Othello: Sexual Difference and Internal Deviation
Othello: Sexual Difference and Internal Deviation
Othello explores anxious preoccupation with perversity as a disordered and disordering movement. Here ‘extravagant’ condenses deviation, perversion, and vagrancy. In one sense the metaphors of truth, linearity, and deviation point simply to duplicity; but also signified is a wilful disarticulation of traditional relations between authority, service, and identity. Gratiano's description of Brabantio's ‘desperate turn’, with its echoes of the Fall, shows that destructive deviation may characterize even the most stolid of patriarchs. The opposition of woman as passive/active correlates closely with that of women as madonna/whore. This kind of representation of deviant female desire echoes Augustinian privation to repudiate those who invest so heavily in Desdemona's ‘virtuous’ passivity. That she is actually attempting to live out the prescribed subject position for a woman within sexual difference only confirms that because the subordinate is so often the subject of displacement there is never safety in obedience.
Keywords: Othello, deviation, perversion, vagrancy, privation, passivity, sexual difference
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
