Desdemona

Who She Is

Daughter of Brabantio, Venetian senator, and wife of Othello by her own choice, against her father and against the city. She is the character on whom critics most disagree, and the one the play kills without her grasping the accusation in time to defend herself. She follows to Cyprus escorted by Iago, intercedes for Cassio with generosity and loses the handkerchief Othello gave her, the physical proof Iago needed. She denies it to the end and, with her last breath, spares the one who killed her.

Trajectory

In scene 3 of Act I, when called to testify before the Senate, Desdemona does not deny her father's authority: she shifts it, and does so in terms of duty, not of passion.

In scene 1 of Act II, she disembarks in Cyprus and finds Othello in full happiness, and while waiting she trades banter with Iago about women, in couplets that she herself calls silly jesting to amuse the simple folk in the taverns. In scene 3 of Act II, Othello withdraws with her after placing Cassio on guard and, as Emilia tells in scene 1 of Act III, she already defends Cassio before the general.

In scene 3 of Act III, in Emilia's presence, she promises Cassio to intercede for him. When Othello arrives with Iago and Cassio hastily withdraws, she tells her husband that she has been speaking with a suitor who suffers from his rejection, and tries to bind his forehead with the handkerchief. He refuses it, and the handkerchief falls. In scene 4 of Act III, she notices the handkerchief missing and asks where he lost it, and when Othello asks for it and hears that she does not have it there, she insists on speaking of Cassio.

In scene 1 of Act IV, she is struck by Othello in front of Lodovico. In scene 2 of Act IV, she is treated as a whore in the bedchamber interrogation and answers with the only identity she claims:

She asks Emilia to lay out the wedding sheets and to call Iago, and asks him what to do to have her husband back. In scene 3 of Act IV, she recalls the maid Barbara, who loved a man who went mad, and sings the willow song:

She asks Emilia whether there are women who betray their husbands for all that there is in the world, and closes the scene with an ethic opposed to Emilia's:

In scene 2 of Act V, she is kissed by the sleeping Othello, accused of having given the handkerchief to Cassio and, without any proof, smothered. She denies it:

Before dying, she rallies for one last line:

Themes Embodied

In scene 3 of Act I, her answer to the Senate is the only account the Senate can validate, and she uses it with precision: she invokes the example of her own mother, who preferred her husband to her father, to make the choice a repetition of order and not a rupture on her part. Autonomy appears dressed as obedience, which is what makes it unanswerable there.

The answers in scene 2 of Act IV and scene 2 of Act V are direct and none carries weight, because the verdict precedes the evidence: in the bedchamber interrogation, the clearest answer possible only confirms, for Othello, the lie he already expects to hear. In the bedchamber she never learns what she is accused of, and only in the room, when it is already too late, does she hear of the handkerchief and of Cassio: this, not death, is what makes the sequence one of the cruelest moments of the play.

The verse of scene 3 of Act IV is her reply to Emilia's thesis that infidelity responds to mistreatment, and the one in scene 2 of Act V is the same ethic carried to its limit: with her last breath she uses the only thing she still controls, her own speech, to exonerate the one who killed her. The coherence between the two speeches is the argument of those who read her as a figure of autonomy, not of passivity.

The story of the maid Barbara, who loved a man who went mad, is told by Desdemona as a memory and works as an omen: she sings the song of a woman undone by a love gone mad, on the very night she herself dies in the same way. Emilia spreads the wedding sheets, and in scene 2 of Act V Othello calls Desdemona "as white as your sheets" (ll. 275-276); later Emilia dies quoting the same song.

Relationships

• Othello: the husband, won by her choice against her father and lost through a story she never hears in full.
• Iago: the one who escorts her to Cyprus, and to whom, in scene 2 of Act IV, she asks how to win back her husband.
• Cassio: the lieutenant for whom she intercedes and whose friendship is used as evidence against her.
• Emilia: the maid who serves her, picks up her handkerchief from the floor without knowing what Iago will do with it, and later dies speaking in her name.
• Brabantio: the father to whom she says her duty is divided.