Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel

Cosmopolitan Vision of Home, Subjectivity 51

As mentioned at the outset, Stern’s narrative is juxtaposed with
two other intertextual stories from vastly different epochs, both
highly dissimilar in terms of voice, register, and historical reference.
The first to be discussed is that of the sixteenth-century African gen-
eral modelled on Othello; the second is the narrative that describes
the persecution of a Jewish moneylender in the fifteenth-century
Venetian ghetto of Portobuffole. What becomes apparent through
the divergent voices used to recount these narratives is the extent
to which prevailing procedures for representing self and conscious-
ness shift in line with their respective historical context. Indeed, the
introduction of the voice that channels the “Othello” narrative pres-
ents a clear aesthetic departure from the register used by Eva Stern.
The bleak, ascetic, and fragmented voice of the latter, which is
more consonant with contemporary late-modernist prose, is sud-
denly counterposed with the grandiloquence of the African general.
The romanticized style and patriarchal ideology that is attributed
to Shakespeare’s original work, and which Phillips conspicuously
replicates, is perhaps most apparent during the scene in which the
general proposes to Desdemona:

I asked her if she might consider becoming my bride. To my great sur-

prise, the child fell immediately to her knees and clasped her hands

together in front of her bowed head. It was then that she told me that

her greatest wish was that I should become her lord and master, and

protect and honour her for the remainder of her days. (pp. 144–145)

This infantilizing of Desdemona (“the child”), combined with the
patriarchal subordination of women (“her lord and master”), clearly
offers a cultural and ideological break from the Eva Stern narrative,
which, in spite of illustrating the ultimate destruction of a female
character, nonetheless portrays a comparatively strong-willed, inde-
pendent woman. But perhaps the greatest contrast presented by the
two narratives is brought about by virtue of the ostensible incom-
patibility of their source texts: the stylistic clash of Anne Frank’s
sober, autobiographical Diary with the ornately rendered histrion-
ics of Shakespeare’s celebrated play. Although Phillips never quite
takes the plotline to the thespian excesses of the drama (nor does
he employ Shakespearean blank verse), the allusions to Othello are