Contemporary Approaches Flashcards
What have many feminist critics noted about Jacobean tragedies?
Female characters are normally victims who have limited power and are punished for their sexuality.
What does Marilyn French suggest about Desdemona?
She ‘accepts her culture’s dictum that she must be obedient to males’ and is ‘self-denying in the extreme’ when she dies.
What does Lisa Jardine suggest the world in Jacobean drama is?
A wholly masculine one where there is only a male viewpoint to offer.
What does Lisa Jardine suggest Desdemona is?
The stereotype of female passivity.
What does Lisa Jardine say Desdemona is punished for? By what?
Desdemona proves to be ‘too-knowing, too-independent’. Because of her waywardness she is punished by the patriarchy.
What does Dympna Callaghan consider?
The cultural significance of Desdemona’s wedding sheets and the handkerchief, commenting on how these objects had economic and symbolic value in the Renaissance.
What does Dympna Callaghan see as a ‘miniature of the nuptial linens’?
The handkerchief, he suggests it is crucially important to the stability of the marriage of Othello and Desdemona.
What does Leonard Tennenhouse believe?
He takes the view that ‘Jacobean tragedies offer up their scenes of excessive punishment as if mutilating the female could somehow correct political corruption.’
What does Leonard Tennenhouse suggest about Desdemona?
She has to be destroyed because she is subversive.
What, unlike many feminist critics, does Leonard Tennenhouse suggest Desdemona is?
The ‘embodiment of power’ when she appears in Act 1 and defends her right to choose her own husband.
What does Frances Dolan suggest Jacobean drama reflects?
Seventeenth-century anxieties about the racial ‘other’, the traitor ‘inside’, the plotting subordinate and abusive authority figures.
Dolan says that Othello can be linked to all these ‘spectres of disorder’.
What does Nicholas Marsh suggest Iago represents?
A new way of thinking about the world/ He is a typical malcontent of Machiavel, a dissatisfied and cynical man who will not stay in his place.
What does Ania Loomba suggest the central conflict in Othello is?
The central conflict in Othello is ‘between the racism of a white patriarchy and the threat posed to it by both a black man and a white woman’.
What does Ania Loomba suggest Othello is at the beginning of the play?
An honorary white but becomes a total outsider because of his relationship with Desdemona, which ruptures his ‘precarious entry into the white world’.
What does Karen Newman argue about white male characters (especially Iago) in the play?
They feel threatened by the ‘power and potency of a different and monstrous sexuality’ which Othello represents.
