Реферат: Othello Essay Research Paper
implies that Desdemona is unfaithful.
Unfaithfulness in a woman will reflect back on her husband. A cuckold is a ridiculous figure in other people’s eyes. He must be seriously lacking in person for his wife
to run after other men. Othello sees himself in the same situation as before the marriage. Instead of using her ears she is now using her sexuality to destroy the identity
he has built up for himself. I have already pointed out how ears and sexuality are connected in Othello’s mind. Either way the results are the same for Othello’s
identity. He sees his positive image of himself slipping away: “Farewell the plumed troops and the big wars/ That makes ambition virtue!….Farewell: Othello’s
occupation’s gone.” (III, iii, 352-353+360) The one way to control this threat is to passivize Desdemona completely by killing her. He realizes too late the effect this
action will have on his own situation. She was the only person who would accept the identity he had been fronting. He even had difficulties believing in it himself,
which made him an easy victim for Iago. So when he killed Desdemona he killed the positive image of himself. The person he saw as a threat to his identity was the
only person who actually sustained it. Because he had such difficulties in believing in himself he found it impossible that anybody else should do so. This insecurity
proves his undoing. His positive self-image gone, he is left a choice between “the Moor” or nothingness. The moment Emilia realizes Othello is the murderer she
reverts to calling him expressions connected to the negative image of “the Moor”: “And you the blacker devil!…thou art a devil.” (V, ii, 129, 131) He can’t stand
being this person, the only one society and the symbolic order can offer him. To construct his own identity has proven impossible. To be without an identity, a
non-personn implies death. He chooses to free himself of this unwanted identity by stepping out of the social order and the language system by means of suicide.