Critics: Women Flashcards
Valerie Traub - Othello kills Desdemona
‘the threat of female erotic power is psychically contained by means of metaphoric and dramatic transformation of women into…corpses’.
Jankowski - marriage is a norm
“If marriage is a norm women who were not married… challenged the norm and were consequently seen as threatening.”
Eales
“Morally, physically and intellectually weaker than men.”
Gayle Green
“Othello is concerned… with men’s misunderstandings of women.”
Carol Thomas Neel
Need female characters to understand male characters.
Karen Newman
“Much of the disgust… critics betray comes not from the fact of Othello’s blackness but from the relation of that blackness to Desdemona’s fair purity.”
Marjorie Garber
Desdemona as Venus
A C Bradley
“Till close to the end she frequently sets ones teeth on edge, and at the end, one is ready to worship her.”
Eales - free women thought as
“Sexually insatiable” and “cuckholding men.”
Loomba
‘Iago’s machinations are effective because Othello is predisposed… about the inherent duplicity of women.’
Webster - Desdemona
Describes girl in audience whispering ‘Oh god, don’t let him kill her.’ - audience desires agency.
Lisa Jardine - wife’s tongue
‘within the tightly-knot Renaissance household the wife’s tongue is her only weapon.’
Hazlitt - Victorians
‘resignation and angelic sweetness of temper’.
Grennan - Bianca defense against Emilia
‘Her speech is a moral reality that brings into sharper focus the moral deficiancies of the world that would condemn her.’
Marilyn French explores the masculine value system at work in Othello. French suggests Desdemona…
‘accepts her culture’s dictum that she must be obedient to males’ and is ‘self-denying in the extreme’ when she dies.
