Torture In In The Time Of The Butterflies And Othello

Ever since humankind has existed, so has torture. It is, according to Dictionary.com, the “extreme anguish of body or mind; agony.” The use of torture to punish or get information out of someone, such as waterboarding, is still used today. Fortunately, cutting people’s heads off in public is no longer a common use of torture as it was in the past. Torture is present in both pieces of literature, Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies and Shakespeare’s Othello. Physical and psychological (emotional) torture are both present, but emotional torture is longer lasting and much harder to recover from. While physical torture can only hurt for so long, emotional agony can last a lifetime. An example of this is when the second oldest Mirabal sister, Dedé, suffered an immense amount of torture during the dictatorship of Trujillo in the mid twentieth century because of her sister’s involvement with the rebellion against him. The

When opinions or ideas are brought to attention they will always be present in your mind. Iago played mind games on Othello to make him believe his wife was cheating on him. Iago spoke to Othello about how in the past Desdemona had turned down men from her home country; men of the same race and similar status... qualities which Othello lacked. He also told Othello that it was easy to see the disloyalty that Desdemona displayed and that she would end up with a man from Italy instead of Othello. Of course this was not true. But, Othello then asked to be left alone to process what he had been told, and the poisonous ideas began to set in. (Shakespeare 3:3). Iago never directly told Othello that his wife had cheated but he let Othello come up with the idea himself with the help of his emotional torture and lies. From this point to the end of the play the idea of Desdemona cheating does not leave Othello’s mind because of the mental torture that was brought upon him by