Joyce/Shakespeare

“My Story Being Done, / She Gave Me for My Pains a World of Sighs”

Shakespeare’s Othello and Joyce’s Ulysses

LAURA PELASCHIAR

This chapter explores Shakespeare’s Othello in the light of Joyce’s Ulysses. This textual/cultural analysis is inspired by the overlapping of two literary silhouettes and motivated by the many similarities that the two protagonists share. Othello and Bloom are both bearers of a cultural alterity that their host communities contemplate with suspicion. They are both also victims of real or imaginary adulterous plots committed by male members of those same communities. The analysis of the emerging common elements and, perhaps more interestingly, of the divergences between Othello and Bloom leads to some rather surprising conclusions, not only as far as Joyce’s modern Odysseus is concerned, but even more with regard to the complex character of Othello, the valiant Moor, who emerges in a new light. Were Othello to happen upon that unlikely place which is Bloomusalem, Bloom’s fanciful utopia described in “Circe,” he would not have it easy. This chapter will try to explain why.

The Shakespeare/Joyce intertextual play is so vast and tentacular as to make any type of systematization a very hard task indeed. In Ulysses alone there are hundreds of Shakespearean quotations and allusions: 329, if one went to the trouble of counting those listed in Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated, which inevitably misses quite a few. Joyce very simply plundered the entire Shakespearean canon, even though it is very obviously Hamlet that sits comfortably in the lead, with more than one hundred references.

Yet when Joyce decides to make Shakespeare appear on stage—an appropriate term to employ since the Bard’s ghost appears in “Circe,” the episode structured in dramatic form—he does not speak to his literary critic Stephen Dedalus, as might legitimately be expected of him given the connection established between young Dedalus and Hamlet early on by the text, given that Stephen expounded at length on his Hamlet theory in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode, and given that the evoking formula pronounced by Lynch, “The mirror up to nature,” is taken from Hamlet, and Stephen is more equipped than Bloom to recognize the quote and activate the fantasy. Joyce’s Shakespeare, instead, chooses to speak to Bloom, using a linguistic pastiche that anticipates the lingua franca of Finnegans Wake and referring not to Hamlet but to Othello. Bloom replies and intertexts with Macbeth, and Zoe promptly follows:

LYNCH

(points) The mirror up to nature. (He laughs). Hu hu hu hu hu.

(Stephen and Bloom gaze in the mirror. The face of William Shakespeare, beardless, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall.)

SHAKESPEARE

(in dignified ventriloquy) ’Tis the loud laugh bespeaks the vacant mind. (to Bloom) Thou thoughtest as how thou wastest invisible. Gaze. (he crows with a black capon’s laugh.) Iagogo! How my Old-fellow chokit his Thursdaymomun. Iagogogo!

BLOOM

(smiles yellowly at the three whores) When will I hear the joke?

ZOE

Before you’re twice married and once a widower.

(U 528–29)

“Circe” is by far the longest and one of the most complex chapters of the book. The complexity is justified by many reasons, one of them being that characters and readers keep fluctuating between two worlds, that of fantasy/hallucination/waking dreams/self-induced visions—a world that Andrew Gibson calls “phantasmagoria” (Gibson 2002, 188)—and that of reality. What is relevant in the economy of the chapter is that both worlds retain for characters and readers alike the same type of validity, in that the events which occur in Bloom’s and Stephen’s fantasies or hallucinations are in terms of their validity as experience au pair with the events that take place in reality. In this, Joyce is a faithful follower, once again, of Homer and the ancients more than he is of Freud and modern psychology. As E. R. Dodds explains, in his classic study The Greeks and the Irrational, for the Greek man has the curious privilege of having right of citizenship to two different worlds that he visits alternatively every day: that of ypar (wakening), and that of onar (dream). Each of the two has its own logic and its own limitations, but there is absolutely no reason to believe that one is more valid the other. Of course ypar offers some advantages—concreteness and continuity, for example—but, Dodds claims, its social possibilities are very restricted since in it we can only meet the people we know. In onar, on the other hand, we can approach faraway friends, the dead, the gods. Onar is the only experience that can subtract us from the painful and incomprehensible tyranny of time and space (Dodds [1951] 2004, 102–34).

Bloom and Stephen in “Circe” make the most ample and the most flexible use possible of this double citizenship, and in so doing they create that phantasmagoria of faraway friends and dead people (no gods included) that make up 80 percent of the chapter itself. This puts “Circe” into a very close textual as well as epistemological relationship with Othello: in Othello, fantasy, nonexistent events, imaginary plots, mental fears, and psychic obsessions—the creative powers of the human mind in its destructive version—are also central, where they have an impact on the lives of the characters as if they had really happened, with the same disruptive power that reality has on human existence. Fantasy and imagination sit at the core of the plot of Othello and are responsible for the tragic evolution of an initially happy marital situation.

William Shakespeare, therefore, is one of the many inhabitants of the “Circe” phantasmagoria. The characters he evokes during his apparition are Iago (Iagogo), Othello (Oldfellow), and Desdemona (Thursdaymomun), the tragedy of Othello being his most famous study in male jealousy. In tune with the Bard’s words, the obsession that gives origin to this specific vision, which we presume to be Bloom’s, is that of Molly’s infidelity. The contextual theme is that of adultery. Even the quotes, or rather misquotes, taken from other Shakespearean plays (Macbeth in Bloom’s exchange with the three whores/witches, and a few lines further down Hamlet in Shakespeare’s own quote) refer to adultery. And adultery, whether suspected, imagined, remembered, or avoided, as Richard Brown puts it (Brown 1985, 102) is central in Joyce’s imagination and to his texts tout court.

In a previous Bloomian fantasy, which functions as a prologue to Shakespeare’s apparition, Bloom takes part in the adulterous episode between Molly and Boylan in the guise of a servant: he casts himself in the role of Molly’s lackey, dressed in uniform, wig, and antlered flunkey, and is busy attending on Boylan, who has just arrived at n. 7 Eccles Street to do his business with Molly.

BOYLAN

(Tosses him sixpence.) Here, to buy yourself a gin and splash. (He hangs his hat smartly on a peg of Bloom’s antlered head.) Show me in. I have a little private business with your wife, you understand?

(U 526)

He is also a passive voyeur, since in the text he watches his wife copulating with Boylan in the company of the other guests: Bloom, Stephen, Lynch, Bella, and the three prostitutes witness Molly’s sexual encounter with her lover, they laugh at the scene and are at that point reprimanded by Shakespeare (“Tis the loud laugh bespeaks the vacant mind,” U 528), who has just appeared in Bella’s mirror. After rebuking the onlookers, Shakespeare (a cuckold husband himself, according to Stephen’s theory) talks to the betrayed husband: “Thou thoughtest as how thou wastest invisible. Gaze. (He crows with a black capon’s laugh.) Iagogo! How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymomun. Iagogogo!” (U 528).

The fact that Bloom appears in his own mental script as a lackey or a servant in Molly’s (and his own) home is an important detail not only because this makes his latent sadomasochism emerge, but also because this directly connects him to the Shakespearean character of Othello. In the same chapter, in fact, but in the course of another fantasy, Bloom had said to Mrs Breen, referring to Molly: “She often said she likes to visit. Slumming. The exotic, you see. Negro servants in livery too if she had money. Othello black brute” (U 421). More than once, and with a remarkable isotopic coherence, Bloom connects his own obsessions with and preoccupations about his wife’s betrayal to those of the Moor of Venice. The connection is rendered all the more valid since, as we have seen, it is also suggested by the most authoritative of all voices, that of William Shakespeare himself.

It is, indeed, a fascinating connection. After all, Dublin’s “wandering jew” and Venice’s “erring barbarian” are among the most famous outsiders in Western literature. They are both dislocated subjects, exiles in a racist, strongly xenopobic, and nationalistic community. What’s more, they both represent a type of alterity which is religious as much as, or even before, it is racial. Marjorie Garber identifies race, class, and gender as categories and modes of analysis within which the tensions articulated in Othello can and must be interpreted, and most of her own reading of the play is based on them. Yet she is clearly aware of the fact that the Moor’s black skin is less central to the dynamics of the play than has been normally assumed. She writes: “Othello is resented by Iago and Roderigo not as much because he is ‘black’ as because he is a stranger in homogenous Venice. He is, as Roderigo calls him, ‘an extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere’ (I, i, 137–38)” (Garber 2005, 592). And she is equally aware of the importance of the religious factor when she tries to describe Othello’s origins: “He is not a native to Venice, but comes instead, presumably, from northern Africa, where Mauritania (the place of origin of the ‘Moors’) was located (on the other side of Morocco from where the country Mauritania now lies). . . . Equally important, Moors were conventionally Muslims, not Christians. Arguably, Othello’s status as a former non-Christian is as important to the play as his status as a former non-Venetian” (594).

Some interesting critical reflections have re-examined and recovered the importance of the religious framework of the play, a reassessment that in turn may help readdress the balance between the categories invoked and employed by Garber. In Othello—exactly as in Ulysses—religion and politics are tightly connected and they contribute to build and structure the political discourse of the text. Critics such as Daniel J. Viktus and Julia Reinhard Lupton favor the religious rather than the racial element in Othello’s identity and alterity. Viktus reads Othello as a “drama of conversion, in particular a conversion to certain forms of faithlessness deeply feared by Shakespeare’s audience” (Viktus 1997, 146); in his interpretation, the play reflects the deep religious anxieties of Elizabethan England, which, on the one hand identified the Roman Catholic Church as a manifestation of an almost metaphysical evil, while, on the other, reserving for the Ottoman Turks and their religion a place of honor among the followers of Satan. The historical context is again important. The Ottomans had been pushing in from the East into the Mediterranean for centuries in an attempt to expand into the territories of Western Christianity. In the years preceding the composition of Othello, their offensive had become more daring; consequently Protestant propaganda in England had intensified, with the result that religious and political enemies were rolled into one single demonological iconography in which the Pope and the Sultan were associated with Satan and the Antichrist, since both Catholics and Muslims aimed at converting Protestants, a sure way to lead them to damnation (Viktus 1997, 148–50). Julia Reinhard Lupton also stresses the religious dimension of Othello’s alterity, claiming that for historical and cultural reasons the Elizabethans perceived such alterity first of all in terms of religious diversity, given that racial diversity was only beginning to emerge then as a cultural discourse. It could be risky, if not totally wrong, to read Othello as a product of a protocolonial culture: “Greenblatt and others,” concludes Viktus, “have used a Western imperialist discourse belonging to later centuries, sometimes quite anachronistically, to frame readings of Renaissance texts” (Lupton 1997, 170).

Viktus’s theory seems supported by the fact that the Venetian Republic in Othello is a synecdoche for Western Christianity as a whole. And Venice is not here portrayed as an expanding superpower busily invading and colonizing foreign lands (an enterprise in which England had only recently started to engage). The action takes place in Cyprus, not in Terranova or in Guyana or in Virginia, and Cyprus is a piece of Christianity under siege, an outpost of Western civilization that risks being invaded by the Muslims. Within this historical and political context, Othello is also therefore Venice’s, and by extension the Christian West’s, crusader and their defensor fidei.

This religious net of signification allows us to understand another important convergence between Bloom and Othello. Both are, in fact, outsiders who converted to the Christian religion, and it is not at all accidental that the baptism of both characters is mentioned in the texts. Iago talks about it in act 2, scene 3 while he is soliloquizing after convincing Cassio to ask Desdemona to intervene in his favor with the Doge since it would be easy for her “to win the Moor, were it to renounce his baptism, / All seals and symbols of redeemed sin” (333–34). In Ulysses Bloom’s baptisms are described in great detail in “Ithaca”: “Had Bloom and Stephen been baptised, and where and by whom, cleric or layman? Bloom (three times), by the reverend Mr Gilmer Johnston M. A., alone, in the protestant church of Saint Nicholas Without, Coombe, by James O’Conor, Philip Gilligan and James Fitzpatrick, together, under a pump in the village of Swords, and by the reverend Charles Malone C. C., in the church of the Three Patrons, Rathgar. Stephen (once) by the reverend Charles Malone C. C., alone, in the church of the Three Patrons, Rathgar” (U 635).

Yet both have rather ambiguously left behind—or at least this is the fear or paranoia that haunts both Dubliners and Venetians alike—an original religion which for Bloom is very clearly the Jewish one, but for Othello is never made explicit. The social danger of this religious ambiguity is clearly perceived and expressed by Dubliners, in “Hades” and in “Cyclops” more specifically, and in Venice by Iago and by Brabantio, who, incapable of accepting his daughter’s betrayal, in act 1, scene 2, accuses Othello of having bewitched his daughter by performing black magic on her. He actually goes further than that: in scene 3 of act 1, given the urgency of state business, the duke is eager to dismiss the unpleasant matter of Desdemona’s marriage with Othello as quickly as possible; he therefore talks to Brabantio in a series of rhyming couplets full of truisms where he more or less tells the offended father he should accept the situation and put up with it. Brabantio, who is hurt much more than the duke is willing to realize (he will actually die heartbroken before the end of the play), replies by comparing Desdemona’s “abduction” at the hands of Othello to the loss of Cyprus at the hands of the Turks. Othello thus becomes the Muslim enemy who conquers and violates a precious Venetian possession.

The ambiguity of faith that characterized Othello’s identity is also typical of Leopold Bloom. Although he converted to the Catholic religion, Bloom feels very much a stranger in it: not only does he find its rituals incomprehensible, he does not even believe in them. Nevertheless, like Othello, who is presented very clearly as the defender of the Republic and of its faith, he operates in defense of the political and cultural identity of his community, or rather of the community to which he now belongs, since in Dublin the rumor is widespread that Bloom had given Arthur Griffith some of the most relevant ideas for the articulation of his political agenda. In “Penelope” Molly remembers how Bloom used to “blather on” about the “Land League and Home Rule” and that “the Doyles said he was going to stand for a member of Parliament” (U 721). In spite of this military (in Othello’s case) and political (in Bloom’s case) commitment to communal interest, both Othello and Bloom are regarded with suspicion by the members of the very community they are committed to defend. Their true loyalty is constantly questioned. In this sense it is not accidental that Joyce puts into Mr Deasy’s mouth the words “put money in thy purse” with which Iago peppers his long speech at the end of act 1, when he convinces Roderigo to follow him to Cyprus: his is, with the citizen’s, the most virulent and intolerant racist and anti-Semitic voice of the text. Deasy is preaching to Stephen with the intention of teaching him how to fare better in life.

—Because you don’t save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don’t know yet what money is. Money is power. When you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? Put but money in thy purse.

—Iago, Stephen murmured. (U 30)

A racist just like Iago, and like Iago (and not like Shakespeare, as Stephen hastens, unheard, to correct) very much into money, Deasy has another characteristic that makes him into a Iago-like figure: he is totally immersed in the sexuophobic misogyny that is typical of patriarchal culture and that Iago is so familiar with. The headmaster is obsessed with women’s betrayal and female adultery, to which he assigns a monocausal role in a philosophy of history that he illustrates to Stephen during their encounter in the study. History moves, he says, toward a single telos, the manifestation of God:

I am happier than you are. We have committed many errors and many sins. A woman brought sin into the world. For a woman who was no better than she should be, Helen, the runway wife of Menelaus, ten years the Greeks made war on Troy. A faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough’s wife and her leman, O’Rourke, prince of Breffni. A woman too brought Parnell low. Many errors, many failures but not the one sin. I am a struggler now at the end of my days. But I will fight for the right till the end.

For Ulster will fight

And Ulster will be right. (U 35)

In Shakespeare’s tragedy, writes Linda Bamber, misogyny and misfortune are very often connected by male protagonists (Bamber 1982, 16). Deasy seems to subscribe to this idea, and it is interesting that his obsession with female unfaithfulness is coupled by Joyce with racism and religious intolerance. Alterity and adultery are in Deasy’s mind directly connected.

And yet that very otherness that inspires so much distance in Dublin and in Venice was instrumental, both for Othello and for Bloom, in winning the love of their women and future wives. If one reads carefully through the texts, both protagonists opt for very similar and equally successful seduction strategies, even though there is one (very important) difference. So successful was Othello in defending himself, even if he claimed in the senate to possess no rhetorical skills (“Rude am I in my speech, / and little blest with the set phrase of peace” [I, iii, 81–82]), that he does not hesitate to re-employ these oratorical skills in order to defend himself from Brabantio’s accusations in front of the duke and the senators. It is important to remember here that scene 3 of act 1 is entirely Shakespeare’s invention and has no counterpart in Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi, which is traditionally indicated as the source for Othello. It is here that the reader is given to understand that the only magic that the Moor operated upon Desdemona is the magic of language, or even better the magic of storytelling.

Her father lov’ed me, oft invited me,

Still question’ed me the story of my life,

From year to year; the battles, sieges, fortunes,

That I have pass’d:

I ran it through, even from my boyish days,

To the very moment that he bade me tell it.

Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,

Of moving accidents by flood and field;

Of hair-breadth scapes i’ th’ imminent deadly breach;

Of being taken by the insolent foe

And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence.

(I, iii, 128–38)

And on he goes to mention vast deserts and high mountains, caves, human cannibals and monsters whose heads grew beneath their shoulders. These are the very words that won not only Desdemona’s heart, but Brabantio’s trust as well. This, and not black magic, is the alchemy used by Othello to bewitch Desdemona. Something Desdemona herself, once she is allowed to enter the scene, confirms.

The archetypal model followed here is obviously that of Odysseus and of the narrations of his own adventures at King Alcinous’s court. Like Odysseus, and more than Odysseus, Othello recounts events of his own life, stories that happened to him, adventures with one protagonist and one witness only: himself. These are the autobiographical narrations that won Desdemona’s heart, and understandably so, as the duke is ready to acknowledge (“I think this tale would win my daughter too” [I, iii, 171]). The Moor is an egotistically hyperbolic narrator of his own adventurous, exotic, and international life, populated by anthropophagi and human monsters that can only exist in the seductive intent of the conquering Moor.

In “Penelope” Molly admits to having been conquered by a very similar—and yet significantly different—type of rhetoric.

he excited me I dont know how the first night ever we met when I was living in Rehoboth terrace we stood staring at one another for about 10 minutes as if we met somewhere I suppose on account of my being jewess looking after my mother he used to amuse me the things he said with the half slootering smile on him and all the Doyles said he was going to stand for a member of Parliament O wasnt I the born fool to believe all his blather about home rule and the land league sending me that long strool of a song out of the Huguenots to sing in French to be more classy O beau pays de la Touraine that I never even sang once explaining and rigmaroling about religion and persecution. (U 721)

In evoking her first meeting with her future husband, Molly projects on her own foreign, and more specifically Jewish, looks and thinks that Bloom’s attraction to her was connected to his instinctive recognition of the Semitic features she thinks she has inherited from her mother, the Spanish Jewess Lunita Laredo. Bloom speaks to Molly about “home rule and land-league,” of the Huguenots, of “religion and persecution,” and also about Buddhism and Hinduism (U 721), revealing that international and multiethnic dimension which makes him so unique in a provincially xenophobic Dublin. But while the self-reflexive, narcissistic Othello talks about his own adventurous life, hyperbolically amplifying his story of “most disastrous chances,” “moving accidents,” and “slavery and redemption” to the point of breaking into fiction and invention (“men with their heads growing beneath their shoulders”), Bloom prefers to dislocate his own traumatic destiny as a marginalized Jew onto historical rather than fictional events that happened to others: those of the Catholic nationalists in Ireland persecuted by Protestants (home rule, land league) and those of the Protestant Huguenots persecuted by Catholics in France. These stories of “religion and persecution,” as Molly calls them, very clearly articulate a rhetorical chiasm which, in the specific context of the “Penelope” episode as well as within the wider circle of Irish history, takes on a universalizing nuance that should not escape the attention of the reader. Besides, the fact that Bloom, unlike his Shakespearean predecessor, prefers facts to fiction, is highly significant. It is in the difference of their rhetorical approaches—with Othello revealing himself to be self-centered, self-referential, and fictional while Bloom is allocentric, referential, and historical—that the divergences between the two heroes begin to appear. But before we move on to examine them, it is necessary to mention the last and most obvious common denominator: adultery.

Alterity, adulteration, adultery: Tony Tanner ponders the semantic proximity of these terms in his famous study Adultery in the Novel, Contract and Transgression (1979). In a subchapter entitled “The Stranger in the House” (24–26), Tanner connects the theme of adultery—which is present in Western tradition since Homer—to that of alterity and examines the transgressions of marriage contracts in classical literature. He begins with Helen of Troy (a mythological episode mentioned by Mr Deasy) and moves on to Tristran and Iseult, Lancelot and Genevieve, all the way down to Shakespeare’s imaginary adulterous plots in Othello (which Tanner does not examine in great detail), Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale. All the male characters implicated in these “adulterous plots,” Tanner claims, have one thing in common: their alterity. They are all aliens of mysterious origin, strangers, to use Tanner’s term, in somebody else’s house. Examining these situations from an anthropological perspective, Tanner observes that the basic intention of the art of hospitality since ancient times has always been to transform the “stranger” into a “guest” in order to elide the potential threat that the Other always represents for the social order and the balance of the hosting tribe. But hospitality remains an uncertain bet because the ontological danger implicit in the Other is always potentially active (and easy to activate); the process of de-alienation that is the purpose of hospitality can never be said to be complete. Paris, Tristran, Lancelot, and Iachimo are all strangers in the house who break the pact they had symbolically signed with their host by transgressing it (or pretending to transgress it) in the most socially unacceptable way: by desiring and possessing the body of a woman who belongs by contract to another man.

It is significant that in his illuminating synopsis Tanner avoids expanding on Othello. This makes sense. Although they are strangers, or semistrangers, in the house, Othello and Bloom are not guilty of committing adultery; instead they are the victims of real or imaginary adulterous plots organized against them by representative male members of the community to which they now belong: Cassio, the perfect courtesan with the good looks and perfect manners, and Blazes Boylan, the supermacho with the quiff. So, both in Othello and in Ulysses, Tanner’s paradigm is not only disappointed: it is literally inverted.

As already indicated, it is the idea of his wife’s adultery that makes it possible for Bloom to see in Bella Cohen’s mirror a William Shakespeare (with horns) who talks to him about Iago, Othello, and Desdemona. Or rather: he tells him of how “his” (that is, Shakespeare’s) Othello (“my Oldfellow”) choked “his” (Othello’s) Desdemona. Because, come to think about it, the specific episode that Shakespeare mentions in “Circe” is the killing of Desdemona by Othello. So, more than adultery here we are actually dealing with uxoricide. And since this Shakespeare is but a product of Bloom’s unconscious, or preconscious, it follows that in his repressed psychic universe the idea, or even the desire of doing to Molly what Othello did to Desdemona does somehow exists. But it is a repressed wish and Bloom, unlike Othello, does not yield to it. And it is here that the trajectory of Joyce’s adulterous plot radically diverts from Shakespeare’s imaginary one.

Indeed, the hiatus that separates Othello from Ulysses is not so much in the distance that separated Othello’s high, heroic, and tragic status from Bloom’s low, comic, petit bourgeois dimension. It does not even lie in the fact that while Desdemona does not kiss Lieutenant Cassio in Cyprus or anywhere else, Molly does kiss in Gibraltar, and under the “Moorish Wall” of all places, Lieutenant Jack Joe Harry Mulvey (U 732), who gave her a handkerchief before leaving Gibraltar and, as the first of a long series of flirts (and possibly lovers), is a prefiguration of Blazes Boylan. The hiatus lies in the opposite reaction that the two protagonists—and hence the two textual strategies, and hence the different cultural systems to which they give voice—choose when they are forced to deal with adultery: it lies in the fact that Othello decides to lay down in his marital bed to choke innocent Desdemona and Bloom enters his own bed to reconcile himself with guilty Molly.

Postcolonial readings of Othello usually come to the conclusion that Iago’s plot tragically succeeds because Othello has internalized (an unconscious process, therefore) the racism that is immanent in the cultural codes of Venetian society, of which Iago is the most ruthless and outspoken representative. As Alessandro Serpieri (1978) explains, Iago’s psychism is but a projection of his own epoch’s collective psychism. This racism is so deeply ingrained that even “fair Desdemona” is somehow affected by it: Iago refers to this when, while he is trying to convince Othello of her duplicity, he says, “She did deceive her father, marrying you; / And when she seem’d to shake and fear your looks, / she loved them most” (III, iii, 210–13; emphasis added); Desdemona herself hints at her own prejudice against Othello when, in her attempt to persuade Othello of Cassio’s good faith and trustworthiness, she says : “Michael Cassio / that came a-wooing with you, and so many times / When I have spoke of you dispraisingly, / Hath ta’en your part—to have so much to do / To bring him in?” (III, iii, 71–75). A postcolonial approach would claim Othello has ended up feeling for himself the repulsion that others (including Desdemona at first) feel for him and therefore is condemned to find Iago’s fiction very plausible, as Desdemona’s adultery is the inevitable consequence of that act of racial adulteration that their union represents. The irretrievable schism between the ideological dogmas of the hegemonic culture that he has adopted and the identitarian “otherness” that he cannot delete, being the stranger in the house, can only lead him to self-destruction; a self-destruction that must be prologued by the elimination of the adulterated—and hence potentially adulterous—Desdemona.

The theory seems to hold. Yet the problem is that Othello does not kill himself after choking Desdemona because of the desperation he feels for the loss of a deeply beloved wife, whose death he laments with powerful words of woe and pain.

My wife, my wife, my wife; I ha’ no wife;

O, insupportable! O heavy hour!

Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse

Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe

Should yawn at alteration.

(V, ii, 98–102)

For Desdemona’s death he invokes huge eclipses of sun and moon and cataclysmic events of global consequence: but no suicide. Because the Moor finishes off his existence only after realizing he has murdered an innocent. Would he have taken his own life had Desdemona (like Molly) been guilty?

Marilyn French, in her gentle feminist reading of Othello, claims that “it would be impossible for Iago to seduce Othello if Othello did not already share Iago’s value structure. Othello is not dense or blind, he is not the noble savage. He is a male who lives and thrives in a masculine occupation, in a ‘masculine’ culture the assumptions of which he subscribes to” (French 1981, 212). This masculine culture, French explains, is based on the exercise of power meant as control over others, and over women in the first place; and since the only forms of control over others are “domestication” and “killing,” if a female object refuses to be domesticated, then the only alternative is killing. Of the patriarchal culture that articulates his eponymous tragedy, Othello shares not only its sexuophobic misogyny (and this explains the linguistic interchangeability between Iago and Othello upon which so many critics have remarked) but also the religious racism that is integral to the play’s net of significations. This is why he is able to order: “Are we turned Turks, and to ourselves do that / Which heaven had forbid the Ottomites / From Christian shame, put by this barbarous brawl” (II, iii, 160–63). It is also why he can compare himself to a “base Indian,” and why he mentions the “malignant and turban’d Turk,” the “circumcised dog” that he claims to have killed in Aleppo in his famous suicide speech of act 5.

And say besides, that in Aleppo once,

Where a malignant and turban’d Turk

Beat a Venetian, and traduc’d the state,

I took by the throat the circumcised dog,

And smote him thus! [Stabs himself]

(V, ii, 355–59)

Encaged within the cultural codes of a hegemonic culture to which he has totally adhered (rather than internalized), Othello cannot coherently bring to fulfillment that “narration of international romance” which his love story with Desdemona represented at the beginning of the play, and thus he betrays that role of “living symbol of Christian universalism” (Lupton 1997, 74) for an excess of zeal toward the “Catholic doctrine of conjugal appropriation of the female body in marriage” (Henke 1990, 2). Othello follows the law of the Old Testament, forgetting that in the New Testament (the Gospel according to John), when the scribes and Pharisees bring to the temple an adulterous woman who, as prescribed by Mosaic law, ought to be stoned, Jesus replies with words of forgiveness:

And every man went unto his own house. Jesus went unto the mount of Olives. And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them. And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more. (Gospel according to John 7:53–8:11)

Paradoxically, it is Bloom the wandering Jew—twice converted to a Christian religion, and yet totally estranged from it because he is still so deeply rooted in his Jewish culture of origin—who follows the Christian example of the New Testament and does not observe the Mosaic commandment of the Old Testament, which instead is obeyed by Othello, the official defender of the Christian faith. Robert Spoo writes apropos of Molly’s adultery and Bloom’s reaction to it:

The theme of the treacherous woman as monocause resounds throughout Ulysses, but nowhere more importantly than in the question of Molly’s adultery and its effect on Bloom. Is Molly the sole cause of Bloom’s marital difficulties? One of the things Bloom comes to terms with in the course of the day is his share of the responsibility for the sundering of their relations.( . . . ) A large-scale deconstruction of causality in the Boylan/Molly affair is undertaken in “Ithaca”, where Bloom’s progress from envy and jealousy to abnegation and equanimity (U 17.2154–99; 732.12–733.30) reveals that everyone—Boylan, Molly, Bloom himself—is partly to blame and partly innocent. (Spoo 1989, 451–52)

Light years away from the misogyny of the “inflexibility of the masculine principle” and the consequent “devaluation of the feminine principle” (French 1981, 217) that is typical of Iago’s and Othello’s male culture, Bloom exhibits behavioral elements that would be classified by that very culture as feminine: he is, after all, described in “Circe” as “a finished example of the new womanly man” (U 465) (before performing exhilarating miracles in Christ-like fashion). In “Cyclops” he is attacked by the citizen because he has rejected the principles of “force, hatred, history, all that” (U 319) which his Fenian antagonist supports and because his forma mentis operates outside the racist and xenophobic ideological framework which Othello did not reject. The new Utopia that Bloom sketches out in “Circe” during one of his visions, is, despite its irresistible comic context, really very close to that ideal of universalism which Othello embodied at the beginning of the play but later failed to live up to.

BLOOM

I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses. Compulsory manual labour for all. All parks open to the public day and night. Electric dishscrubbers. Tubercolosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all, esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state.

And further down:

BLOOM

Mixed races and mixed marriages.

LENEHAN

What about mixed bathing?

(U 462)

The “Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future,” which Joyce does not take seriously at all, has the inconsistency and the implausibility of all literary utopias, but unlike other utopias—and perhaps the only one in its genre—it possesses the gift of desirability. And if one were to imagine a fiction located in Bloomusalem in which and Othello and Bloom were accidentally to meet, there is little doubt that the comic, grotesque, and slightly overweight Leopold Bloom could rob valiant Othello if not of the role of epic hero, then at least of his position as absolute protagonist. But this is another story.