Shakespeare's Othello - Loving Desdemona

Loving Desdemona

William Shakespeare, in his tragic drama Othello, creates a most exquisite character in the person of Desdemona. Her many virtues clearly require that she be given detailed consideration by every Christian member of the audience.

David Bevington in William Shakespeare: Four Tragedies describes the depth of virtue within this tragic heroine:

We believe her [Desdemona] when she says that she does not even know what it means to be unfaithful; the word “whore” is not in her vocabulary. She is defenseless against the charges brought against her because she does not even comprehend them, cannot believe that anyone would imagine such things. Her love, both erotic and chaste, is of that transcendent wholesomeness common to several late Shakespearean heroines [. . .]. Her “preferring” Othello to her father, like Cordelia’s placing her duty to a husband before that to a father, is not ungrateful but natural and proper. (221)

Blanche Coles in Shakespeare’s Four Giants interprets the protagonist’s very meaningful four-word greeting to Desdemona which he utters upon disembarking in Cyprus:

Othello’s four words, “O, my soul’s joy,” tell us that this beautiful Venetian girl has brought great joy, felicity, bliss to the very depths of his soul. This exquisitely beautiful love that has come to a thoughtful, earnest man is indescribably impressive. For him it is heaven on earth. And all the while, almost within arm’s length, stands Iago, the embodiment of evil, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. (87)

In Act 1 Scene1, Iago persuades the rejected suitor of Desdemona, Roderigo, to accompany him to the home of Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, in the middle of the night. Once there the two awaken him with loud shouts about his daughter’s elopement with Othello. In response to Iago’s vulgar descriptions of Desdemona’s involvement with the general, Brabantio arises from bed and, with Roderigo’s help, gathers a search party to go and find Desdemona and bring her home. The father’s attitude is that life without his Desdemona will be much worse than before:

It is too true an evil: gone she is;

And what's to come of my despised time

Is nought but bitterness. (1.1)

So obviously the senator has great respect for his daughter, or at least for the comforts which she has afforded him up the beginning of the play.