Women In Othello Flashcards
(5 cards)
History= women on the hole have been consistently oppressed for most of history, but this does not discount the fact that…..
There’ve been some exceptionally strong women like queen Elizabeth i and those who we would consider ‘proto-feminists’ since classical antiquity.
Why Desdemona is more complex that we think, ‘othello’ could more aptly be entitled: ‘the divine Desdemona’
She is courageous in love and progressive in values, she’s also a selfless vessel of virtue whose eventual martyrdom has inspired pathos through the ages. And yet, there’s also an argument to be made that this is precisely what makes her unlikeable. The popular opinion over the years has haloised her character, which is understandable given the contrast against iago’s evil and othello’s misguidedness.
Interestingly, she embodies irony: she promises the archetype of a perfect, saintly woman but dramatises instead the failure of a woman ever becoming perfect or saintly.
Her tragedy, then, has very little do with whether she’s cheated on othello w/ Cassio but rather, its the disposition of ‘holiness’ that she consistently projects in the play, and worse from the others asserting this belief around her.
Frequent, earnest allusions to ‘heaven’ or its lexical variants
‘Divine des’ - alliteration highlights the binding and inseparable quality of divinity that is associated with with her being.
‘Her name, that was a fresh as fresh as dian’s visage’ and even in a pun, recognises that ‘she’s framed as fruitful as the elements’. ‘Fruitful’ here connotes either a generosity in spirit or in sexuality. The point, though, is that all men see des in superhuman terms, comparing her to a saint or to the goddess of chastity.
Yet we see from des’s behaviour that she’s clearly marked by human flaws
Such as stubbornness, immaturity and a certain lack of empathy
Even more surprisingly, it is the men who make such a big deal of her humanness and depict it as something monstrous and unforgiving.
Her downfall can be put simply as doing the right thing at the wrong time despite good intentions
Guilt tripping
In her annoying insistence on othello’s forgiveness of Cassio impatiently asked him to retract his demotion of Cassio which echoes ‘her captain’s captain’
She says that she’s a ‘child to childing’ after oth strikes and calls her a whore, we may be reminded of her self-infantilisation, which modern feminists may be furious to see.
She badgers and cajoles and even borderline guilt trips othello into granting her wish and refuse to acknowledge that such decisions require time and thought. The problem isnt the wife nagging her husband but an individual not registering the time and effort to consider a decision.
