Compare Emilia and Desdemona - Essay Example

Her speech here with lines like ,"So much I challenge that I may profess/ Due to the Moor my lord"(I, iii, 191-192) makes her appear to be an articulate woman who knows her own mind, a woman who has eloped with a racially disparate man, and is able to defend her choice with sagacity and courage.Desdemona's resolute profession of her love shows us the practical nature and the intensity of her affections: "My downright violence and storm of fortunes/May trumpet to the world: my heart's subdued/ Even to the very quality of my lord:/I saw Othello's visage in his mind,/And to his honor and his valiant parts/ Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate".

( I, iii, 254- 59)She is a woman in love, who is ready to go to strange parts in order to be with her husband, and is also a woman much loved, as we see when she is reunited with her husband at Cyprus. "Desdemona was a stranger, not just different in class from Emilia, different in species. Emilia watched her from a cautious distance, the impulsive girl whose giddy love, written on her incandescent face, demonstrated that she had nothing in common with her".(Rutter, 2001)Emilia's marriage is of long standing and she has seen the world with all its realities.

Her husband does not lose a moment in putting her down in company, and does so viciously and with a barely concealed venom, slandering not just her but her entire kind: "Come on, come on; you are pictures out of doors,/Bells in your parlors, wild-cats in your kitchens,/Saints in your injuries, devils being offended, Players in your housewifery, and housewives' in your beds". ( II, i, 113-117)We know from the very beginning that though loyal to her husband, she is living a loveless marriage. And beyond a few one-line dialogs, she indeed has no speech in the first scenes after her appearance.

Having left her father's home and the confines of Venetian society for the first time, Desdemona is in a relaxed frame of mind. Somewhat guileless, her circumstances of living with her married love have made her cheerful, bantering, tolerant , as is evident from her good-humored response even to Iago's lack of taste in his very first conversation with her. She mislays her handkerchief, and lovingly nags her husband on Cassio's case by playing the shrew, fully assured of her power over Othello and her ability to make him do her bidding.

She feels it her part to play the nagging wife and present it as a 'boon' to the husband:Her performance exploits and collapses the two male fantasies that most define early modern wives: the one, negative, of the shrew, and the other, the ideal of the submissive subordinate. Lest we believe the stereotypes and think Desdemona truly shrewish, she announces that she will play the shrew. In merging the postures of good wife and shrew, Desdemona indirectly challenges the presumption of their difference enforced in marriage handbooks, homilies, church courts, misogynist pamphlets, and the like.

Her performance highlights what that discourse masks: that to be a shrew is, in fact, to follow the rules, to be obediently disobedient, to fill a role created by (male) authorities who needed shrews in order to contain, by criminalizing, female speech. Conversely, Desdemona also places outspokenness within the perimeters of appropriate wifely