Extreme Jealousy in Othello, the Moor of Venice
Aristotle's Poetics laid out the definition of tragedy: unlike comedy, the purpose of tragedy is not merely to instruct and delight an audience. Rather, its aim is to allow a cathartic release as a result of the heightened emotional state caused by the events of the tragedy. This idea assumes that the average person can experience these intense emotions vicariously. In Psyche and Symbol in Shakespeare , Alex Aronson contends that the characters in Shakespearean tragedy have the power to affect us because they tap what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious , the "omnipresent, unchanging, and everywhere identical condition or substratum of the psyche per se" (14). Othello, the Moor of Venice, attempts to achieve the requisite level of harrowing emotion by treating the audience to a spectacle of passionate delusional jealousy and the murder that follows. The playwright, according to Rolf Soellner, framed his Moorish general?s fall in terms of Passion warring with Patience (both 'the will' and rationality of action) -- drawing on the prevalent Senecan and Stoic conventions of the baroque period in which he was writing (239-58). Unfortunately, the modern tendency to 'psychoanalyze' the words and actions presented in Othello reduces the audience?s experience from cathartic to metaphoric. In either case, the Moor?s over-reaction can be viewed as a lesson counseling against indulgence in the excesses of emotion without a balancing leaven of self-control.
As most of Othello ?s fictional characters have been psychoanalyzed in absentia , I hoped to find a reasonable psychological explanation for Othello?s breakdown. The journal American Imago (co-founded by Freud) has publ...
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...as truly such a destructive force.
Works Cited and Consulted
Aronson, Alex. Psyche and Symbol in Shakespeare . Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1972.
Bell, Millicent. ?Othello?s Jealousy.? Yale Review 85 (April 1997): 120-136.
Driscoll, James P. Identity in Shakespearean Drama . East Brunswick, NJ: Assoc. UP, 1983.
Faber, M. D. ?Othello: Symbolic Action, Ritual and Myth.? American Imago 31 (Summer 1974): 159-205.
Holland, Norman N. Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare . New York: McGraw, 1966.
Kovel, Joel. ?Othello.? American Imago 35 (Spring-Summer 1978): 113-119.
Reid, Stephen. ?Othello?s Jealousy.? American Imago 25 ( Fall 1968): 274-293.
Shakespeare, William. Complete Works of Shakespeare . Ed. David Bevington. 4th ed. NY: Longman, 1997.
Soellner, Rolf. Shakespeare?s Patterns of Self-Knowledge . N.p.: Ohio State UP, 1972.
The first expression of Bigger’s desire for power comes in the opening scene of the book in which Wright sets the precedent for Bigger’s actions. In the opening scene, the Thomas family discovers a black rat in their apartment, and it is Bigger’s task to take care of it. Bigger kills the rat, and through this action, he asserts control over the disturbance of his environment. Though he dominates one annoyance in his environment, he is not yet satisfied; he needs to have control over his family as well. In his quest to gain control over his family, he takes the dead rat and dangles it around Vera’s face to scare her thus putting him in control. Bigger’s act of waving the rat is not a physically aggressive action, but it still constitutes violence because it is an unjustified assertion of force. Bigger is not satisfied that he only has control of Vera, however. Next he must control his mother, which he does by not responding when she asks him to help Vera to bed. Bigger only obeys after the second time that his mother tells him to act, which demonstrates that he decides what he does and when he does it, as opposed to his mother’s doing so. Thomas’ reasons for pursuing his control are the same ones that he has for killing Mary; he must have power over any oppressive structure that he can. His mother is oppressive in the way that she seeks to limit him through rules, forcing him to get a job, and commanding him to act. Bigger’s mother even prohibits him from forming any self-identity because she alters other people’s perception of Bigger. When Bigger refuses to obey his mother she calls...
In the Shakespearean tragedy Othello the number and description of themes is open to discussion. With the help of literary critics, we can analyze this subject in detail.
Continually confronted with his difference, and apparently associated inferiority, Othello eventually ingests and manifests this difference in a violent rage against the symbol and defining emblem of his otherness, Desdemona. Yet, who is to blame? Which character is redeemed through our sympathy so that another can be condemned? Othello, the dark-skinned murdering Moor, himself. The separation of his otherness from explicit and innate evil contrasted with Iago's free-flowing and early-established taste for revenge and punishment, alleviates Othello from responsibility. Surely, Othello has wronged and is to be held reprehensible--with his death--but even this is a self-infli...
Othello is one of Shakespeare’s four pillars of great tragedies. Othello is unique in comparison to the others in that it focuses on the private lives of its primary characters. When researching the subject of Othello being an Aristotelian tragedy, there is debate among some critics and readers. Some claim that Shakespeare did not hold true to Aristotle’s model of tragedy, according to his definition in “Poetics,” which categorized Othello as a classic tragedy as opposed to traditional tragedy. Readers in the twenty-first century would regard Othello a psychological thriller; it definitely keeps you on the edge of your seat creating the emotions of terror, heart break, and sympathy. This paper will focus on what Shakespeare actually intended regarding “Othello” and its Aristotelian influences.
Shakespeare, William. Othello. Ed. Edward Pechter. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004. Print.
God when they only need something]. It was then that faith and hope for a better
that it is so difficult to posses all of these traits, it is also that same
At first glance this quote could seem meaningless, but later the reader learns in the book that a parallel can be drawn between the big black rat and the big black Bigger.
Aristotle continued to express a tragedy arouses both pity and fear, pity for the doomed hero and fear for all humans who are subject to the same forces and weakness. It would not be difficult to discover that Othello demonstrate weakness and fear in the play, and Shak...
Berry, Edward. “Othello’s Alienation.” Studies in English Literature 30.2 (1990): 315-33. JSTOR. Web. 17 Feb. 2014.
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Wright, Louis B. and Virginia A. LaMar. “The Engaging Qualities of Othello.” Readings on The Tragedies.
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