A Summary Of Desdemona

Women in general were considered to be cold and wet. Therefore, they were seen as melancholic. In this sense, women were expected to have a bad temper, to be gloomy, “to be passive, less intelligent, inconsistent, to have weak will and morality, and to be vulnerable to their imagination” (Bialo leture/slides, date). Galen says:

Now just as mankind is the most perfect of all animals, so within mankind the man is more perfect than the woman, and the primary instrument. Hence in those animals that have less of it, her workmanship is necessarily more imperfect, and so it is no wonder that the female is less perfect than the male by as much as she is colder than he. In fact, just as the mole has imperfect eyes, though certainly not as imperfect

Her father in turn warns Othello, “Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:/ She has deceived her father, and may thee” (Shakespeare, 1.3.290-291). Desdemona is now seen as a woman who is not submissive to her lords, because if she disobeyed one, she will disobey all. By transgressing the female conformity of submissiveness, Desdemona becomes and aberration. Therefore, Desdemona’s defiance is also characterized through the disobedience to her father’s will.

Silence was another characteristic of the perfect woman of the Renaissance that Desdemona does not obey. It was not proper for woman in the Renaissance to speak in public. Thomas Becon writes:

This also must honest maids provide, that they be not full of tongue, and of much babbling, nor use many words, but as few as they may, yea and those wisely and discretely, soberly and modestly spoken, ever remembering this common proverb: a maid should be seen and not heard. (25)

Therefore, by speaking in public Desdemona breaks another gender conformity rule. Shakespeare

Descriptions of the curtain lecture in Juvenal’s second-century Sixth Satire and Theophrastus’ Liber de nuptiis – preserved in St. Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum (c.393) – provided rich mines of arguments against unruly female speech that later writers “endlessly quarried”…In fact, the potential dangers of the curtain lecture for men – everything from loss of possessions to loss of manhood, or even the soul – regularly appear as a subtext in both popular and literary representations of the practice…Literary texts depict the curtain lecture as a skilled performance in which the cunning wife marshals preemptive attacks, crocodile tears, and sexual blandishments not only to leverage pretty clothes and jewelry form her husband, but to pull the wool over his eyes when she has a lover…The husband who submitted to being schooled audiently by his wife became the object of derisive laughter not only because he cowered under his wife’s tongue-lashings, but also because – unruly tongues and unruly bodies being so intimately related in popular and literary texts – he was assumed to be a cuckold. (Sloan,