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Othello
Third lecture
Othello’s “psychomachia”
• Iago’s temptation of Othello: one long scene, III, 3: Othello’s
“psychomachia,” the contest for his soul.
• Without fully appreciating what he’s saying, Othello exclaims of
Desdemona at l. 90ff, “Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul/
But I do love thee! And when I love thee not/ Chaos is come again.”
• In essence, “Damned if I don’t love you!”
• Iago aims at falsifying Othello’s entire experience of love.
• Or perhaps replacing it? Notice how often the word “love” occurs in
Iago’s discourse of temptation.
• “My lord, you know I love you” (l. 117)
• To which Othello says, “I think thou dost.”
• And when Othello says he’ll choose between love and jealousy, Iago
says, “I’m glad of this, for now I shall have reason/ To show the love
and duty I bear you” (l. 194).
• And after reminding him of Desdemona’s deception of her father,
Iago says, “I humbly do beseech you of your pardon/ For too much
loving you.
• To which Othello says, “I am bound to thee forever.”
• A contest of two “loves”?
Othello’s trial
• Can we expect Othello to see through Iago? If so, how
would he?
• Iago aims at a totalizing of Othello’s understanding and
experience.
• Can he evade this?
• See his soliloquy at l. 258ff. He comes to think of
infidelity in marriage and being cuckholded as inevitable.
• BUT there’s one decisive moment for Othello, which
might enable him to evade Iago’s theater of suspicion.
• III, 3, 277: “Look where she comes./ If she be false, O
then heaven mocks itself./ I’ll not believe’t!”
• For this one moment, Othello seems poised on the
fulcrum of good and evil, between Desdemona’s love
and Iago’s “love.”
• And the next action seems decisive – and occurs without
Iago.
The handkerchief
• At III, 3, 284, Othello performs an act of Iago-like
fantasy: he pretends a “pain” on his forehead,
that is, that he has grown a cuckhold’s horns.
• Which Desdemona, innocent of his fantasy, tries
to touch, to bind with her handkerchief –
• A figure of health-giving love, trying to touch his
forehead – and his mind?
• And Othello’s hand, pushes hers away, causing
the handkerchief to fall.
• And he forbids her to pick it up.
• Thus forbidding her to touch his head and mind
and insuring that the handkerchief will become a
malevolent thing.
• This is a moment at the dead center of the play.
Othello + Iago
• Othello asks for “proof” – is “proof” of goodness/honesty
ever possible? (III, 3, 383ff.)
• Rather than “proof,” Iago feeds him with only more
fantasy:
• The fantasy image of Desdemona’s sexual relation with
Cassio and the handkerchief as love token.
• Which Othello accepts without question.
• And vows himself to Iago’s love.
• Which Iago accepts in what appears a sort of inverse
marriage vow: Othello kneels at l. 460.
• And Iago too kneels and vows himself to Othello.
• “Now thou art my lieutenant.”
• And Iago replies, “I am thine own forever.”
• This “marriage” essentially replaces and cancels
Othello’s marriage to Desdemona.
• Or will if it is ratified.
The handkerchief again
• At III, 4, Othello makes of the handkerchief a fetish.
• That is, an object of superstition, of conjuration.
• Instead of a gift of love, a neutral object that takes its
meaning from the act of gift . . .
• . . . it becomes an object with alleged intrinsic power.
• “There’s magic in the web of it.”
• A 200-year-old sibyl wove it of silk from holy silk worms,
and died it in “mummy” from maidens’ hearts.
• Its effect is to compel love (which cannot be
compelled?).
• Desdemona recoils in horror from what Othello has now
made of the handkerchief: “Then would to God I had
never seen’t!”
• It now seems something magical, a fetish, from Othello’s
pre-Christian past.
• Ironically, Othello seems not even to see the
handkerchief in the scene in which Iago
arranged for him to see it passed between
Bianca and Cassio.
• IV.1, 170: Iago asks, “Did you see the
handkerchief?”
• And Othello answers, “Was that mine?”
• The supposed “proof” become insignificant in
relation to the fantasy that has been created.
“It is the cause, it is the cause”
• V.2: Othello goes to Desdemona with a torch, and addresses these
words to himself.
• But what is “the cause”?
• “Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars.”
• Simply, “It is the cause.”
• He clearly is conflicted between her beauty and his need to fulfill
“the cause.”
• The poignancy of his understanding of the finality of what he’s about
to do: he cannot “relume” her light, restore the rose he “plucks.”
• The kisses may make us think he’ll catch himself, repent, stop,
especially perhaps when she wakes.
• Finally she is able to glimpse what it is he intends and to assert
herself against Iago’s charge.
• Othello objects that her defense makes “murder” what he thought “a
sacrifice.” As of course it is.
• But a sacrifice of what? A sacrifice to what?
• She asks for process: Let Cassio speak, require Othello to confront
the evidence.
• But his response is simply her death, but a death that does not
disturb her beauty – recall the earlier hint of necrophilia in “I will kill
thee/ And love thee after.”
“The cause”?
• Is there a profound misogyny in it?
• Othello, once seemingly free of the need
of dominance, has been brought under its
spell.
• Lover reverts to warrior? Or rather the
lover becomes dominator.
• Violence now directed inward, toward both
her and himself?
• Even before he knows the truth, he sees
the immense alteration: V, 2, 98ff.
Should she forgive him?
• In response to Emilia, Desdemona says, “A
guiltless death I die.”
• But also, in response to Emilia’s question:
“Nobody – I myself. Farewell./Commend me to
my kind lord. O, farewell!”
• Lines missing in the Fishburne/Branagh film.
• Justice would demand that he not be forgiven.
• And any feminist sympathies we have should be
outraged at her forgiveness, her apparent
turning the guilt on herself.
• The syndrome of the battered wife?
• Or can we see more in it than that?
• How would the play be different it she’d accused
Othello?
Othello’s suicide
• The “decent thing to do”?
• He imagines his damnation for what he has
done at l. 274ff.
• What to make of his final lines? T.S. Eliot
thought Othello was just trying to “cheer himself
up.”
• Did he love “too well”? (agreed “not wisely”!)
• Does his death mean anything?
• Does he give any meaning to his death?
• Can it be felt to have meaning in relation to his
descent into misogyny?