“Too Gentle”: Jealousy and Class in Othello

Abstract

Amid the hubbub of the first act of Othello, it is easy to miss an intriguing narrative detail: Iago and Roderigo's boisterous claims awaken Brabanzio from a prophetic dream. Upon being told that Desdemona has made a gross revolt and married the Moor, the Venetian senator says, This accident is not unlike my dream; / Belief of it oppresses me already (1.1.43-44). Shakespeare thus presents Desdemona's father as a character with some access to foresight, something that may matter when, in his final words to Othello, he adopts a prophetic tone: Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see / She has deceived her father, and may thee (1.3.291-92). However, Brabanzio's dream also suggests that on some level he has feared or anticipated the loss of his daughter: that he is-by early modern definition-jealous. As I will explain in more detail, jealousy was the fear of losing possession, either of household property or of people. In its most commonly represented form, jealousy was the fear of cuckoldry, or losing exclusive possession of one's wife to another man.For the play's early audiences, Brabanzio's jealous possessiveness toward Desdemona would help to underscore Othello's own vulnerability to this dangerous emotion. Iago, surely, sees the risk. For modern readers and audience members, however, the scene is best remembered for Iago's racist images of Othello (as the old black ram), images that do set the scene for the tragedy that ensues. Yet critical attention to race in Othello has obscured, to our detriment, the way the operation of jealousy in the play also highlights issues of gender and class. When we attribute Othello's jealousy either to his race or to Iago's masterful psychological manipulation, we inevitably minimize the play's preoccupation with Desdemona's political agency and social importance. I argue that Desdemona's social location-that is to say, her position as the female heir of a senator-would have been understood to be a potential catalyst for the kind of intense jealousy her husband develops. To marry someone like Desdemona-who is, as the early scenes involving Brabanzio make clear, socially valuable-was to put oneself at risk of developing jealousy, a tormenting state that many believed to be incurable.As Erika Milburn points out, Latin has no word for jealousy (580). By the early modern period in Europe, by contrast, it was one of the most commonly narrated themes of poetry and drama. Despite fine historicized accounts of early modern jealousy from critics such as Mary Floyd-Wilson, Natasha Korda, and Mark Breitenberg, we still know very little about how jealousy was understood in the early modern period, no doubt because, as Werner Gundersheimer explains, there seems to have been no general consensus about its representation (322).1 Shakespeare, however, was relatively consistent in his portrayals of the green-eyed monster. With the exception of The Merry Wives of Windsor's Mr. Ford, his jealous male figures are Italian or soldiers surrounded by Italians-a pattern that corroborates Floyd-Wilson's observation that jealousy was understood primarily as a state of paranoid suspicion born out of a corrupt inwardness that the English typically associated with Italians and, surprisingly enough, neo-Stoic control (132-33). Yet we could- and should-draw lines of comparison not only between Shakespeare's jealous characters, but also between the women they accuse. When we consider Othello's jealousy in light of other Shakespearean portraits of jealousy-not only The Winter's Tale's Leontes, to which he has been fruitfully compared,2 but also Much Ado About Nothing's Claudio and Cymbeline's Posthumus, we see an element of Shakespearean jealousy that has been largely overlooked: Shakespeare's most jealous male characters are married or betrothed to the only children of important men. The possible exceptions-Merry Wives's Mistress Ford (whose background is unknown) and The Winter's Tale's Hermione (who is a ruler's daughter but perhaps not his only child)-are noteworthy for the fact that their heroines are married from the start of the play. …