But, in the words of Harold Boris, a contemporary post-Kleinian analyst of envy, "the infant who cannot, sooner or later, feed the hand from which it feeds . 219-20]); Jones, 274-75; and Susan Isaacs, "Penis-Feces-Child," Internationaljournal of Psycho-analysis 8 (1927): 74-76. For turn, see Othello's later "she can turn, and turn, and yet go on, / And turn again" [4.1.249-50];48 characteristically, Othello replicates in Desdemona the "turn" Iago has replicated in him.) . And in fact he has: part of the peculiar horror of this play is that Othello becomes so effective a receptacle for—and enactor of—Iago's fantasies. For Arthur L. Little Jr. the whole of the play constitutes "the primal scene of racism," a forbidden sexual sight/site from which the audience "constructs the significance of race" ("'An essence that's not seen': The Primal Scene of Racism in Othello," SQ 44 [1993]: 304-24, esp. When he is made to imagine that object as spoiled—"a cistern, for foul toads / To knot and gender in"—its loss is wholly intolerable to him; even at the end, as he kills Desdemona, he is working very hard to restore some remnant of the good object in her. Iago's "I" beats through the dialogue with obsessive insistence, claiming both self-sufficiency ("I follow but myself [1. Klein hypothesizes the combined parent figure as a special target of envy ("the suspicion that the parents are always getting sexual gratification from one another reinforces the phantasy . [1.1.80, 85]) looks less like a description of danger to Brabantio or Desdemona than like a description of danger to Iago himself. her time, Desdemona has denounced Othello’s ego—at least that was the assumption of her male-dominated society. 64-65).18 To allow himself to be seen or known is tantamount to being stabbed, eaten alive: pecked at from the outside unless he manages to keep the barrier between inner and outer perfectly intact, gnawed from the inside if he lets anyone in. Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. As the embodiment of what Iago would avoid, Roderigo exists largely to give Iago repeated occasions on which to display his mastery over both self and other: in effect, Iago can load his contaminated insides into Roderigo and then rub him to the sense in order to demonstrate the difference between them and, hence, the impermeability of Iago's own insides. He is such manipulative, self-serving, and dishonest person; making it obvious he would be a man with a personality disorder. frieze, In Iago's fantasy, as I have suggested, there is no uncontaminated interior space: he can allow no one access to his interior and has to keep it hidden away because it is more a cesspool than a palace or a garden. Iago's hoarding, his sadism, his references to purgatives and clyster-pipes can be read through the language of classical psychoanalysis as evidence of an anal fixation; in that language the equation of money with faeces is familiar enough, as is the association of sadistic control with the anal phase.19 Iago's obsessive suspicion that Othello has leaped into his seat, along with his heavily eroticized account of Cassio's dream, similarly lend themselves to a classically psychoanalytic reading of Iago as repressed homosexual.20 While these readings are not "wrong" within their own terms, they nonetheless seem to me limited, and not only insofar as they can be said to assume a historically inaccurate concept of the subject or of "the homosexual":21 limited even within the terms of psychoanalysis insofar as they do not get at either the quality of Iago's emotional relationships (his inability to form any kind of libidinal bond, his tendency to treat others as poisonous inner objects) or the terrifying theatrical seductiveness of the processes of projection that we witness through him. 305-6). When we first meet Othello, he is confident enough about his status and his color that he wishes to be found; he can confidently wish "the goodness of the night" (1.2.35) on Cassio and the duke's servants because blackness has not yet been poisoned for him. Othello may be impressive on the battlefield, but his own personal insecurity leads to the tragic end of the story. 4-5]) in a death that he imagines as a revirgination;33 in fantasy he cleanses "the slime / That sticks on filthy deeds," remaking her unmarred and unpenetrated, "one entire and perfect chrysolite" (11. Other tragedies begin with ancillary figures commenting on the character who will turn out to be at the center of the tragedy—one thinks of Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra—but no other play subjects its ostensibly tragic hero to so long and intensive a debunking before he even sets foot onstage. Thus, the ego operates in accordance with the reality principle (Freud, 1984). (Find a price that suits your requirements). . The Patterns in Othello Compared with Freud's sex and aggression theories. But Iago at least insists that he is the divided one, and Othello initially claims that his soul is "perfect" or undivided; whatever the state to which Othello is reduced, Othello—like The Tempest—seems to me to encode the fantasy that the exotic other possesses a primitive unitary identity before his induction into a Western-style split self. (Poor Emilia has obviously learned from her husband: in her view men "are all but stomachs, and we all but food; / They eat us hungerly, and when they are full, / They belch us" [3.4.101-3].). Jealousy is a derivative of envy but is more easily recognized and more socially acceptable (Klein, Envy and Gratitude, 198; Joseph in Feldman and Spillius, eds., 182); partly as a consequence, it can sometimes serve as "an important defence against envy" (Klein, Envy and Gratitude, 198). Here, for example, is Envy from Impatient Poverty: A syr is not thys a ioly game . Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969). must be lee'd, and calm'd" [11. Again and again Iago imagines the body filled with liquid putrefaction, with contents that can and should be vomited out or excreted. The matter of Othello, and satisfaction of the audience's urgent curiosity about what exactly Roderigo has just learned, are deferred until after we have heard Iago's catalogue of injuries to that "I" ("I know my price, I am worth no worse a place" [1.1.11]; "And I, of whom his eyes had seen the proof, . Hence the peculiar sensitivity of the envious to the good—and the consequent need not to possess but to destroy it, or, in Klein's terms, "to put badness, primarily bad excrement and bad parts of the self, into the mother, and first of all into her breast, in order to spoil and destroy her. 41 My formulation here is partly indebted to Janine Chausseguet-Smirgel's work on perversion, especially anal perversion, which she sees as an attempt to dissolve generational and gender differences in order to defend against acknowledgment of the pervert's own puniness and vulnerability; though she does not draw specifically on Klein's concept of envy, her work sometimes intersects usefully with Klein's. Iago's voice inducts us into the play: long before Othello has a name, much less a voice, of his own, Iago has a distinctive "I." What we have here, I suggest, is the vindictive fantasy of a faecal pregnancy and delivery that can project Iago's inner monstrosity and darkness into the world:44 initially displaced upward to the evacuated pate, this faecal baby is then returned to its source as his monstrous birth, the baby he has conceived in response to Desdemona's request for praise (2.1.124) and the easy generativity (his own is a difficult labor) that he envies in her. (1.1.) To shatter the illusion of Othello's fullness and presence is also to shatter the illusion of his erotic power; his division from himself is first of all his division from Desdemona and from the fair portion of himself invested in her. 34 Iago's words here, like Emilia's at 3.4.157-60, refer explicitly to jealousy but nonetheless define the self-referential qualities of envy. The dream clearly crosses the line—between male friendship and sodomy—that Bray delineates, more strikingly because Iago need not have included all that sexiness to convey his "information" to Othello; and whether or not the reported dream proclaims Iago a "repressed homosexual," its effect on Othello clearly depends as much on its crossing of that line as on the information that Cassio dreams about Desdemona. Listening to them talk, hearing their words, and seeing their actions just makes one’s skin crawl. In the first scene, he claims to be angry at Othello for having passed him over for the position of lieutenant (I.i. William Warburton (1747) glosses "mocke" (in terms strikingly close to my own) as "loaths that which nourishes and sustains it" (176). When he first invokes the metaphor of pregnancy, he is merely the midwife/observer: "There are many events in the womb of time, which will be delivered" (1.3.369-70). Having poured the pestilence of himself into Othello, Iago has nothing left inside him: his antigenerative birth hollows him out, leaving him empty. He manipulates and mentally corrupts him to achieve what he wants, which in this case is power. And "The Moor already changes with my poison," Iago says, adding for our benefit—in case we have not noticed the links between his poisonous conceit and Othello's—"Dangerous conceits are in their natures poisons, / Which . You may also want to include the person responsible and the budget required for each objective. Contemporary critics who comment on the homoerotic dynamic between Iago and Othello tend to locate their readings not in this model but in the complex of metaphors that makes Iago's seduction of Othello into an aural penetration and insemination, with a resulting monstrous (and miscegenistic) conception; see, e.g., Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 1981), 144-45; and Parker in Hendricks and Parker, eds., 99-100. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare: Some Recent Appraisals Examined ([London, New York, and Toronto: Long-mans, Green and Company, 1949], 102-5), though Stewart ultimately abandons a naturalistic reading of the play through projection for a symbolic reading of Iago and Othello as parts of a single whole. For Iago calls up the action of the play as though in response to this sense of injury: "Call up her father, . We see his self-serving anger issues from the beginning. Roderigo plays a pivotal role in this process. 5 This position was powerfully—and variously—articulated in three classic essays published in 1979-80: Edward A. I follow him to serve my turn upon him. Iago mentions later that Othello slept with his wife, Emilia: “And it is thought abroad that twixt my sheets he’s done my office” (1.3.366-367). . "40 In conceiving of his monstrous birth, that is, Iago not only mocks but also displaces Desdemona's generativity by taking on its powers for himself, denying the difference—between her fruitfulness and his barrenness, between her fullness and his emptiness—that he cannot tolerate. Insofar as perversion attempts to replace God's differentiated universe with its own undifferentiation, it is "the equivalent of Devil religion" (9); the undifferentiated anal universe "constitutes an imitation or parody of the genital universe of the father" (11). 25-27; in her account "science merely takes up already pre-existing terms of difference, such as skin color and features, that have [previously] been combined with physical and mental characteristics" (25). Through this metaphor, Iago's mental production becomes his substitute birth, in which he replaces the world outside himself41—the world of time's womb, or of Desdemona's—with the projection of his own interior monstrosity; thus conceived, his plot manages simultaneously to destroy the generativity that he cannot tolerate and to proclaim the superior efficacy of his own product. 33 As many have argued: see especially Cavell, 134; and Snow, 392. The English author William Shakespeare (1564–1616)(➔ Media Link #ab) wrote poetry (sonnets and narrative poems) as well as 38 plays – 39 if one includes Double Falsehood,that is, Lewis Theobald's (1688–1744)(➔ Media Link #ac) 1727 reconstruction of a lost play, which was based on Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's (1547–1616)(➔ Media Link #ad) Don Quixote and originally entitled Cardenio. Presumably Iago means that his invention is as slow—as laborious—-as the process of removing birdlime from rough cloth (frieze), in which the nap of the cloth is removed along with the soiling agent (hence "plucks out brain and all"). Attention to the status of "others" has made contemporary criticism particularly sensitive to Othello as the site of Iago's projections rather than as the originator of projection; see, e.g., Parker on "the violence of projection" (100). Klein insisted both on the fantasies of bodily function accompanying this process and on the extent to which it is specifically pieces of the self and its inner objects that are thus relocated, with the consequence that pieces of the self are now felt to be "out there," both controlling the object into which they have been projected and subject to dangers from it; Klein renamed this process "projective identification." August 26, 2020 by Essay Writer. 1 Quotations follow the Arden edition of Othello, edited by M. R. Ridley (London: Methuen, 1958). They represented the opposite of ego, pride, cynicism, and amorality. Witness, you ever-burning lights above, You elements that clip us round about, Witness that here Iago doth give up The execution of his wit, hands, heart To wronged Othello's service! What I have earlier called Iago's injured "I"—his sense that he is chronically slighted and betrayed, his sense of self-division—produces (or perhaps is produced by) fantasies of his body as penetrated and contaminated, especially by Othello. Listening to them talk, hearing their words, and seeing their actions simply makes one’s skin crawl. He uses many racist terms, such as Moor to describe Othello or to get his attention. In William Shakespeare’s play, Othello, the character Iago lacks a superego which allowed his id to run free and this caused him to lack any form of sympathy and to become a sociopath. If Cassio is any indication, that erotic power is heavily idealized by the Italians: Great Jove, Othello guard, chawed his owne maw" in The Faerie Queene [I.iv.30]—to register the gnawing effects of jealousy on him); and in Othello itself, insofar as its own narratives of jealousy are far more legible and recognizably "human" than the envy represented through Iago and dismissed in him as unrecognizable, inhuman, or demonic. Shortly after he calls up black vengeance, and again in 5.2, Othello imagines his revenge swallowing up his victims (3.3.467 and 5.2.76), as though returning them to the interior source of his vengeance. Iago’s craftiness get Rodergio to trust him with his with his money; Rodergio says, “That thou, Iago, who hast had my purse as if the strings were mine…”. 232-52. Instead he attempts to recreate her unviolated wholeness ("that whiter skin of hers than snow, / And smooth, as monumental alabaster" [11. If the questionnaire is changed from person to person then the end result will be ... to Open a Business The business idea plays a critical role in the overall success ... ... actions. Are all doors lock'd?" In the context of lovemaking, spirits is not a neutral term; for its specifically sexual senses, see Stephen Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1977), 441-43. That he may bless this bay with his tall ship, We’ve discounted annual subscriptions by 50% for COVID-19 relief—Join Now! This sense of inner contamination leaves him—as Klein would predict—particularly subject to the sense of goodness in others and particularly ambivalent toward that goodness.
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