will to do in Venice, and driven at least as much by attraction to a sexually
fluent Florentine as by repulsion from the Moor.
In separating Iago’s manipulation of gender from his racial and cultural
discriminations, I do not mean to undo important work that has unveiled the
imbrication of constructions of gender with constructions of race or, for that
matter, other registers of identity, such as class or religion.^76 No discourse ex-
ists in a vacuum, as the play on “country” here attests. My point is rather that
inOthello, at the least, these intersections are volatile and dynamic, their
terms variable, unbalanced, and unequal, not all applied with equal fervor or
equal effect at any given moment. Although different registers of identity do
coexist within Venice’s discursive field, even as they complement each other
they may simultaneously conflict. Indeed, Iago’s primary choice of venue is
traumatically torn, his manipulation of gender stereotypes emerging at once
in conjunction andin conflict with his racial indictments. In resorting to
terms that can include but are not exclusive to a “mixed” marriage, Iago un-
derplays the importance of that factor, as if tailoring his discourse to a Moor
who is not, and does not expect to be, alienated or estranged. Where Iago’s
references to Othello’s complexion and clime, on the one hand, separate the
Moor from Venetian society, his obsession with Desdemona’s dishonesty, on
the other, writes Othello in among Venetian “cuckolds” who unwittingly
“liv[e] in bliss” and who need to know what women do with their “country
forms” in Venice ( 3. 3. 170 ).
No wonder, then, that even as Othello acknowledges his own blackness,
he identifies the problem as the “curse of marriage, / That we can call these
delicate creatures ours, / And not their appetites!” ( 3. 3. 271 – 73 )—including
himself among the “we” of husbands and imagining his situation as “the
plague to great ones” and a “destiny unshunnable” ( 3. 3. 276 , 278 ).^77 No won-
der either that, at the crucial moment of truth, he premises the murder of his
wife on the idea that “she must die, else she’ll betray more men”—not, it must
be said, more Moors ( 5. 2. 6 ). As Othello positions himself as the arbiter of
“Justice,” he extracts himself, an abstract “I,” from clime, complexion, and
degree, and locates the “cause” (which goes without saying) in her signifying
body, not his ( 5. 2. 17 ). And what he invokes and repels as he looks at that body,
refusing to “shed her blood” or “scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,” is
not the racially loaded spectacle of black against white that we may see, but
the sexually loaded spectacle of red (sexual blood) against white (virginal
sheets) that he would erase or hide ( 5. 2. 3 – 4 ).^78
In emphasizing the domestic edges of Iago’s fictions and Othello’s fall, the
Othelloand the Moor of Venice 183