A Eulogy for Desdemona
From the very day of her birth, when she first graced us all with her presence, Desdemona was not a creature of this world. She was too good, too beautiful, too breakable, to be true. Othello was only as undeserving of Desdemona as any man would have been, not through a fault of his own but because she had never been made to be possessed.
All her life, Desdemona was loved too much. She grew up like a bird, caged by an owner who was made selfish by his own love of the little creature. He never wanted to show his daughter the world, for fear that she would choose that forbidden fruit, freedom, over the sanctuary her natural-born position and title provided her.
Every man around Desdemona wanted to claim her as theirs and theirs only, and Othello was no exception. Though he knew that her goodness was not made to be hoarded, he loved her too much not to try. While Desdemona saw Othello’s love as her escape, her liberation, she was too naïve to see what it would become- an all-consuming jealousy that would instead rob her of her freedom, and eventually, her life. To her very last breath, she was faithful to the notion that love could only beget love.
Desdemona and Othello’s relationship was not based on complete understanding of the other, as it should have been, but instead on worship. Desdemona could not see that Othello was subject to human emotions such as jealousy, saying “the sun where he was born drew all such humors from him.” In fact, she expected that Othello would love her all the more for the generosity and sympathy she bestowed upon Cassio. Her instinct was always to love and protect, and, after all, this tendency for pity (coupled with a fascination for the strange and unconventional) was what had brought her and Othello together. But with the poison that Iago poured into his ears, Othello began to mistrust Desdemona for the very same reasons that he once loved her best. For surely it could not be possible that anyone could so good for the sake of goodness, or be so naïve as to act without worrying about the suspicions she bought!
But it was possible. And it was Desdemona. She laid out the white sheets, soon bloodied, upon her own deathbed, and waited pliantly for Othello to come, unsuspecting of his intentions, blinded, not only by her love and worship towards him, but also by the trusting nature that defined her.
The paradox stuns us all. Men want their wives to be beautiful, but hate the admiring stares of others. They want them to be of kind and generous nature, yet glare with jealous eyes when their hands are so much as brushed with the lips of a gentleman. Desdemona’s only sin was that she was all Othello had ever wanted. There are two outcomes in war: you conquer or you are conquered. What kept Othello up the many nights of his and Desdemona’s courtship, and later, of their marriage, was the idea that he could lay only partial claim to her body and soul. Because of his own insecurities, Othello was all too ready to believe that Desdemona would tire of him, would discard him like an expensive plaything she grew bored of when its newness wore off. He was a dark-skinned, war-hardened soldier, and she was the daughter of the most powerful senator in Venice. Othello knew that he was expendable, while she was not. What his passion prevented him from seeing, however, was that he had never been expendable to Desdemona. It was a miracle that she did love Othello, and it is all too clear now that he thought it- and her- too good to be true.