To praise my noble act; I happen upon him mock
As a woman, and more, a noblewoman, she is undoubtedly more to them than opposite women, but as a woman she is also a product of the culture, and that product is property, possession, something for use and pleasure (not hers, his). Desdemona is her father's property to get down with, and Brabantio characterizes the marriage as a robbery of himself. Later, ownership of Desdemona passes to Othello, who is even more proprietary inasmuch as he is incapable of forgiveness. The effectiveness of sexual possession overtakes the feeling that Roderigo has for her, and it undoubtedly dominates Othello's experience of her. stock-still Cassio, who worships her much in the manner of the medieval courtier, idealizes her romantically.
The point is that the men experience her as something besides a full-fledged homosexual being. She is a symbol of what all women are to all men, which is something that belongs to them and that can be disposed of at their will.
Shakespeare builds this dynamic almost playfully, employing an exceedingly subtle and serious subtext in a lighthearted scene. The unmixed lightheartedness of the discussion of men's and women's roles in life makes ulterior events all the more powerful. When Cassio decorously kisses Emilia in accost in Cyprus, Iago says, "Sir, would she give you so much of her lips / As of her spittle she oft bestows on me, / You'ld have enough" (II.i.101-3). Challenged good-naturedly by Desdemona, Iago's insult to his wife becomes a declaration of what women are rattling like, especially those who don't know their place. He is speaking with apparent irony, with "knavery's unmixed face," as he says at the end of II.ii, but we rede that he is really speaking what for him is deadly earnest trueness:
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
Political adventurism, the bane of civilization, is also traditionally the province of men, not women. And the evidence of account statement is that it has repeatedly sealed
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