Othello: A Dramatic Study in Venetian Alienation

Othello: A Dramatic Study in Venetian Alienation

According to Shakesperean scholar Maurice Hunt, "Shakespeare's Venice" in the play "Othello" strives to activate "a disturbing paradigm dependent upon the city's multicultural reputation." (Hunt, 2003, p.1) In other words, in Shakespeare's Venice, diversity creates a disturbing and tumultous environment, an environment where only alienation rather than harmony between different races and different people can be sustained. At the beginning of Shakespeare's drama, Othello is a Venetian general who is esteemed, yet finds his illusions of equal participation in the personal as well as the military life of his adopted city cruelly cut short when he marries Desdemona. Desdemona's father accuses the general, whom he often invited as a guest to his house -- "Her father loved me; oft invited me;" is Othello's first protest when accused -- of witchcraft. Only though witchcraft could Othello ensnare his white's daughter's heart, only a witch could cause Desdemona to love what she ought to fear, namely a black man. "She is abused, stol'n from me, and corrupted/By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks," says Brabitano. "A maiden never bold;/Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion/Blush'd at herself; and she, in spite of nature, / Of years, of country, credit, every thing, / To fall in love with what she fear'd to look on! (I.3)

Thus, "the persecutory component of Venice, the tendency activated and strengthened by having to deal with the alien in the city, neutralizes certain finer values of Venetian Renaissance culture" according to Hunt. Hunt, 2003, p.1) Shakespeare first seems to embrace multiculturalism in making Othello a sublimely human and humane individual who woos Desdemona with his stories, not witchcraft, but the prejudices of others and his unfamiliarity with Venietian society and his subsequent insecurity about its subtle manners cause him to become corrupted by Iago's lies. (I.3) Iago tells Othello that Venetian wives "let God see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands; their best conscience / Is not to leave't undone, but keep't unknown" (3.3.216-18). The hateful Iago paints an innaccurate picture of all Venetian wifes transgressing behind their husband's backs. Othello believes Iago because of Othello's lack of experience in private and romantic life. After all, Othello has lived most of his life as a soldier as well as a Moor in a White, Christian world. The cruel rejection Othello experienced at the beginning of the play by a man whom he thought was a friend, Desdemona's father, further creates Othello's sense of social anxiety, despite his high military status.

But what is true of one woman is hardly true of all women. Iago's wife Emilia justifies adultry on the part of wronged wives: "But I do think it is their husbands' faults

If wives do fall," while Desdemona demurs, "Good night, good night: heaven me such uses send,/Not to pick bad from bad, but by bad mend!" (IV.3) Multiculturalism may be dangerous in that it destabilizes Othello's sense of self and his ability to see his wife's virtue correctly, but it is not fair to stereotype either all Venetian women or all Moors, because of the dangers diversity poses to social stability.

Maurice Hunt futher suggests, however, that it is not only Othello who is alienated by Venetian society. "Iago's only bond with his wife Emilia is not intimate, or even affectionate, and it becomes the means that undoes him when he believes he must kill her to prevent her from revealing his knavery." (Hunt, 2003, p.2) Iago, while a Venetian by birth, is also a kind of "private, unofficial" alien in an "existential" sense that he feels denied a rightful position in society. (Hunt, 2003, p.2) The alien Iago forges a bond with official Venetian aliens like Rodrigo and Othello which "serves to underscore an unarticulated affinity felt between two sets of men," but which causes Iago to also feel "painful self-disgust" over his lot in life and forms a "compound impulse to stereotype" the Moor as an alien "devil" and to make him "wish to abuse each victim physically and mentally. (Hunt, 2003, p.2) Thus, projecting "felt alienation onto another" Iago "seeks the means to destroy what originally exists unobjectified in himself."(Hunt, 2003, p.2) In other words, self-hating and alienated men like Iago may identify with cultural aliens, but then come to hate them because they symbolize social alien's own sense of societal disaffection. (A contemporary parallel might be found with Nazi-loving high school students, ostracized by their social communities.)