The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0379 Wednesday, 15 July 2009
[1] From: Carol Barton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 15 Jul 2009 07:48:32 -0500 (CDT)
Subj: Re: SHK 20.0372 Othello's Handkerchief
[2] From: Martin Mueller <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 15 Jul 2009 08:13:10 -0500
Subj: Re: SHK 20.0372 Othello's Handkerchief
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Carol Barton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 15 Jul 2009 07:48:32 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: 20.0372 Othello's Handkerchief
Comment: Re: SHK 20.0372 Othello's Handkerchief
What an interesting thread!
I have a slightly different "take" on the matter: it doesn't really
matter whether the handkerchief actually is, or is only believed to be,
endowed with magical properties. Like the forbidden fruit of Genesis,
it's symbolic of a test of faith -- and its loss, like Eve's ingestion
of the malus, is confirmation of faith broken. Othello's public and
private versions of the handkerchief's history are not necessarily
disingenuous or sinister: perhaps he thinks others will mock him or
think his confidence in Desdemona's fidelity less than firm (as we know
it is) if he tells the token's true origin and properties; perhaps he
makes the story up to enhance the value of the gift to the
romantically-inclined Desdemona -- or perhaps he's lying about it
altogether, and purchased the handkerchief himself from a street-vendor.
The point is that it is a *token of his love* -- which Desdemona treats
like the "trifle" Emilia calls it -- symbolic (to him) of her valuation
of his devotion. It's a nothing -- and an everything -- like many of the
little treasures each of us has in his or her life that are valuable
only because of the giver and the circumstances of the gift, but
worthless (or trifling) in anyone else's eyes. It's human nature to
invest certain events and things with the property of "signs" -- and the
more superstitious the individual, the more likely he or she is to
believe that stepping on a crack will actually break his or her mother's
back.
I don't think you can separate the vehicle from the tenor in this case.
Magic or not, the handkerchief is deeply meaningful to Othello -- not
because of its supposed inherent powers, but because of power with which
he himself has invested it. It may as well have been his own throbbing
heart that Desdemona carelessly dropped.
Best to all,
Carol Barton
[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Martin Mueller <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 15 Jul 2009 08:13:10 -0500
Subject: 20.0372 Othello's Handkerchief
Comment: Re: SHK 20.0372 Othello's Handkerchief
Returning once more to the handkerchief, I am grateful to Julia
Griffin's observation that late in the play Othello refers to the
handkerchief as an "antique token" that his father gave to his mother
-- a (not so?) distant relative of the "turquois" that Shylock's wife
gave to him when he was a bachelor. Deeply charged objects, and much
turns on their loss.
It is unclear to me whether the two accounts are incompatible in the way
in which, for instance, the two accounts of Portia's death are
incompatible, but I am very skeptical about any interpretation that
uses the possible discrepancy to turn Othello into a man who makes up
stories with a manipulative intent. That is Iago's line.
Desdemona 'loses' the handkerchief because at a critical moment she
cares more about Othello's aching head than about the thing that
symbolizes their relationship. That is part of the 'thing|ring' paradox
that Shakespeare had explored in the Merchant of Venice. The German 18th
century playwright Lessing, a very good reader of Shakespeare, saw the
connection between the ring and the handkerchief. In Nathan the Wise,
which turns on Boccaccio's story of the three rings, the 'true' ring has
the magical power of making its owner 'amiable'. The judge who cannot
decide which of the three rings is true, tells its bears that the most
amiable will be the owner of the true ring -- a subtle way of re- and
de-mythologizing the magic object.
Othello at the critical moment attends not to Desdemona but to the thing
that he turns into a fetish. This is the wrong thing to do, just as
Desdemona's disregard of the handkerchief was the right thing to do.
From those two moments of distraction the tragedy follows, and in very
deep ways they carry fundamental aspects of the relationship of Othello
and Desdemona.
I think you miss the delusion of Othello if you think of him at this
moment as setting up Desdemona. And since the second version of the
story (the father gave it to the mother) does not appear until much
later, the audience would not have any basis for challenging the truth
of the story. And how productive is a line of inquiry that starts from
an "aha" moment where after discovering that it was "really" Othello's
father who gave the handkerchief to his mother you revise your
understanding of the first account and decide that Othello made it up?
These are moves that belong in the world of detective novels.
In the end it is good to remember that the handkerchief is Shakespeare's
'fabrication'. He makes a lot of fuss about the object at a very
particular moment in the play. The fuss goes a long way to tell you
about Othello's delusion, but it tells you very little about him as a
dissembler
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