¶ … 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...

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.…