Attitude Gender in Shakespeares Play Othello - Essay Example

The marriage bed is at the very heart of the tragedy of Othello; offstage but dramatically the center of attention in the first scene and again in the first scene of the second act, it is literally and symbolically at the center of the last scene and is explicitly hidden from sight at the conclusion. Whether the marriage is consummated, when it is consummated, and what the significance of this consummation is for Othello and Desdemona have all been important sources of debate about the play. Throughout its critical history, Othello, like the other problem plays, has generated passionate and radically conflicting responses--responses that are invariably tied to the critic's emotional responses to the characters and to the gender relations in the play.

Othello, Iago, and Desdemona have been loved and loathed, defended and attacked, judged and exonerated by critics just as they are by characters within the play. "Almost damned in a fair wife" is Leslie Fiedler's alternate title for his chapter on Othello in The Stranger in Shakespeare. In it he asserts of the women in the play: "Three out of four, then, [are] weak, or treacherous, or both." Thus he seconds Iago's misogyny and broadens the attack on what Leavis has called "The sentimentalists Othello," the traditional view of the play held by Coleridge, Bradley, Granville-Barker, Knight, Bayley, Gardner, and many others.

These "Othello critics," as I shall call them, accept Othello at his own high estimate. They are enamored of his "heroic music," affirm his love, and, like him, are overwhelmed by Iago's diabolism, to which they devote much of their analysis. Like Othello, they do not always argue rationally or rigorously for their views and so are vulnerable to attacks on their romanticism or sentimentality. Reacting against these traditionalists, "Iago critics" (Eliot, Empson, Kirschbaum, Rossiter, and Mason, as well as Fiedler and Leavis) take their cues from Iago.

Like him, they are attracted to Othello, unmoved by his rhetoric, and eager to "set down the pegs that make this music." They attack Othello at his most vulnerable point, his love. They support their case by quoting Iago's estimates of Othello; they emphasize Iago's realism and "honesty" while priding themselves on their own. Their realism or cynicism gives them, with Iago, apparent invulnerability. But, like "Othello critics," they share the bias and blindness of the character whose perspective they adopt. Most damagingly, both groups of critics, like both Othello and Iago, badly misunderstand and misrepresent the women in the play.

Iago's critics implicitly demean Desdemona, for if Othello's character and love are called into question, then her love for him loses its justification and validity. Explicitly they have little to say about her. Othello's critics idealize her along with the hero, but, like him, they have a tendency to see her as an object. The source of her sainthood seems a passivity verging on catatonia: "Desdemona is helplessly passive. She can do nothing whatever. She cannot retaliate even in speech; no, not even in silent feeling. ... She is helpless because her nature is infinitely sweet and her love absolute. ...

Desdemona's suffering is like that of the most loving of dumb creatures tortured without cause by the being he adores." Iago's critics, finding the same trait, condemn Desdemona for it. "But the damage to her symbolic value is greater when we see her passively leaving everything to Heaven. She ought in a sense to have embodied Heaven, give us a human equivalent that would 'make sense of Heaven. For this task, she had the wrong sort of purity." When Desdemona is credited with activity, she is condemned for that, too; she is accused of being domineering, using witchcraft, rebelliousness, disobedience, and wantonness. Although discussion of her has frequently been an afterthought to the analysis of the men, recently she has been the focus of a number of studies. Both Othello and Iago critics tend to see good versus evil as the play's central theme, Othello versus Iago as the play's central conflict, and hence, the major tragedies as its most important context.