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.