Betrayal in Othello
- Created by: kelliedickson
- Created on: 09-06-17 10:46
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- Betrayal is key to the plot of Othello because the most immediate effect of the betrayal of trust is in the emotional impact on the person betrayed, this emotional impact is the death of Desdemona, and victimised protagonist Othello whose weakness is that he makes abrupt and eager decisions and then acts upon them based on his military experience which fortifies the tragedy.
- John Knox’s (1558) interpretation of women being ‘weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish: and experience hath declared them to be unconstant, variable, cruel and lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment’ immediately refers to women being disobedient which evidently was considered as a form of betrayal at this time especially towards the ascendant male gender. (DESDEMONA DECLARING LOVE FOR OTHELLO TO BRABANTIO).
- As women were emblems of Catholic Morality, Desdemona’s disobedience could have set a foundation for betrayal at the beginning, or maybe foreshadowed it as this key element of the tragedy becomes more frequent throughout the play. And so, you could argue her rebellious act encouraged further betrayal of the characters in Othello such as Iago’s constant machiavellianism towards several other characters all due to his hatred towards Othello.
- Women were instructed and expected to become devoted mothers, and to rear and raise their children as proper Christians (this however, may be an indication of Desdemona’s betrayal, her abstruse marriage to Othello could suggest that it would have been improper to raise mixed raced children as ‘proper Christians’ due to Iago referring to Othello as a “Barbary horse”, possibly then referring to the famous horses of the Arab world, but also playing on the associations of ‘barbarian’ with paganism and savagery).
- Strong religious morals were aimed at preserving chastity until matrimony…
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