Othello: Jealousy as Mimetic Contagion

As a tragedy on the destructive and self-destructive power of male jealousy, Othello could more aptly be entitled Iago, because it is the latter who serves as centering agent (mediator) of the sexual/social envy which he engenders in his outwitted rivals: Roderigo, Cassio, Brabantio, and above all the noble Moor, Othello. For it is devilishly brilliant Iago, not the more physical Othello, who authors the recursive labyrinth of triangles-within-triangles which parodically informs the world of this play. The structural analysis of mimetic desire proposed by René Girard as the motive at the psychic origin of that male violence which informs western literature, allows us to can see that Shakespeare offers through Othello's Iago and his tragic victims a critical diagnosis of what is a necessarily triangulated desire.1 Indeed as a critique of the causes and consequences of male jealousy, Othello is still one of the best available to western consciousness.

Through the consummate mimetic artistry of a wholly amoral will, Iago authors no less than five triangles of male rivalry within the play: (1) most centrally he creates in Othello the fantasmatic image that innocuous Cassio is a rival for the passions of loyal Desdemona; (2) he makes the impotent Roderigo imagine that the black General is a (successful) rival for the hand and bed of Desdemona, even after they are married (“She must change for youth: when she is sated with his body, she will find the error of her choice” [1.3.347-348]; he engenders in Brabantio the irrational sense that Desdemona has betrayed his fatherly affection in Othello's “tupping your white ewe”; (4) Iago himself Actively conjectures that Othello has copulated with his wife, Emilia, based on a groundless rumor he treats as fact (“I hate the Moor;/And it is thought abroad that ‘twixt my sheets/H'as done my office” [1.3.380-382]; (5) moreover, this genuine homme de ressentiment broods