My reading of Othello was very enjoyable, but also a little frustrating. There seems to be so many themes that you could look at in this play and so I have easily gotten distracted from my original ideas of my essay and am feeling urged to create new ones out of the themes and ideas that have sprung from Othello. There are themes of jealousy, race, sex, marital relationships, honor, class, deception, heroism, death and love, solitude, blindness, temperance, and patience. There is so much pack into that play that it is really cool to read it, and I highly recommend that you do. But with all of this I looked into a couple more of themes that came out in this play by looking at the Shakespeare Bibliography, select google searches, and even an audio version of Othello. By doing this I found some essay topic ideas that got me a little more excited than the ones that I had mentioned before.
One of those is going with the race theme in Othello and looking at how his character is developed similar to the character that W.E.B. Dubois places on African Americans in his The Souls of Black Folk. I am taking an African American Literature class right now and so that's probably another reason why this is really interesting to me. I can sort of see how Othello would have internal pressure to become something under the speculation of all the white people, and therefore is constantly worried about whether people are doing things dishonorable to him behind his back. The way people treat him is very important to him.
The other idea that I found was really interesting was the idea of heroism. There are questions in this play along with King Lear that ask what makes a hero? And as I thought about how Othello willingly kills himself in the end because he realizes what horrible thing he has done in accusing Desdemona and strangling her to death. Is this heroic because he dies to pay for his sins. It's sort of a repentance thing, which by repenting he displays his utmost honor. Likewise, King Lear dies after his daughter has died due to everything that he had caused to happen, so is his repentance honorable enough to be heroic? Explaining it like that seems like it is. But then I thought about a school shooting and how generally the people who shoot out the school commit suicide in the end. Is that then, by my definition, heroic? I don't think we want to believe that would be an heroic act just because of everything that happened before.
The question you bring up at the end is a good one... cause I found myself agreeing with your definition of heroism with Othello and Lear, but as soon as you brought up the modern day counter argument, it brought me up short.... Now I'm not sure how I feel about that definition :/
ReplyDeleteUm yeah, I agree with Shelise. Way to sucker punch us at the end! That is such an interesting leading question. And it makes me curious about other ways that we define and categorize characters in plays and in literature that maybe aren't as applicable as we think.
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of examining Othello in relation to The Souls of Black Folks, and maybe even further examining his character based on the way race impacts one's life today. I don't really see the connection of the school shooter's suicide to Lear's death... It's not at all redemptive.
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