Shakespeare’s Othello presents to its audience the tragic story of a doomed interracial marriage in which Othello, the titular ‘Moor of Venice’ becomes entangled in the schemings of his malevolent ensign Iago, who convinces him of his wife Desdemona’s infidelity. By the end, Othello has murdered Desdemona and taken his own life out of grief and guilt. That Othello succumbs to manipulation and loses his reputation, marriage, and life makes him tragic enough. Unique to this character, though, is the way racial and gendered power enable and heighten his tragedy. Othello is a black man in a white ecosystem. He faces and internalizes societal racism and marginalization that feed the insecurities that are ultimately exploited by Iago. And though he is denied access to the power and comfort of whiteness, he is still able to brandish the power of patriarchy and maleness. A victim of alienation himself, Othello victimizes others with the power he does have--the ability to carry out gendered violence. And therein lies the thing that makes Othello such a tragic character: he responds to his personal alienation in a hostile society by perpetuating hostility. Ultimately, it is the intersection of Othello’s marginalized identity (blackness) and his privileged identity (maleness) that transforms him into a tragic character because it allows his insecurities to be weaponized by a patriarchal, racist universe to erode his humanity.
From the very beginning, the explicit racism of white Venetian society establishes a backdrop against which Othello’s blackness becomes a marginalized, exploitable aspect of his identity. In the opening scene, Iago crudely and hatefully informs Desdemona’s father Brabantio of her elopement with Othello, crying “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram Is tupping your white ewe” (1.1.88–9). Here, the illicit nature of their relationship in the eyes of Venice is made scathingly clear. As Iago sees it, a black African has had the gall to court and marry a white Venetian beauty as if he were the equal of a man of her class and color. And she has had the gall to prefer “a lascivious Moor” (1.1.126) to her own kind and defiantly proclaims her love for this “erring barbarian” (1.3.355-6) in public. As a result, Othello and Desdemona find unleashed upon them, in the shape of Iago’s schemes, the venomous rage of a society whose foundations are rocked by the mere existence of their marriage. Because Othello and Desdemona have made a mockery of the principles of social, sexual, and racial hierarchy on which white men like Iago base their very identity and sense of self-worth, he hatches a plot designed to put them in their place: to turn “The divine Desdemona” (2.1.73) into the “subtle whore” (4.2.21) he thinks every woman really is, and to turn the noble, esteemed Othello into a deranged wife-killer, who proves the racist’s worst fears fully justified. Iago, of course, is not the only source of societal racial contempt, though the intensity of his loathing is unrivaled. Roderigo, too, derides Othello, as “the thick-lips” (1.1.66), while Brabantio, in his public confrontation with Othello, finds it inconceivable that his daughter should desire to “Run from her garage to the sooty bosom Of such a thing as thou” (1.2.70–1) without being drugged or bewitched. By presenting such endemic, ingrained racism in the white male characters, Shakespeare makes it plain from the start that it’s not just Iago the newly-weds are up against, but the status quo and a view of the world which Iago merely embodies in its most lethal form. Their defiance of the Venetian taboo against interracial marriages locks them from the outset into a defensive posture, which predisposes Othello to the insecurity and doubt that grip him so swiftly at Iago’s prompting and set him on the ruinous, tragic path of murder.
On top of the endemic anti-blackness of Venetian culture, or more accurately, as a result of it, Othello’s internalized racism forces him squarely into Iago’s conspiracy and towards tragedy. When Othello’s faith in Desdemona’s love begins to crumble, his complexion is the first thing he blames: “Haply, for I am black, And have not those soft parts of conversation That chamberers have” (3.3.263–5). Here marks the first time Othello seems to give into society’s perception of him as something unrefined, something undesirable. Such an explicit acceptance of anti-blackness allows his insecurities to rise to the surface uninhibited. Later in that same conversation with Iago, Othello connects his race to even more awful concepts. He instinctively employs his own blackness as a metaphor for his wife’s alleged depravity: “Her name, that was as fresh As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black As mine own face” (3.3.386–8). Far more malignant than ill manners, Othello allows his blackness to become a stand-in for sinfulness and evil. In real-time, the audience watches as Othello not only talks himself into believing Iago’s lies about Desdemona’s adultery, but seemingly the lies that blackness is a marker of some moral perversion. This belief, as much as his conviction of Desdemona’s guilt, allows Othello to murder his wife in cold blood. Othello’s relationship with his racial identity is, then, a key component in his downfall because his visibly alien race makes him far more vulnerable to the machinations of Iago than if he were an equally accomplished and indispensable white man. Iago is keenly aware that Othello’s skin color creates a barrier that he can never completely overcome, and he uses this to sow seeds of doubt and jealousy in Othello’s mind. In othering Othello from himself, Iago, the mouthpiece of Venetian society, creates not merely a black man who is jealous, but a man whose jealousy and blackness are inseparable, with the latter being the foundation upon which the former is built. When Othello internalizes Iago’s (and others’) anti-black sentiments, he dooms both himself and Desdemona. After all, with no other outlet, he responds to his own victimization by murdering his wife, and victimizing another in a tragic show of gendered violence.
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Gendered power works in tandem with racial alienation to turn Othello from a respected, content general into a paranoid, murderous speller of his own doom. Like racism, misogyny is forced externally onto Othello by a white patriarchal society, which causes him to internalize and perpetuate it. From the start, sexual jealousy is shown to be the norm in Venice rather than an anomalous emotional disorder to which Othello is especially prone to succumb. Roderigo’s infatuation with Desdemona makes him intensely jealous of both Othello and Cassio (2.1.303-304), and Iago himself betrays the same toxic disposition when he fastens automatically on sexual jealousy as a pretext for provoking it in Othello: ‘I do suspect the lusty Moor Hath leaped into my seat; the thought whereof Doth (like a poisonous mineral), gnaw my inwards’ (2.1.295–7). Although none of them is as consumed by jealousy as Othello, all these characters fall prey like him to the jealousy and sexual entitlement that flourishes in a society in which the sexual desire of a woman is regarded as the property of a man. From such societal precedence, Othello's own relationship with gendered power becomes clear. His dread of cuckoldry and the underlying misogyny that feeds into it perfectly aligns with the patriarchal culture of a city where his race makes him feel like an outsider, but where he’s entirely at home as a man. The explanation for why Iago is so quick and successful in persuading Othello to swallow the rumors he spins about Desdemona’s infidelity is that Othello is primed to believe it by the warped view of women and female sexuality that he shares not only with Iago but with all the other male characters. When Iago reminds Othello that Desdemona “did deceive her father, marrying you” (3.3.206) as proof of her capacity to double-cross men, he’s merely echoing the parting words with which Brabantio sought to sow the same seeds of suspicion in Othello’s mind in Act 1: “Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see; She has deceived her father, and may thee” (1.3.292-3). Indeed, Iago’s role as a villain is as much a reflection of a prejudiced society as the workings of a vengeful individual. And by echoing societal pressures on Othello, he successfully capitalizes on the general’s ingrained misogyny to convince him that he must execute Desdemona to salvage his dignity, unknowingly bringing about his own tragedy in the process. Thus, the misogyny that is just as endemic as racism in Venetian culture plays an equally crucial role in sealing the tragic fate of Othello.
The great danger, perhaps, of interpreting the tragedy as a byproduct of a patriarchal, racist universe is the risk of abstracting Othello’s actions away from himself. Certainly, Othello is a victim of a racist system that has marginalized him and left him vulnerable to racial insecurities. So, too, has his perspective of women and sexuality been tainted by a patriarchal, misogynistic society. Above all, though, Othello must be understood as a character who has the agency to carry out the acts that upend his life and tragically destroy him. Iago’s devious scheme against Othello functions so well because it needs only reflect his victim's own beliefs, confirm his suspicions, and fulfill his expectations. The audience sees this in full force when Iago carefully and intentionally agrees with Othello’s growing paranoia that Desdemona must eventually snap back to her ‘natural’ taste in (white) men one day (3.3). Though he planted the seeds of doubt in the first place, Iago knows he only needs to act as a mirror for Othello’s growing doubts to get his victim to fall deeper into a conspiracy on his own merits. And when Othello asks Cassio to “demand that demi-devil Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body,” Iago brusquely interjects: “Demand me nothing; what you know, you know” (5.2.301-3). In other words, Iago, and by extension, Venetian society, did not explicitly force Othello to commit the actions he committed. Push and aggravate him, yes, but never force him. Othello kept his agency through it all. It is clear, then, that the societal pressures of Othello’s marginalized blackness and privileged maleness create the conditions necessary for his tragedy, but ultimately must be balanced with the character’s own agency to understand the nuances of his tragedy. Even when sympathizing with the difficult circumstances Othello faces, the audience understands that culpability for Desdemona’s death falls squarely on Othello’s shoulders. And that too, heightens the tragedy of Othello’s character. After all, the greatest of tragedies are those which come by the protagonist’s own hand.
In the end, the tragedy of Shakespeare’s Othello is that of a black man whose enemies capitalize on the insecurities that flow freely from such hateful systems as racism and patriarchy. And though by the end, Othello has committed heinous acts of violence, the audience still feels sympathy for the protagonist who, just five acts ago, was well on his way to living a peaceful, happy life with his new wife. In Elizabethan England, where blackness on the stage was almost always a stand-in for inherent evil, where audiences brought unmitigated racial prejudice with them to the playhouse, Shakespeare produced in Othello an unexpectedly searing critique of racial and sexual injustices for their ability to make otherwise good people vulnerable to committing heinous acts that perpetuate such injustices. It is a critique that is perhaps even more powerful today in the 21st century than it could ever hope to be at the dawn of the 17th.
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