Sacrificing Desdemona
Bill Long
The State of Othello's Mind in 5.2.1-85
My concern in this essay is to try to understand what Othello is thinking and feeling before he suffocates/strangles Desdemona on their bed. In short he is trying to suppress all his emotions and become as icy as the Pontic flow and as hard-hearted as a stone. He actually deceives himself into thinking he has extinguished all emotion, but his emotions, like the facts of what happened, "'twill out" and will lead to his destruction. Finally, he believes that killing Desdemona is the only way to preserve their love.
Othello's Tormented Mind
Othello gives a preventative rationale for killing Desdemona: "Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men (5.2.6)." But it is a flimsy reason, a Potemkin village constructed of cardboard that will come crashing down when the slightest breeze blows against it. In fact what is happening is that Othello must kill Desdemona to try to still his tormented mind. Othello is nearly crazed by inner turmoil because of her alleged betrayal, and his emotional roller coaster of Act IV must either lead to her death or his madness (or death). In his anguished situation, he argues to himself that killing Desdemona is the only way to keep loving her. "This sorrow's heavenly,/ It strkes where it doth love (5.2.21-22)," and "Be thus [still and calm, because Desdemona is sleeping] when thou art dead, and I will kill thee/ And love thee after (5.2.18-19)." He thus mentions his love for Desdemona twice as he prepares to kill her. He knows he cannot stop loving her or he will return to chaos (3.3.90-92), and so he decides in his twisted logic that killing her will enable him to keep loving her. It is almost as if Othello believes that stillness, symbolized by the cold "monumental alablaster" of the stone, is the only condition Desdemona can assume for him to keep loving her.
In order to try to believe this unlikely set of propositions, Othello has to strangle his own emotions just as he intends to strangle Desdemona. He cannot let his heart be torn in two and his mind go screaming in multiple directions. When his emotions take over all he can do is extrapolate; all he can do is to imagine that Desdemona has not simply had sexual relations with Cassio on one occasion but "she with Cassio hath the act of shame/ A thousand times committed (5.2.210-212)." There is no limit to the multiplied torment of his mind when he lets his emotions take over.
But if can control them, and coolly redefine the murder he is about to commit, he can, he thinks, overcome the human limitation of feeling and continue to love her at the same time. Thus, for Othello, his love for Desdemona is ultimately purchased with emotional capital: his love can continue only if he gives up all emotions. But, love itself is an emotion, a feeling, as well as a duty, and giving up the feeling aspect of love is like giving up the odor and color of Spring and continuing to call May Spring. He is trapped in the prison of his own mind, and the verbal and then breathing constriction faced by Desdemona only mirrors a similar conceptual constriction in Othello's mind.
Desdemona's Death as Sacrifice
So, Othello needs to redefine her death as not the killing of his beloved but the sacrifice of the thing most loved in order to prevent further wrongdoing. In this process he depersonalizes her death: "This sorrow's heavenly,/ It strikes where it doth love (5.2.21-22)." His killing of Desdemona will be the act of "sorrow," a sorrow that is "heavenly" and that strikes as impersonally as the thunder of Zeus. And, his true thoughts of her death come out later as she objects to his plan to kill her: "O perjur'd woman, thou dost stone my heart,/ And mak'st me call what I intend to do/ A murther, which I thought a sacrifice (5.2.63-65)."
In using the language of sacrifice, Shakespeare is beckoning us to think back on an earlier tragedy, Julius Caesar, and the rationale given there for the killing of Caesar. Brutus warns the conspirators that they should only kill Caesar and not Antony else the act appear to be an expression of irrational wrath. Rather,
"Let's be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius./ We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar,/ And in the spirit of men there is no blood;/ O that we then could come by Caesar's spirit,/ And not dismember Caesar! But, alas,/ Caesar must bleed for it! And, gentle friend,/ Let's kill him boldly, but not wrathfully;/ Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods,/ Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds (JC 2.1.166-174)."
By using the language of sacrifice, Brutus is sacralizing the death of Caesar. Though the thought behind Caesar's death as sacrifice is much more elaborately developed than Desdemona's death as sacrifice, the reference to blood in both is arresting. Brutus would like nothing better than just to kill Caesar's spirit for which the shedding of blood would be unnecessary but, alas, you can't get to the spirit without going through the body. So, Caesar must bleed and die.
Othello also does not want to shed blood. "Yet I'll not shed her blood,/ Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,/ And smooth as monumental alablaster (5.2.3-5)." But here the rationale appears to be different. He wants to keep Desdemona intact. Her flesh already is whiter than snow and smoother than the "alablaster" tomb. No blood has flowed from it [Is this another indication, perhaps, that the sheets in which she lies are unstained, and that she lies there, in fact, in virginity?], and Othello will strangle her, even though he earlier wanted to "chop her into messes (4.1.200)," because he doesn't want the blood to flow. Perhaps the blood, the life of a person, is an indication of the uncontrollable aspect of life. Once it begins to flow, either because the hymen is broken or the integrity of the body is otherwise breached, life can quickly become out of control. Othello, therefore, must "control" Desdemona completely, and only in that controlled state can he continue to love her.
Conclusion
Othello's language of sacrifice is only half-hearted and not nearly so developed as Brutus's. In fact, Othello really isn't convinced in his mind that what he is doing is offering some kind of sacrifice to the gods. Indeed, this would not comport well with Christian theology at all. Thus, he uses the religious justification only scantily, and rests his case on the fear that she will betray him further. What he really wants to do, however, is an impossibility: to bring his emotions fully under control through killing her so that he can be assured that he would love her forever. He must freeze her to love her. Only in this way, he is convinced, can he keep himself from returning to chaos. But, as events develop, this thought exercise quickly unravels.
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