Later, when Othello hits Desdemona because he believes her support for Cassio is due to an affair, Desdemona simply responds by saying "I have not deserved this" before telling Othello that she "will not stay to offend" him (4.1.241, 247). Although Othello is in grips of his own ignorance and anger, his petulant, sarcastic criticisms of Desdemona actually help to demonstrate her own failure when he tells Lodovico that "she's obedient, as you say, obedient, / very obedient" (4.1.255-256). When Othello later calls Desdemona a strumpet and a whore, she almost begins to see the error of her blind subservience, to the point that she even tells Emilia that she has no lord (4.2.102). Even then, however, she remains woefully ignorant and entirely too self-effacing, stating that "those that do teach young babes / do it with gentle means and easy tasks: / he might have chid me so; for, in good faith, / I am a child to chiding" (4.2.111-114). This may be read as Desdemona attempting to justify her lack of assertion or confidence to the audience, and that she does this by calling herself dumb only makes her appear more despicably committed to a ridiculous notion of honor and duty. That her experience being beat and derided does not rouse something more than sadness and self-effacement in Desdemona demonstrates how fully she has devoted herself to maintaining the patriarchal social structure which allows her to be treated as terribly as Othello likes, and it is this devotion to prescribed social roles which ultimately leads to her death.

The conversation between Desdemona and Othello immediately before he kills her borders on farce, because even after Othello has beat her, derided her, and actually literally said that he is going to kill her, the best Desdemona can do is to respond "if you say so, I hope you will not kill me" (5.2.35). One cannot even begin to pity her, because she cannot even give a halfhearted attempt to save her own life. She is so fully committed to her husband that she makes no attempt to flee or fight, but rather asks to...

Desdemona's idiotic devotion to her husband reaches its nadir in her last words, when she actually has the chance to take some power for herself and accuse her husband, but instead, when asked who killed her, she responds "nobody; I myself," ironically confirming the argument of this essay while simultaneously maintaining her steadfast devotion to a social order which has done nothing but stunt her intellectual and personal growth before leading her to her death (5.2.124). Thus, with these last words, Desdemona removes any last, miniscule chance that the audience might pity her, and instead allows no other reasonable response but disgust and disappointment.
Perhaps more than any other character in William Shakespeare's Othello, Desdemona is the one most capable of eliciting feelings of disgust and contempt from the audience, because her failure is so willful and unnecessary. While the offenses committed by the rest of the characters are at least born out of jealously or anger (except Iago, who refreshingly refuses to divulge his reasons and is instead content to destroy everyone else's lives), Desdemona willingly chooses to conform to a set of societal rules that do absolutely nothing to benefit her, except that perhaps she is not starving in the street as a result of her social status. She repeatedly defers to male characters and never asserts herself, whether in "defending" her marriage to Othello or asking politely if she might be allowed to live a little bit longer. W.H Auden was right not to like Desdemona, but even he gives her too much credit by claiming that everybody must pity her. To pity Desdemona is buy into the same lies she has done, and to consider her innocent in the events leading up to her death is to absolve her entirely of her utter subservience to a morally corrupt and ludicrously patriarchal society.

Work Cited

Shakespeare, William. Othello. Shakespeare Navigators. Shakespearenavigators.com,…