1 / 11

Othello

Othello. Third lecture. Othello’s “psychomachia”. Iago’s temptation of Othello: one long scene, III, 3: Othello’s “psychomachia,” the contest for his soul.

brigid
Download Presentation

Othello

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. Othello Third lecture

  2. 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”?

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. “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.”

  9. “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.

  10. 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?

  11. 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?

More Related