Othello

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?