women

• feminists - Desdemona is a “hideous embodiment of the down-trodden woman”
• French - Desdemona ‘accepts her culture’s dictum that she must be obedient to males’ and is ‘self-denying in the extreme’ when she dies
• Jardine -the stage world of Jacobean drama is wholly masculine and argues that there is only a male viewpoint on offer
• Jardine - Desdemona proves to be ‘too-knowing, too-independent’ and because of her waywardness she is punished by the patriarchy
• Jardine - Desdemona has been publicly designated ‘whore’ in terms damaging enough to constitute a substantial threat to her reputation
• Jardine - Othello murders Desdemona for adultery not out of jealousy
• Jardine - “In the Elizabethan age, the domineering wife brought shame and humiliation upon the husband”
• Donkor - Venetian men have an insufficient grasp of the ‘true’ character of women
• Donkor - Emilia functions as “the ‘straight-talking’ working woman seeking to cut through patriarchal misreadings
• Donkor - Emilia's "struggle is not just against the tendency for concealment and obscurity within her husband or Othello. She is shouting against a whole society’s desire to complicate what should be made plain"
• Eagleton - “Female sexuality is either in one place - the male’s private possession - or it’s everywhere.”
• Greenberg - “Shakespeare did not conceal male weakness or villany, but he did fail to recognise the possibility of female autonomy or growth”
• Currie - Iago treats his own wife as a thing. This gradually invades Othello’s conscience as he dehumanises Desdemona, and then himself.
• French - Cassio does not treat women as human beings: either they are elevated as the male ideal of perfection and “divine” like Desdemona, placed on a pedestal from which they must inevitably fall, or they are reduced to a “monkey’” like Bianca.
• French - Emilia represents a voice which “counters the attitudes of the males in the play.”
• Tannenbaum - Emilia a “lewd and filthy-speaking harlot”
• Honingman - “​​Emilia’s love (of Desdemona) is Iago’s undoing."
• Adams - Desdemona is a "wanton"
• Heraud - Desdemona "suffers from illusion and loves to be deluded"
• Bradley - Desdemona is "the ‘eternal womanly’ in its most lovely and adorable form, simple and innocent as a child, radiant with the heavenly purity of heart which men worship the more because nature so rarely permits it to themselves”
• Jameson - disagrees with Bradley's view that Desdemona is "childlike", whilst she has “less quickness of intellect and less tendency for reflection than most of Shakespeare’s heroines” she has the “unconscious address” common in women