Chaste Impossibilities: Adultery and Individuation in Othello

This chapter advances the polemical argument that Desdemona is guilty of adultery insofar as she is a creature of the flesh. Chronicling the recent turn away from the “saint or strumpet” debate about Othello’s wife that runs through the first few centuries of the play’s criticism, this chapter maintain that the current critical construction of Desdemona as a chaste but sexual subject often amounts to an essentialist guardianship of her Christian virtue. This construction protects Desdemona from the self-adulterating consequences of her marriage – her race-mixing union in the flesh with a black man and arguably a Muslim. Just as often, this construction takes Desdemona’s chastity as an object of critical certainty, ironically reinforcing the claim of so many Renaissance marriage moralizers that chaste wives must be transparent subjects – their thoughts and actions completely legible to their husbands who head the marital body. This chapter treats adultery as an inevitable effect of a wife being both too much one with and too separate from her husband.