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Othello essay help?

could someone help me with an othello question? It’s about the way Desdemona is presented in terms of asserting herself. Othello really drains me and i’m finding it hard to gather motivation

Reply 1

999tigger

Original post by mz025

could someone help me with an othello question? It’s about the way Desdemona is presented in terms of asserting herself. Othello really drains me and i’m finding it hard to gather motivation

Maybe it would be better if you put the title up and tell us what your ideas/ what you have done?
So it seems a popular area to explore with Desdemona is how she starts off as assertive and confident and eventually turns into passive victim?

As I recall the assertiveness in the beginning comes from being self assured , in love and in cntrl which gives her the confidence to feel she is in a world which she understands and thus can control and influence all the people round her.

She manages- Virtually all her interactions at the beginning are based on her asserting herself by breaking with tradition
and being confident to know her own mind.
Her father
Othello
The other Venetians.
Cassio and Iago
with ease because she knows and can cntrol what is happening.

This changes later in the play when she realises the world is not as she thinks and things dont add up.
It ceases to work and at the centre of this is Othello is out of control and beyond her, so everything else ceases to work and she is too naive to understand people wish her harm or the fact that Iago has corrupted Othello and undermined her relationship with him.

Thats my bit and there are various links to pieces along that line here.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=desdemona+assertiveness

(edited 4 years ago)

Reply 2

r3320