I am What I am Not: Identifying with the Other in Othello

Summary

The relationship between tragedy and race in the critical history of Othello has been nearly as fraught as that between the play's romantic protagonists, and for many of the same reasons. The play's earliest critic, Thomas Rymer, found the black Othello so improbable a tragic hero and his relationship with Desdemona so inappropriate as to render the play incapable of producing the requisite tragic effect. Later critics like Coleridge, endeavouring to defend Shakespeare's reputation and the play's status as tragedy, often did so by denying Othello's blackness in order to preserve his plausibility as tragic hero and romantic lead. By the mid-twentieth century, most critics had come to accept both Othello as black and Othello as tragedy, and turned to consideration of what sort of tragedy, and tragic hero, the play offered. Those who read it as the tragedy of a noble hero and a great love destroyed by a treacherous villain often did so not by denying but by downplaying Othello's race and emphasizing instead the universality of his feelings and responses, while those who stressed the hero's own culpability in his downfall frequently did so in terms that evoked his ‘barbarous’ origins and the consequent incommensurability of his marriage. With the increased cultural and critical attention to ideologies of race in the 1960s and 1970s came the now commonplace argument that Othello is a tragedy not of race but of racism, exposing and condemning not Othello's race-based inadequacies but rather Iago's destructive use of racial stereotypes and prejudices. This pointed refutation of racial essentialism was often supported by an appeal to universalism, arguing that racist processes of differentiation function, for psychological, political or economic reasons, to obscure a common humanity that the play finally affirms.

In recent years, however, tragedy and race have suffered a separation, if not a divorce, in Othello criticism: while in keeping with the historicist and materialist turns in early modern studies, much has been learned about the historical circumstances and cultural data that inform the play's racial imaginary, little has been said about the role of tragic form in its ideological or affective use of those materials. In the argument that follows I seek to redress this lack by demonstrating the reciprocal roles of racial ideology in the complexity of Othello's formal structure and of formal expectations in the play's depiction of racial otherness. The key to this reciprocity is the concept of identification. Central to early modern and subsequent understandings of both genre and race, identification structures the play's activation as well as its thematization of tragic affect and racial ideology: Othello's formal and racial enticements and anxieties come to a head in an audience's ability – or inability – to identify with its characters. As the play's critical history suggests, however, the results of this dynamic are not universal, but depend upon the reader/viewer's critical and ideological positions. In examining the origins and history of the play's identificatory dynamic, I aim neither to recapture originary meaning nor to correct a history of misreadings, but to reunite race and tragedy in an Othello that speaks to our own critical and cultural circumstances.