ABSTRACT

The succession of generations here is a curiously matrilinear affair, the male participating only as the mother's son, and then only to facilitate the passage of the magical object of power over men from woman to woman. The fantasy of direct patriarchal descent must elide the Oedipal betrayal that necessarily mediates the son's accession to the father's place. The son must receive the emblem of his father's sexual powers from his mother. Even the play's most dramatically satisfying moments of clarification and release work to dissemble the true grounds of its woe. Brabantio's "cause" has become his own: he is determined to stifle Desdemona's newly-liberated voice, to stop up the "free passage" that he himself has opened in her, and thus undo the breach her sexuality has created in the stable male order of things. It is a terrible irony that with this introjection of the father's prohibitive cause, the note of alienation virtually disappears from Othello's voice.