love” ( 3. 3. 447 , 446 ). In the end, the more Iago talks, the more Othello’s dark-
ness seems to become a sign and source of trouble. No wonder, then, that his
blackness would become the persistent centerpiece of an Othellomyth.
Yet while issues of culture and color do filter into the crisis that Iago
constructs and Othello begins to live, those issues are decidedly, perhaps sur-
prisingly, notthe centerpiece either of Iago’s accusations or Othello’s anxi-
eties. For notably, Iago does not ground his fictions on the racist discrimination
he has tested within Venice, turning the Moor directly into the subject of
suspicion and “intermingling everything [Othello] does” with a reminder
that he is, alas, a Moor, alien and black ( 3. 3. 25 ). Rather, Iago selects Desde-
mona as the more pliable and plausible target, drawing on the arguably more
conventional misogynous discourses which, as critics have shown, circulate
across the play and provide a set of discriminations that are more inclusive
and precise, if not also more persuasive, than the more amorphous terms of
race or culture.^73 It is Desdemona’s potential for deception, which in turn
impugns and becomes her sexual behavior, that is the easy mark. Brabantio
has already alerted Othello to the ominous fact that “she has deceived her fa-
ther, and may thee,” has already rendered elopement and adultery sugges-
tively contiguous ( 1. 3. 291 ). Iago uses that deception and those words to play
the race and culture card, to remind Othello that Desdemona “did deceive
her father, marrying you,” seeming to fear what she loved ( 3. 3. 209 ). But Iago
moves well beyond this “unnatural” choice of spouse to turn Desdemona’s
dishonesty into an essential feature of her character and gender, setting her
up not just to represent “maidens of quality” who, “without their parents’
consent,...run away with blackamoors,” but to represent wives “in Venice”
who “let God see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands” and
whose “best conscience / Is not to leave’t undone, but keep’t unknown”
( 3. 3. 205 – 7 ).^74 This is her “country disposition,” which is “Venetian,” though
Venice qualifies what wives show, not necessarily who they are ( 3. 3. 204 ). But
that “country” points more directly (with the obvious pun on “cunt”) to the
wife’s unchaste sexual body. It is that body that Iago will prop up with pruri-
ent “proofs” ( 3. 3. 326 ): the handkerchief, which substitutes for her body as a
“common thing” ( 3. 3. 305 ), and Cassio’s erotic dream of “ ‘Sweet Desde-
mona,’ ” which Iago invents and embodies to “thicken other proofs, / That
do demonstrate thinly” ( 3. 3. 420 , 431 – 32 ).^75 The all too believable fiction here
is not merely that Desdemona may “recoil” to “her better judgement” when
she cannot “match” the Moor with her “country” (or countrymen’s) “forms”
( 3. 3. 240 ), but that she is a wife, acting dishonestly on her desires, as wives
182 chapter seven