There are few things that the human mind cannot stand, and one of them is self-contempt. It is one thing to hate another person, but to hate and despise oneself is equivalent to denying one's existence. Othello, in a fundamentally ethnocentric and racist society, finds himself confronted with the horrible reality of this self-contempt when there is cause to believe that Desdemona, whose loved had been the shield against his self-contempt, now betrays him too. Thus, Shakespeare's Othello is a psychoanalytic view of a self-loathing man and his doomed attempts to defend himself against a painful reality.
The society and culture in which Othello finds himself is one where racism and ethnocentrism prevailed and prejudices abounded. As Ania Loomba in "Sexuality and Racial DifferenceEcites G.K. Hunter, there was Ea powerful and ancient tradition associating black-faced men with wickednessEwhich) came right up to Shakespeare's own day'"(166). She further......
Join Now or Login to view the rest of this paper.
Approximate Word Count: 2442
Approximate Pages: 10 (260 words per double-spaced page) |