Desdemona—Passive or Assertive?

One question that can arise with the audience after watching or reading the play Othello is the extent to which Desdemona was a passive character.  Was she just a victim of Othello’s brutality, or what was her role?  The end of the play made her seem like an entirely passive victim.  She hardly even fought or argued with Othello before he smothered her and ended her life.  However, if you look back earlier in the play, she shows more assertiveness when her husband is around than when he is not.  Desdemona’s first speech is extremely confident and straight forward.  She defends her marriage and is not afraid to assert her beliefs.  She is surrounded by not only men, but powerful men, and she is not ashamed to stand up for herself and her decisions.  Unfortunately, Iago recognizes her straight forward manner and ends up using this against her.  Her willingness to stand up for what she believes in gets flipped upside down when she starts to stand up for Cassio.  Iago turns this around to make it look like an affair.  Also, her courage in her refusal to search for the lost handkerchief infuriates Othello.  She even yells out against him when he abuses her, and she constantly insists that she is innocent.  All of these signs of her standing up for herself make Othello question her loyalty to him even more.  However, this doesn’t just come from himself, but it is fed to Othello by Iago.  Desdemona clearly becomes affected by Othello’s brutality.  He has given her so many reasons to think poorly of him, but she never says anything.  Even when she is with her best friend Emilia, who bad mouths men, Desdemona has nothing worse to say than “Heaven keep the monster from Othello’s mind” (III.4.158).  She shows assertiveness when she is with her husband, but when he is not around, she does not stand up against him.  But even the assertiveness with her husband eventually disappears.  We see the effect of Othello’s brutality in the last scene when Desdemona finally becomes a passive victim.

Hell, Demons, & Monsters

Hell, demons, and monsters are a re-occurring theme throughout the play Othello.  Iago tells Othello to beware of the “green-eyed monster” known as jealousy.  He describes it as one that mocks the meat it feeds on.  Iago’s wife, Emilia, also describes the green-eyed monster of jealousy as dangerously self-generating.  Imagery of damnation and hell occur in the play and especially at the end when Othello wants to murder Desdemona.  Othello can’t stop thinking about the moral and religious judgment of Desdemona and himself.  Once Othello learns the truth about Iago in Act Five, he calls Iago the Devil and a demon several times.  Earlier in the play, Othello made a reference to some monster in his thoughts.  Sadly, this ironically turns out to be Iago.  Also earlier in the play, he refers to Desdemona’s betrayal of him as monstrous.  Right before Othello kills himself at the end of the play, he asks for eternal torture in Hell.  The imagery of the monster begins to take over.  The jealousy-crazed character is grotesque, deformed, and demonic.  Something else that is interesting about all of this reference to devils and demons are the characters actual names.  Othello includes the word hell and Desdemona includes the word demon.  Othello is dark and supposed to be like the devil in hell.  But Desdemona is white and is supposed to be like the light.  However, her name includes the word demon.  This makes her character seem more questionable and not as pure as everyone thought she was.  It’s hard to determine whether or not Desdemona is a good person or was faithful to her husband.  But after looking at her conversation with Emilia, it seems like she would never consider betraying her husband Othello.  This is why it is hard to determine the reasoning for including “demon” in the name Desdemona.

Light and Darkness in Othello

The theme of light and darkness or sight and blindness has a large role in the play Othello.  The most obvious example is Othello’s physical difference from everyone else.  He is the only one who is black, while every other character in the play is white.  Desdemona looks beyond this racial difference and can see more than just Othello’s color, even though Othello cannot. This is something that he doubts by the end of the play.  Desdemona mentions multiple times about different types of sight.  One thing she says is, “Saw Othello’s visage in his mind, and to his honors and his valiant parts, did I my soul and fortunes consecrate” (1.iii.250-252).  Desdemona loves things about Othello and believes things about Othello that she cannot see.  Othello acts as though he needs more proof of things and needs to see what is happening in order to believe it.  However, throughout the play, Othello is convinced by Iago of things that he cannot see.  The most tragic example is when Othello accuses Desdemona of having an affair with Cassio, even though he never actually sees her infidelity.  He does not believe her when she tells him that it’s not true because he doubts that she ever actually loved him.  This comes from his insecurity about being dark.  Because Othello places such a great significance on light versus dark, he ends up murdering his wife and committing suicide at the end of the play.  After Othello kills himself, Lodovico says, “Look on the tragic loading of this bed.  This is thy work.  The object poisons sight.  Let it be hid” (5.ii.373-375).  There are so many things that can distort our sight and make us believe something that we did not actually see.  Othello’s color distorted his sight of Desdemona.  It made him believe rumors that were not true.  Iago took advantage of all of this and caused the tragedy in the play. 

Disguises in Twelfth Night

Disguises are a big part of the plot in the play Twelfth Night.  The most obvious example of a character that uses disguise is Viola pretending to be a boy named Cesario.  She puts on the clothing of a man and everyone assumes that she is a man.  This causes a lot of confusion, especially with Olivia who begins to fall in love with “him.”  A similar problem also arises for Viola because she falls in love with Orsino, who assumes that she is a boy.  I think that Shakespeare is showing how ridiculous human attraction can be.  Just a change of clothing can make someone attracted to someone else that they normally would never be interested in.  Malvolio also uses a change in clothing to try and attract the female character that he is interested in.  He assumes that by dressing in strange attire, he will win Olivia over.  He daydreams about being Olivia’s husband and sees himself as above all of her other servants.  His change of clothing shows that he feels empowered to rise above to another social class.  Another character that changes his appearance to take on a new identity is Feste.  Feste dresses up as a priest named Sir Topas to make Malvolio think that he has gone mad.  He does not even need to dress up because the room is dark, but he does so anyway.  This suggests that in order to play the part, Feste needed to be wearing the disguise.  Shakespeare brings up a lot of questions about human identity with all of these disguises.  It seems that gender and status can be easily changed with just a change in wardrobe.  People are delusional, and they cannot see passed the physical appearance of each other.  Who a person is should be much deeper than what they look like, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in Twelfth Night.

She's The Man vs. Twelfth Night

The movie She’s the Man was influenced directly by the play Twelfth Night.  It is not supposed to be an exact adaptation of the play, so there are many differences in the two versions.   However, the overall plot is almost exactly the same.  In the play, Orsino, the Duke of Illyria is in love with Olivia who does not love him back.  In the movie, Duke Orsino has a crush on Olivia who is not interested in him at all.  In the play, Viola comes in dressed up as Cesario to work for Orsino, and ends up falling in love with him.  Unfortunately, he has Cesario help deliver his love letters to Olivia.  In the movie, Viola goes to Illyria disguised as her twin brother Sebastian, and she starts to fall for her roommate Duke.  Sebastian ends up having to help Duke try and win over Olivia.  In the play, Olivia falls for Cesario, and in the movie, Olivia falls for Sebastian.  The real Sebastian enters the scene and Olivia takes him to marry her.  The real Sebastian enters the movie, and Olivia kisses him.  All of the miscommunication is resolved when everyone is at the same place at the same time.  Viola shows who she really is (no longer Cesario or Sebastian), and Orsino decides to marry her.  In the movie, Duke decides to ask her out.  The movie puts a modern twist on the story, uses the names of characters and places, and removes the element of homosexuality.  Orsino seemed extremely interested in Cesario as a boy, which was not the case at all for Duke and Sebastian in the movie.  The most important element that the movie is missing is including the characters Maria and Feste.  There is also no practical joke played on the Malvolio character by Andrew or Toby.  This was an important part of the play, but it did not have a role in the film.