been accumulating around Desdem
Richard S. Veit points out, the word "tribe" is
in Shakespeare.33 It primarily connotes "clan"
"tribes of the world": Coriolanus uses it to ref
with Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Iago
become part of the texture of xenophobia and
play throughout ("One Michael Cassio, a Flor
and become especially dense in Othello's fina
The variants may again be the result of authori
than with "lodging/loading," the only full inte
both readings. Each variant suggests a differen
the traveller, the adventurer, full of exotic lo
"Judean" makes him the self-consciously conv
size complementary aspects of Desdemona 's
prized possession; "Judean," something in w
self. Finally, they reflect the divided consciousn
speech: "Indian" attempts to excuse what he did
folly; "Judean" makes him guilty of delibera
expiation is possible.
33. Richard S. Veit, "'Like the Base Judean': A

Othello Shakespeare Quarterly 26 (1975), 466-69.

Sexual Anxiety and The Male Order of Things in "Othello"

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Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Thigs in "Othello"

Author(s): EDWARD A. SNOW

Sexual <ł Anxiety and the ^híale Order of 'Th

We see the ground whereon these woes do lie,

confound the audience of Othello. In perhaps no other of

It follows that Desdemona 's assurances of loyalty are of little avail

Othello: Why? what art thou?

Similarly, it is more as a husband than a cuckold that Othello becomes

Consciously, her bed (Othello will prove especially susceptible to the

Desdemona: It is not lost; but what and if it w

The doctrine of married chastity that the ha

The idea of strangling Desdemona yields to bloodier fan

as well. "Therefore," he commands, "confess th

Othello manages to have it both ways in this n

13. Originally it was Brabantio who "lov'd" Othello, and

Othello's jealousy, then, is immune to reason largely because of

Othello [to Emilia]: Some of your function, mistress;

Othello: What, not a whore?

That have the office opposite to Saint Peter,

Othello's cynicism overreaches itself here t

Desdemona 's almost eager subjection to her h

18. Summoned by a husband who has become convinced th

Desdemona: My lord, what is your will?

which Othello comes to see Cassio in his place

Ay, there's the point; as (to be bold with you)

What speaks here is a contempt latent in Othello himself, although it

as a "naturar' expression of sin; but when Ot

20. Cf. The deathbed soliloquy: "When I have pluck'd thy ro

One component of Othello's jealousy, then, is a patriarchal con-

The increasingly complex hypotaxis of this spee

The succession of generations here is a curiously matrilinear affair, the

23. The handkerchief nevertheless remains a thoroughly partriarchal fantasy-object.

(IV. ii. 57-60).24 Conversely, when Desdem

I know't; I thank you. You do love my lord;

Do not doubt that; before Emilia here,

Eventually, however, Desdemona 's reassurances to Cassio do over-

Innocent as these words are, their image of the

The underlying male fear is thralldom to the de

But the erotic principle in her is gradually transformed by "the curse

Othello: Are not you a strumpet?

This tangle of denials and contingencies is the language of self demanded

Despite obvious sympathy for Desdemona, Shakespeare treats this

sentimental investment in the wedding sheets a

Desdemona speaks more truly than she r

It has become a commonplace of Othello criticism that Iago is the

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

Othello initially appears to take Desdemona 's part, pleading with

in the stable male order of things. It is a terribl

Appendix: Two Cruxes in Othello

1. "Look on the tragic lodging (Q) / loading (F) of this bed."

External evidence tends to favor Q's "Indian

33. Richard S. Veit, "'Like the Base Judean': A

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