William Rudolf Long and Dr. Bill Long and William R. Long and Essay 100 and final questions and unresolved questions and race and Othello

5. What is the role of emotion in our decision-making process? Othello tries to suppress his emotion, to conquer it, to smother his interior doubts beneath the imposing and comforting languages of law (appeal to justice--5.2.17,138) and religion (appeal to sacrifice--5.2.65). "It is the cause" becomes his mantra of self-deception. Yet is he so different from any of us? We are taught, and we teach, that the life driven by emotion is not the useful life. We therefore develop a whole vocabulary of how to "handle" emotion. Emotion can be felt, of course, but it must be "controlled," or "channeled," or "focused," or "contained." Young people ought to be taught, we say, to learn how to "handle" their emotions. But what is the difference between merely "channeling" emotion and trying to extirpate it? When does the quest for control become, paradoxically, the means for emotion to squirt out the back door and come around and be the unrecognized motivator of life? Othello teaches us that the attempt to quiet the emotions at all costs is not possible and that it actually leads to incredible intellectual distortion. But it does not tell us the proper role of the emotions, or how to "channel" them.

6. What is the nature of the love we have and seek? Despite the emphasis in many of my essays on deception and jealousy, the underlying reality in Othello, as in many of Shakespeare's plays, is love and our expression of it. Can we actually hope to love a person or are we only able to love an image of that person? When Othello narrates the story of his life to the Venetian Senate, he says that Desdemona "lov'd me for the dangers I had pass'd,/ And I lov'd her that she did pity them (1.3.167-168)." When Desdemona speaks later to the Senate she says, "I saw Othello's visage in his mind," and "I did love the Moor to live with him (1.3.252,248)." When we learn to love and fall in love, do we see the beloved's "visage in his mind"--i.e., see the beloved as he (or she) really is, apart from the externalities of race, culture and upbringing? Or, do we, like Narcissus, fall in love with an image of ourselves, much less the other person, and convince ourselves that we are in love?

And, what about Othello's statement that she loved him for his adventures (his "manliness") but he loved her derivately (because she loved him)? Is that the way things tend to work between men and women, that the men really are not capable, in most instances, of loving women for "who they are" but rather love them primarily (even if they do not say so) because she has first loved them and finds their adventures and ambitions so intriguiging? Modern feminism tells women to find a man who "loves them as they are." Might that be the crowing act of self-deception, because men are, by and large, incapable of doing that? As Desdemona says, "we must think men are not gods,/ Nor of them look for such observancy/ As befits the bridal (3.4.148-150)." Maybe men are only "gods" on their wedding day when they profess pure love for their brides. In any case, Othello and Desdemona loved each other fiercely but neither took the time to understand the other's vulnerabilities and fears. Desdemona denied Othello's capacity for jealousy (3.4.30-31), and Othello could not recognize his wife's undivided love for him, despite her words about Cassio.

7. Why do we sometimes need to "freeze" someone in their past rather than let them grow? When Othello disembarks on Cyprus in 2.1 and greets Desdemona, it is as if life could not get any better. "I cannot speak enough of this content,/ It stops me here; it is too much of joy (2.1.196-197)." I think there is something in the feeling there expressed by Othello that he doesn't want, yea he cannot, lose. He wants to freeze his joy and his memory at that point of greatest triumph. The "gutter'd rocks and congregated sands" were "traitors ensteep'd to enclog" the Turkish keels (2.1.69,70), and they foundered in the storm. Now, Othello holds his beloved in his arms away from the noise of Venice. Life simply couldn't get any better. But then life changes, and it changes rapidly. Its bewildering rapidity frightened and confused Othello. When he finally sees Desdemona sleeping peacefully on their bed, just before he kills her, one gets the sense that if only she had remained so motionless, none of this would have happened. Perhaps we, too, are "enclogged" by the power of memory, and just want to "freeze" our friend/lover in that time and relationship.

We often attribute domestic violence to one partner's (usually the male's) violent tendencies or personal insecurities. Why not also, with Othello as our guide, see it as a sign of lost love or confused love, the love that would like to have "frozen" the person in a memory that still is so overpoweringly good for the lover? Do we want or need things to stay just as they are rather than encourage another's growth, because we fear that that growth might lead to estrangement from us?

Concluding Thoughts

So we come to the end of our long journey with Othello. It is not performed very much in our day in the United States primarily because the themes surrounding race are so fraught with emotion in our culture that directors and actors alike might be afraid to pursue them. For example, the Moor is the subject of racial attack because of his physical characteristics, his supposed sexual prowess, and his "weak function." He is a man of extreme nobility of character, but that nobility is easily stripped away by the cunning Iago. Eventually the large and imposing black man becomes violent and murders an innocent white woman, "the sweetest innocent/ Taht e'er did lift up eye (5.2.199-200)." What a wonderful breeding ground for even more prejudice in a society which is still quite unable to handle the painful legacy of slavery. Thus, Othello has the curious ability to hurt us, even if we deny our capacity to be hurt by a play.

But Shakespeare, it seems to me, explores the volatile issue of race by letting the racial stereotypes fly and then showing that at the level of the heart we are both a product of stereotypes as well as people of quite individual temperament. One of the painful realities that Othello might teach is that stereotypes, malicious as they are, are basically true. We are not a society (in 2004 America) that wants to accept that judgment.

The greatest benefit, however, in studying Othello has been to provide a vocabulary and a language to limn human life with accuracy and potency. I early set it as a goal in my life to come up with words that are "asymptotic to life," that is, that are tangent to life at infinity, as the mathematicians might say. I find after reading Othello that I simply must memorize the lines, hundreds and hundreds of them, so that I can better express the bitter, twisted and joyful truths of life. How about you?