Othello’s Desdemona Problem

“[I]nnocent, and sweet, and passive” (67). This is how lauded postcolonial Nigerian author Ben Okri describes Desdemona in his essay “Leaping Out of Shakespeare’s Terror: Five Meditations on Othello” (1997). As Okri meditates on the often evaded “terrors that are at the heart of the play” (59) after watching director Terry Hands’s Othello starring Ben Kingsley and David Suchet at the Barbican, in the fourth and fifth sections he turns to the general’s “general” and the way that the white, patriarchal powers shaping her worldview doom her and Othello’s love from the outset. For Okri, Desdemona is a young woman loving but ignorant, devoted but sheltered. “She is,” he explains, “the redemption and the victim of her history.” What is this history? Okri never articulates it, and neither does Shakespeare’s play. Yet even without its details, Okri understands that Desdemona is

How can Okri make these assertions without access to the very history he says shapes Desdemona? He can articulate these claims because Desdemona’s history is part of another history, one pervasive and well-known—that of white patriarchal control over the female body and mind. Okri never mentions patriarchal restrictions explicitly, but he implies them as he recognizes what Desdemona “has never been allowed.” Whether applied to Shakespeare’s Desdemona or the one Okri imagines for today, the protective sheltering of young white womanhood from the vagaries of the world depends upon a desire for silence, chastity, and obedience, for it is only through careful cultivation and protection by patriarchy that innocent, sweet, and passive femininity can endure.

According to Okri, such patriarchal circumscription serves to maintain a particular perspective, one that does not acknowledge or truly confront racial inequity.