Chapter 10 - Sufi Theoeroticism, the Sophianic Feminine and Desdemona’s Tragic Heroism

Summary

Destiny is recognizing the radiance of the soul that, even when faced with human impossibility, loves all of life.

– Marion Woodman, Bone: A Journal of Wisdom, Strength and Healing, p. xvi

This little point [point vierge] of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us.

– Thomas Merton, ‘A Member of the Human Race’, A Thomas Merton Reader, pp. 346–7

Sixteenth-century Venice, the setting of Othello, was an archetypal city-state where Beauty and Love interacted towards ends of transcendence and pleasure. Promoting its reputation as an international trade centre and a cosmopolitan city-state, Venice curated itself ‘as a city founded on principles of equality, magnanimity, domestic harmony, and justice for all of its citizens’. The most visible and ubiquitous icon of its civic aspirations combines both the divine and pagan emblems, the Virgin Mary and Venus Anadyomene, into a single female figure of Justice: Venetia, beautifully depicted in Paolo Veronese's ceiling allegory, The Apotheosis of Venice (1579). Aspiring to social and political concord, Venice, overseen and protected by this conflation of Venus and Virgin, was equally known for the unparalleled beauty of its courtesans and the unruly licentiousness to which Iago discreetly refers as ‘our country disposition’ (3.3.197). According to English traveller Thomas Coryat, their ‘allurements’ were ‘so infinite’ that their fame ‘hath drawen many to Venice from some of the remotest parts of Christendome, to contemplate their beauties, and enjoy their pleasing dalliances’.

Against this backdrop of Venice's paradoxes, Othello intriguingly dramatises the theoeroticism surrounding the double-sided Venus whose divinity is misconstrued as lust in the sensible world. The play's embodiment of Venus is the great-souled Desdemona, who binds herself – ‘soul and fortunes’ (1.3.348) – to Othello, noble Moor of Venice. Triggered by the efforts of his perfidious ensign Iago who exploits the duality of Venus towards destructive self-serving ends, Othello detaches from his theoerotic partner and their conjoined aspirations to virtuous piety, signalling a further narrowing of the circumscribed sphere of female action. Against all adversity Desdemona still manages to present herself as a female archetype of virtue. A champion of bold humility, Desdemona trumpets an unexamined tragic heroism grounded in Sufi-Christian spirituality channelling Neoplatonism, the Hellenistic philosophy exhibiting elements common to the mystical expressions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity.