Snail Games -- Othello: Self-abasement

It is generally accepted that there are three possible causes of Othello’s tragedy: jealousy, credulousness and sense of honor. In my opinion, however, the deep-rooted one led to Othello’s fate is his self-abasement, which leads to his suspicion, oversensitivity, over-evaluation of relationship with Desdemona, and final over-reaction.

As a Moor, an identity he was born with, Othello suffered a lot in his struggling to approach the upper class. He was nobody before he became the military elite of a colonial power who won the regard of the Venetian state and the love of Desdemona, and to achieve this, he must have bear bloody cruelty: “the story of lie/From year to year-the battles, sieges, fortunes/That passed…” (Shakespeare 2001) What’s more, he had once experienced the ultimate degradation of being “taken by the insolent foe”, “And sold slavery”(Shakespeare 2001). It is obvious that Othello has made the most opportunity and his genius to earn his identity and has overcome the handicaps of being foreign and black in the white Venetian world. But he is still alone. Watching under stage, we will find he is still excluded in color. And no matter how hard he had tried, he remains “a veritable negro” (Shakespeare 2001). Pathetically, he is away from his Moor group, thus he belongs to neither of the classes. A sense of lost in history and identity would be aroused, and that is the radical cause of self-denial, or, self-abasement. Othello admits it when he begins to doubt Desdemona’s innocence: “Haply, for I am black/And have not those soft parts of conversation/That chambers have, or for I am declined/Into the vale of years” (Shakespeare, 2001). When he claimed his wife’s betrayal, he mentions again: “Her name, that was as fresh/As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black/As mine own face” (Shakespeare 2001). Though he is the one to judge other’s “misbehavior”, he reveals his contempt and denial toward his Moor origin.

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