Jealusy In Othello Essay Research Paper The

Jealusy In Othello Essay, Research Paper

The emotions of jealousy in the characters in Othello

In Othello Shakespeare presents everybody with the tragic spectacle of a man who, in a spirit of jealous rage, destroys what he loves best in all the world. Such a spectacle must of necessity be painful, whatever the object destroyed and whoever the destroyer, but it is doubly painful and deeply tragic when we see a noble man brutally killing his pure, faithful and loving young wife in the mistaken belief that she was cheating on him. This emotion was done be jealousy and these jealousy caused the characters to destroy themselves and others especially Othello, Iago and Roderigo.

The love of Othello and Desdemona is a love that doesn’t care for physical barriers of colour, nationality and age. Its tenderness and passion are evident whenever they speak of each other. Othello won Desdemona by relating to her the adventures and dangers he had experienced :

She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d,

And I loved her that she did pity them. (Act 1, Sc.3, 167)

Despite the way in which the purity and depth of their love is ultimately different from the last scene of Act 1, throughout Act 2 and at the opening of Act 3. In Act 2, a meeting between Cassio and Desdemona reinforces Iago’s idea of developing a suspicion of the two in the mind of Othello. Throughout Act 3, Iago keeps telling Othello things making him more mad

and becomes more and more fearful that there really is a romance between his wife and Cassio. Then in Act three Othello starts to wonder the physical and cultural disparity between himself and his wife:

…Haply, for I am black

And have not those soft parts of conversation

That chambers have, or for I am declined

Into the vale of years,- yet that’s not much-

She’s gone. I am abused; and my relief

Must be to loathe her…(Act 3, Sc.3, 206-65)

He assumes that his own lack of the qualities she is accustomed to in the young men about her way well have led to her infidelity.

Before Othello can do anything to Cassio or Desdemona he wanted proof,

I’ll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove;

And on the proof, there is no more but this:

Away at once with love or jealousy! (Act 3, Sc.3, 187-90)

Iago then supplies him with the visible, tangible proof of Desdemona’s adultery with Cassio that he desires. The episode of the handkerchief and that of the conversation concerning Bianca, which Othello believes to be about Desdemona, are but two of the incidents in which tricks Othello into believing that Desdemona is cheating on him. The anger and persistence with which Othello demands her handkerchief frighten Desdemona into panicky lying and lead her to wondering comment to her husband: ‘My lord is not my lord, nor should I know him / Were