Thin Line Between Love and Hate

¶ … cause of Othello's tragedy: a fine line, not between love and hate, but too heavy a line between men and women

Othello: "It is the cause, oh my soul"

Act 5, Scene II

What is the cause of the bloody end of "Othello?" Othello has one of the most horrifying ends of all of Shakespeare's tragedies -- a man smothers a woman he apparently loves, who gave up everything to marry him, and then kills himself when he discovers that she was chaste. Is it the cause of this terrible rooted in Othello's soul? The protagonists himself suggests that the cause is the thin line that exists between love and hate, as he looms over what will become his bride's death-bed at the end of the tragedy that bears his name, and his dying words are that he is a man who loved too much rather than too little. In the eyes of Shakespeare's dramatic, tragic hero Othello, this may indeed seem to be the case, given his natural tendency to self-valorization. After all, it was Othello's stories that won Desdemona's heart in the first place. However, one must not accept Othello's misguided self- perceptions at face value. One could just as easily suggest that the cause of Desdemona's death and Othello's fall is not in Othello's soul, but that the cause is in Othello and Desdemona's society, not in this fallen husband's divided soul.

The tragedy of "Othello" is set in Venice an almost entirely male-dominated, public society where women and female affairs matter little, and male, military matters count for more than anything. Women, as evidenced in Desdemona's fate, pass from their father's to their husband's house, and factor little as real actors of political significance. This is one reason why Othello is so dismissive of Desdemona when she attempts to intervene upon the fate of Michael Cassio. True, Iago has been planting seeds of doubt in the Moor's mind up until this time of the drama. But even Desdemona's own father, long before she married, expressed disbelief that his daughter could have any ideas or desires of her own, outside that of the world of men. Thus, even if Iago never became a factor in the drama and even if Othello did not have mixed emotions about his wife, Othello and Desdemona were wed in a Venetian society where what women had to say and think was devalued. Even if Othello loved Desdemona, it was a love born in a world where women and women's ways of thinking and speaking were seen as lesser than male ways of thinking and speaking. Thus, how could Othello, even if he did love his wife, value her words as much as a military, male general such as Iago?

Despite her love for Othello, far from being a weak woman, Desdemona frequently protests this fate of women. Of course, her desire to leave her father's house against her father's openly expressed desires to marry a man of another color, class, and religion is the most obvious example of Desdemona's defiance. Also, when she has her longest scene with Iago, in Act 2, Scene 1, Desdemona openly protests Iago's treatment of Emilia, his wife, and mourns how quiet Emilia is, because of Iago's frequent public shaming of Emilia.

The fact that only two women at all figure prominently in the military-located drama of Othello, Iago's wife Emilia and Desdemona, along with Cassio's prostitute Bianca (who even the gentle and aristocratic Michael Cassio mocks for her desire to marry him) reveals a great deal about the sexual stereotypes in Venetian society. It reveals that Othello as a general is taught by the society around him, that the words of women, even a woman he loves, has little value in comparison to the words of men.

The world of "Othello" thus is a sick society. It is a sick is world of soldiers and honor, of betrayals between men, rather a drama that values a relationship between a man and a woman, however much Othello may desire to have a meaningful relationship with Desdemona. When they are courting, Othello tells stories to Desdemona, while she listens in silence. This scenario shows that Othello is experienced in matters of the world. He has suffered racism and even, he says, when defending their relationship in the first council room marriage in Act 1 after the couple's elopement, suffered the pains of slavery. But he cannot take Desdemona's speech seriously because society does not take female speech seriously. Even the men in the council room blame a man's witchcraft of speech and narrative, namely Othello's, in wooing Desdemona, rather than blaming the woman herself. Women have no agency in Venice, only the words of Othello can persuade these hardened, military men that Desdemona's quiet and gentle exterior might have been swayed by the good rather than bad words of a black man.

Thus, the play "Othello" paints the picture not of a good or divided soul gone wrong, even though Othello's soul may have been infected by his society. The problem is not that there is a fine line between love and hate in Venice. Rather, the problem is of a society gone wrong, with far too deep a line between women and men in a patriarchal world, where women do not figure as predominant speakers and citizens. Thus "Othello" can and should be read as a play with a feminist theme, that the idealization of women can very easily turn to the hatred of women.

Iago can easily cause such intrigue and misunderstandings of the motivation of good women like Desdemona in the minds credulous military men like Othello, who have little experience with women because women have little voice and credulity as speakers in the public sphere. Emilia, despite her affection for Desdemona, feels she has no choice but to obey her domineering husband and secure her lady's strawberry spotted handkerchief for her husband -- without a husband or father's protection women are nothing, are whores like Bianca. Othello is more likely to believe a man and a fellow fighter, even a fighter he does not respect enough to promote like Iago, than his own wife.