jealousy

• Tyan - “He’s the most easily jealous man that anybody’s ever written about. The minute he suspects, or thinks he has the smallest grounds for suspecting, Desdemona, he wishes to think her guilty.”
• Wilson - jealousy shown as "mimetic contagion"
• Wilson - Othello is a “tragedy on the destructive and self-destructive power of male jealousy”
• Wilson - In the final scene looking on the “tragic loading of this bed”, we see Othello as “a cathartic image of male jealousy”
• Wilson - “Othello could more aptly be titled Iago” as he serves as “centering agent (mediator) of the sexual/social envy which he engenders in his outwitted rivals”
• Wilson - Iago incites jealousy in everyone else, "authors five triangles of male rivalry within the play"

  • Othello’s jealousy at Cassio being a “rival for the passions of Desdemona”
  • Roderigo’s jealousy in imagining Othello is a successful rival for Desdemona’s “hand and bed”
  • Brabantio’s jealousy in believing Desdemona has “betrayed his fatherly affection” for Othello
  • Iago’s “fictively conjectures” his own jealousy in believing Othello has had an affair with Emilia
  • Iago’s jealousy that Cassio has been promoted
• Wilson - jealousy as "male motive which will stop at nothing less than violence, the force of a will to annihilate the other who blocks the desire of the primal, presocialised self"
• Toole - Iago associated with “monstrous, base-minded jealousy”, pulls Othello down to his "level", a “noble-minded man and causes him…to look for a time through his eyes”