Chapter 13 - Fear

Summary

This essay argues that the central themes of modern Othello scholarship – including race, gender, jealousy and the pursuit of truth – all contribute to the play’s overarching exploration of fear’s impact on individuals and their communities. Othello’s emotional landscape sees fear as the principle that shapes all social connections, structures the characters’ communication with one another, and directs the play’s action. In this play, fear produces a particular model of subjectivity that is both emotionally permeable and prone to manipulation, but equally the emotion shapes a broader civic identity that characterises the Venetians (Othello included). Attending to the myriad permutations of fear at the heart of Othello, this essay argues that the play demonstrates the impact of an unstable emotional landscape on personal subjectivity, and in so doing, explicitly depicts the threat of a self made vulnerable. Early in the play, Othello makes a seemingly benign observation that people ‘in a town of war’ with ‘hearts brimful of fear’ (2.3.194-5) require careful handling; this essay demonstrates how apt – and how tragically overlooked – that comment really is within the larger context of the play.