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1 Desdemona's Handkerchief as an Emblem of Her Reputation Author(s): John A. Hodgson Source: Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 19, No. 3, An Issue Devoted to the Renaissance (FALL 1977), pp Published by: University of Texas Press Stable URL: Accessed: 22/03/ :10 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Texas Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Texas Studies in Literature and Language.

2 John A. Hodgson Desdemona's Handkerchief as an Emblem of Her Reputation One of the most comfortably settled assumptions of Othello criticism is that Desdemona's handkerchief symbolizes true and honorable love. Othello himself clearly thinks so. 'To lose, or give't away, were such perdition / As nothing else could match," he warns Desdemona; and later, charging her with adultery, accuses, "That handkerchief which I so lov'd, and gave thee, / Thou gavest to Cassio."1 And critics of the play, while necessarily rejecting Othello's reasoning and conclusions concerning the handkerchief's significance, have commonly accepted his premises. Thus, to note only a few important versions of this reading, G. Wilson Knight calls the handkerchief "a symbol of domestic sanctity"; J. M. Murry speaks of it as "a true symbol... half-incorporate with the mystery it signifies.... a handkerchief dipped in the mystery of love"; G. R. Elliott states that "this sacramental handkerchief" signifies "a rare bond of love" and "becomes a vivid symbol both of the primal nature and the present state of [Othello's] love"; and Robert Heilman calls it a "symbolization of love," "2 "quasisacramental. An immediately obvious difficulty with this interpretation is that the first appearance of the handkerchief seems directly to contradict it. As numerous critics have pointed out, Desdemona drops and forgets the handkerchief because she is preoccupied by her loving concern for Othello; her care for her love makes her careless of a mere token. Murry finds this divergence of signifier from signification expressive of the symbol's mysteriousness, while Heilman argues that "in rejecting her attention, Othello really rejects the magical powers of love; he will not be cured."3 But surely these readings beg the question, at least if the handkerchief is truly a symbol and not simply a token. Rather it would seem that in interpreting the handkerchief against the evidence of this scene as a symbol of love, we are allowing Othello's valuation of it to determine our own. But Othello, as events prove, is hardly a sensitive or impartial judge.

3 John A. Hodgson 314 As much important recent criticism has noted, Othello is inordinately concerned with his reputation.4 Moreover, his pride in his reputation is of a piece with his acceptance of the reputations of others.5 In a word, Othello trusts in appearances, in the mere trappings of character. As lago says, he "thinks men honesthat but seem to be so" (I.iii.398), simply because he believes that "men should be what they seem" (III.iii.132). For Othello, then, a man's reputation defines his essential character, because to Othello all men, himself included, are what they seem to be. Iago's most effective ploy against his Captain is to insinuate ambiguity into this clarity: "Her honor is an essence that's not seen, / They have it very oft that have it not" (IV.i.16-17). And his next words- "But for the handkerchief"- indicate his next step: having introduced ambiguity, to resolve it by recurring to simple appearances. Though lago hurries Othello past the ambiguities of his adages, we might profitably pause to consider them more carefully. "Her honor is an essence that's not seen, / They have it very oft that have it not." The essence of honor is an invisible because a spiritual thing; Desdemona defines it for herself and can lose it herself, but no one else can take it from her. Her reputation for honesty, however, is a matter of epithets and appearances, defined not by herself but entirely by others, and can thus be "filched" from her against her will. lago, with his personal bias, insists that to have a reputation for honor is not necessarily to be honorable; he understandably scants the inverse truth, that to have lost one's reputation is not necessarily to have lost one's honor. This kind of subtlety is something that Othello, so long as he understands and values only the appearances of things, cannot handle: By the world, I think my wife be honest, and think she is not, I think that thou art just, and think thou art not; I'll have some proof (III.iii ) But the "proofs" he receives cannot resolve his confusion. For an appearance of something can only prove appearances; to prove essences, Othello must settle for no less than a knowledge of essences. It is Othello's confusion of the appearance with the essence of honor, surely, that has given rise to the traditional misinterpretation of Desdemona's handkerchief as a symbol of love. But to regard it so is, as Othello himself tragically demonstrates, to be badly mistaken. Instead, I would suggest, the handkerchief is an emblem of Desdemona's reputation; and as such it closely parallels in its progress through the play the career of her good name.

4 Desdemona's Handkerchief as Emblem 315 Desdemona in herself is essentially honest; Othello further credits her with the appearance of honesty- which is all of honesty that he can appreciate- and so gives her the handkerchief. Because he is ready to regard it as an absolute symbol of her love and honesty, he tells her a marvelous story about it. The handkerchief, he says, has magical properties. An Egyptian woman, "a charmer," had given it to Othello's mother and told her, while she kept it 'Twould make her amiable, and subdue my father Entirely to her love: but if she lost it, Or made a gift of it, my father's eye Should hold her loathly, and his spirits should hunt After new fancies there's magic in the web of it; A sibyl, that had number'd in the world The sun to make two hundred compasses, In her prophetic fury sew'd the word; The worms were hallow'd that did breed the silk, And it was dyed in mummy, which the skilful Conserve of maidens' hearts. (III.iv.53-73) Now if this be true, then the handkerchief is indeed a kind of accurate talisman of love- though, significantly, it is the man's love, not the woman's, which threatens to stray- and Othello might justifiably warn Desdemona that "To lose, or give't away, were such perdition / As nothing else could match." But, most interestingly, the story seems not to be true at all, even though Othello first claims it is "Most veritable" (III.iv.74). For later, contradicting this wild story, Othello assertsimply that the handkerchief is "an antique token / My father gave my mother" ( V.ii ). What was originally an acknowledged token, only a token, of a man's love, Othello tries willfully to make into first a symbol and later a proof of a woman's love. But he can only make it, by arbitrarily willing it to be, a proof of her reputation. lago begins his campaign to abuse Othello's faith in his wife's honesty in Ill.iii, first in a brief and ineffective efforto make Cassio's audience with Desdemona seem "guilty-like" (1. 40), then through a more protracted and strikingly more successful series of slanderous insinuations which yet stop short of a direct accusation. Perhaps the most telling of these is a worldly generalization that taints by association:

5 John A. Hodgson 316 I know our country disposition well; In Venice they do let God see the pranks They dare not show their husbands: their best conscience Is not to leave undone, but keep unknown. (III.iii ) It is quite true, of course, that Desdemona is a Venetian wife; so "Venetian wife" can properly mean Desdemona. But now lago has sullied the connotations of the term. And when Othello begins to regard Desdemona in this new context, he becomes able for the firstime to imagine her as liable to the supposedly "natural" impulses and frailties of her type.6 Her reputation in his eyes has already slipped thus far, from "divine Desdemona" to "Desdemona the Venetian wife." And almost immediately thereafter, handkerchief passes from Desdemona's possession to Emilia's. Emilia is a Venetian wife, too, only more so. She seems to enjoy a reputation for honesty-^except, we note, in her husband's estimate- but has not Desdemona's purity of essence. "Wouldsthou do such a thing [commit adultery] for all the world?" Desdemonasks her in Act 4; and Emilia replies carefully, "The world is a huge thing, it is a great price, / For a small vice" (IV.iii.67-69). lago finally convinces Othello of Desdemona's unfaithfulness by telling him the story of Cassio's dream. Although Othello has not yet seen the ocular proof of his handkerchief in Cassio's possession, this story nevertheless convinces him; with a puff, he blows his love away to heaven, and vows vengeance. Now that he has decided exactly what kind of Venetian wife Desdemonappears to be, he abandons this ambiguous classification for a simpler one. He is ready now to term Desdemona "lewd minx" and "fair devil" (III.iii.482, 485), ready to speak figuratively of her "liberal" hand as "a young and sweating devil here / That commonly rebels" (III. iv.38-39),7 and ready finally, as his fit seizes him, to condemn her conclusively for her unfaithfulness: "Oh devil!" (IV.i.43). Meanwhile, through the agencies of scheming lago and thoughtless Cassio, the handkerchief has passed into the possession of Bianca, the housewife who, though faithful in her way to the man she loves, is indeed a prostitute. As Maynard Mack notes, Bianca "may be thought to supply in living form on the stage the prostitute figure that Desdemona has become in Othello's mind."8 But significantly we do not, on her first appearance, recognize Bianca as a prostitute; only after she obtains the handkerchief are we told what sort of woman she is.9 And finally, when Bianca, in Othello'sight, furiously rejects the handkerchief because she thinks it the token of some "hobby-horse" (IV.i.152), so does Desdemona's reputation sink to this even lower level in Othello's eyes. Worseven than

6 Desdemona's Handkerchief as Emblem 317 a false wife, she now seems truly a "cunning whore of Venice" (IV.ii.91), a "public commoner" (IV.ii.75), of whom he can righteously believe that "she must die, else she'll betray more men" (V.ii.6). It is noteworthy that all three women seem to regard the handkerchief as an emblem of reputation. Desdemona knows that she has in no way trespassed against Othello's love, "Either in discourse of thought or actual deed" (IV.ii.155), but still she worries, when she thinks of it, that her loss of the handkerchief might seem incriminating to a mind that judges by appearances: Where should I lose that handkerchief, Emilia? Believe me, I had rather lose my purse Pull of crusadoes: and but my noble Moor Is true of mind, and made of no such baseness As jealous creatures are, it were enough To put him to ill thinking. (III.iv.19-25) These lines are all the more emphatic for their evocation of an earlier speech by lago: Good name in man and woman's dear, my lord; Is the immediate jewel of our souls: Who steals my purse, steals trash, 'tis something, nothing, 'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands: But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed. (III.iii ) And truly lago does filch Desdemona 's good name by stealing her handkerchief.10 Further, as Desdemona 's handkerchief passes to the other two women, it is Emilia's intent and Bianca's assignment to "take the work out," that is, to copy the pattern. Due to the press of events, neither of them does. But in both cases the potential act implies a concern with reputation. Emilia suffers and chafes under Iago's suspicion of her as an adulteress: something, she knows, has "turned [his] wit the seamy side without, / And made [him] to suspect me with the Moor" (IV.ii ). She steals and plans to copy the handkerchief as a demonstration of her true devotion to him: My wayward husband hath a hundred times Woo'd me to steal it...

7 John A. Hodgson I'll ha' the work ta'en out, And give't lago: what he'll do with it Heaven knows, not I, I nothing know, but for his fantasy. (III.iii ) - nothing, that is, but for his love.11 When he enters immediately afterwards and to her affectionate "I have a thing for you" retorts insultingly, "A thing for me? it is a common thing" (IILiii ), her responsive producing of an uncommon thing, Desdemona's handkerchief, is also a figurative defense of her reputation. The gesture serves to deny his insinuation and proclaim her faithfulness: you judge me wrongly, mine is not a common thing. Bianca, for her part, at first hesitates to copy the handkerchief because she does not know who its owner might be; later, having pondered the matter, she reacts angrily:... what did you mean by that same handkerchief you gave me even now? I was a fine fool to take it; I mus take out the whole work, a likely piece of work, that you should find it in your chamber, and not know who left it there! This is some minx's token, and I mus take out the work; there, give it the hobby-horse, wheresoever you had it, I'll take out no work on't. (IV.i ) Her outburst here, with its sarcastic puns on that "piece of work" in Cassio's chamber, makes clear that Bianca now considers taking out this particular piece of work to be emblematically tantamount to patterning herself after some "lewd minx." While no one, as it happens, takes out the work of Desdemona's handkerchief, we must recognize that it would be quite possible for someone to do so, just as it is possible- as lago proves- for someone to copy an honest reputation. The inimitable pattern in the play is not that of Desdemona's handkerchief at all, but that of her love.12 Othello lies, as we have seen, when he asserts that there is magic in the web of this handkerchief; the magic is all in Desdemona's genuine love, which a handkerchief- like reputation, an appearance- cannot prove, however much Othello may want it to. The handkerchief disappears from Othello after Bianca angrily thrusts it back upon Cassio in IV.i. We may take pleasure, perhaps, in conjecturing that it might appear one last time, without comment, in V.i, as Bianca anxiously tends her fallen Cassio- the scene

8 Desdemona's Handkerchief as Emblem 319 would be intriguingly evocative of the handkerchief's first appearance, when Desdemona tries to bind Othello's aching forehead with it- but this stage-business can be no more than conjecture, of interest more to Shakespearean directors than to Shakespearean scholars. But earlier in this same violent scene there is one striking line which subtly but powerfully calls the handkerchief to mind once more, the last line Othello speaks before he exits to murder Desdemona: "Thy bed, lust-stain 'd, shall with lust's blood be spotted" ( V.i.36). Both image and words here are reminiscent of the single description of the handkerchief's "work" we ever hear: "Spotted with strawberries" (III.iii.442).13 The echo is all the more noteworthy in that both before (see IV.i ) and after this Othello resolves rather to strangle Desdemona: yet I'll not shed her blood, Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, And smooth, as monumental alabaster; Yet she must die (V.ii.3-6) But while his threat of bloodshed early in Act 5 thus strays curiously from his announced intent, the line reverberates chillingly against what we have just learned about Desdemona's bed- that tonight it has been made up, according to Desdemona's wish, with her and Othello's wedding sheets (IV.ii ; IV.iii.22). And it is into these sheets, I think, that the image of the handkerchief finally disappears. In actuality, they are as clean as Desdemona is chaste; much more truly and properly than the handkerchief they are the unsullied emblem of her fidelity. To Othello's mind, however, the sheets on her bed seem soiled by her lust and therefore are to be spotted with her blood: upon them he will figuratively take out the work of the handkerchief which he has chosen to regard as the emblem of her love and which he thinks has been similarly lust-stained: such a handkerchief- I am sure it was your wife's-^did I to-day See Cassio wipe his beard with.14 (III.iii ) Yet Othello does not, in the end, shed Desdemona's blood and spot the sheets: as she once says, "his unkindness may defeat my life, / But never taint my love" (IV.ii ). Appropriately, em-

9 John A. Hodgson 320 blematically, Desdemona dies on spotless wedding sheets; while minutes later Othello, falling mortally self -wounded beside her on the bed, stains them with his own blood. Yale University New Haven, Connecticut Notes 1. III.iv.65-66; V.ii All quotations are taken from the Arden edition of Othello, éd. M. R. Ridley (London: Methuen, 1958; rpt. with minor corrections 1962). 2. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (1930; rev. ed. London: Methuen, 1949), p. 109; John Middleton Murry, Shakespeare (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), p. 318; G. R. Elliott, Flaming Minister (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 147, 127, 151; Robert B. Heilman, Magic in the Web (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1956), p Murry, p. 318; Heilman, p See, especially, Brents Stirling, Unity in Shakespearean Tragedy (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1956), pp ; Irving Ribner, Patterns in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1960), p. 99; Madeleine Doran, "Good Name in Othello," Studies in English Literature, 7 (1967), ; David L. Jeffrey and Patrick Grant, "Reputation in Othello," Shakespeare Studies, 6 (1970), See Matthew N. Proser, The Heroic Image in Five Shakespearean Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), pp F. R. Leavis, "Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero," The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952), p We ought not, among the more obvious double meanings of this passage, overlook the connotations of "commonly." Cf. "a common thing" (III.iii.306), "public commoner" (IV.ii.75). 8. Maynard Mack, "The Jacobean Shakespeare: Some Observations on the Construction of the Tragedies," Jacobean Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies No. 1 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1960), p. 30. Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1951), II, 51, makes essentially the same point. 9. Similarly, only when Emilia takes up the handkerchief do we begin to see her moral weakness. 10. This last-quoted passage provides a further important example, in many respects parallel to that of the handkerchief, of how readily and blindly Othello confuses appearances with essences. Iago's sententious speech has all the appearance of truth. But what does it mean, really, to say that "Good name in man and woman... / Is the immediate jewel of our souls"? If by good name lago means honesty, then he is right. But if instead he means the appearance of honesty, or reputation - and we see that he does mean this - then he is completely and heretically wrong: reputation may be the jewel of a man's earthly life, but it is not the jewel of his soul. In effect, lago has begun by promising a parable, but has ended in abusing its central metaphor.

10 Desdemona's Handkerchief as Emblem 321 A man's soul, his most precious treasure, cannot be stolen. But a jewel can be stolen; and Othello, as he traces this image through lago 's little homily, loses his way in the ambiguity of "good name" and again mistakes the appearance for the thing itself. 11. "Love" is a usual meaning of "fantasy" in Shakespeare, as Ridley notes, citing for example As You Like It, II.iv.28-36; cf. As You Like It, V.ii. 93, The Merry Wives of Windsor, V.v.96. While I am ready to agree with Ridley that the primary meaning of the word here is seemingly "whim," I think the context rather emphatically requires us to understand a play on "love" also. 12. Harry Levin, "Othello and the Motive-Hunters," Centennial Review, 8 (1964), 13-14, similarly describes Desdemona's love as a pattern that cannot be copied. But Levin, following Heilman in seeing the handkerchief as a symbol of love, implies that Bianca cannot copy the handkerchief because she cannot, as a venal lover, match Desdemona's true love. In the same way, Lynda E. Boose, "Othello's Handkerchief: 'The Recognizance and the Pledge of Love,'" English Literary Renaissance, 5 (1975), 368, argues that Bianca is actually unable to copy the handkerchief because it symbolizes a valid marriage in which she has no part: "The 'work' stained upon this symbolic token, the act between one husband and one wife, exists as a unique absolute and is therefore not subject to duplication or eradication." The fact remains, however, that the pattern of the handkerchief itself can of course be copied, as Emilia, Cassio, and Bianca all explicitly or implicitly agree. 13. Peter G. Mudford, "Othello and the 'Tragedy of Situation,'" English, 20 (1971), 5; Katherine S. Stockholder, "Egregiously an Ass: Chance and Accident in Othello,'' Studies in English Literature, 13 (1973), 269; and Boose, p. 370, all note this verbal and imagistic echo. The strawberries on the handkerchief are an effectively ambivalent motif. As Lawrence J. Ross shows, strawberries could signify either an actual or a false-seemingood or virtue, and so were associated with, for example, the Virgin Mary and, more generally, virtuous Christians on the one hand and illicit love on the other ("The Meaning of Strawberries in Shakespeare," Studies in the Renaissance, 7 [1960], , 231). Thus while Othello could appropriately during courtship or at marriage give Desdemona the strawberryspotted handkerchief in reference to her goodness and chastity, he could also, once it passes out of her keeping, interpret it emblematically as a sign of her unfaithfulness, her "specious and traitorous show of goodness" (Ross, p. 239). 14. The erotic implications of this image have been noted by David Kaula, "Othello Possessed: Notes on Shakespeare's Use of Magic and Witchcraft," Shakespeare Studies, 2 (1966), 123. Lynda Boose, in the course of her striking and provocative essay, also recognizes the relevance and importance of the handkerchief/wedding sheets association. But she interprets it quite differently, arguing that the red-spotted handkerchief is "a visually recognizable reduction of Othello's and Desdemona's wedding-bed sheets" (p. 363), the blood-stained sheets of the bridal night which would demonstrate both the bride's virginal purity and the marriage's consummation (pp , 370, 373). The burden of Othello's jealousy, however, is not that his bride was not a virgin but that his wife is an adulteress, so the matter of blood-spotted wedding sheets would seem to be somewhat beside the point. And the unspotted whiteness of Desdemona's sheets, indicated by Othello's threat that her bed shall be spotted with her spilled blood (it therefore apparently is not yet blood-spotted), is further

11 John A. Hodgson 322 implied by her instruction to Emilia, "If I do die before thee, prithee shroud me / In one of those same sheets" ( IV. iii ); cf. Ophelia's song in Hamlet, "White his shroud as the mountain snow" (IV.v.34), and the Clown's in Twelfth Night, "My shroud of white, stuck all with yew, / O prepare it" (II.iv.55-56).