The First Act of “Othello”

Act 1 of Othello introduces the conflicts surrounding Othello’s and Desdemona’s marriage. These first scenes establish, through Shakespeare’s dramatic use of figurative language and foreshadowing, Iago’s role as the play’s stock villain, giving the reasons for his “monstrous” plotting against the protagonist as stemming from Iago’s evilness and jealousy. They also present the character Othello in an ambiguous, multifaceted way, as the sense of his nobility is constantly juxtaposed with negative stereotypes regarding Moors as were present in Shakespeare’s contemporary society. In this way, Shakespeare prepares the audience for Othello’s progression as a tragic character in a plot fraught with deceit and tension.

The first Scene of Othello opens with an intimate conversation between Roderigo and Iago; in this way, Shakespeare immediately transports the audience into these character’s private worlds, outlining their motivations and the relationships they have with each other and with the rest of the characters. The register with which these two initially speak suggests their lower positioning within the Venetian military, as their dialogue is punctuated by popular figures of speech and mild curses (“Tush”, “S’blood”); in contrast, Othello’s speech is notably in a more patterned and formal style, at times developing into florid extended speeches which employ extensive figurative language – in essence outlining his higher military rank. Encountering such language allows the audience to perceive that these two characters have developed resentful feelings towards Othello, and that their roles in the play will centre around the antagonistic.

Shakespeare also suggests with this conversation that the world of these characters is one where individuals pursue only their own interests. Roderigo immediately asserts that Iago “hast had my purse / As if the strings were thine”: in order to help satisfy the former’s wish to marry Desdemona, Iago was paid a large sum of money to assist him, and failed; the fact that Roderigo tries to use his financial influence to achieve his personal goals, while Iago, despite having been paid, fails to assist Roderigo, outlines their reliance on corruption and duplicity as features of their character. This characteristic becomes more and more prominent in Iago as the scene develops. His speech describing relationship to Othello, his superior, highlights how superficially Iago renders this allegiance: “We cannot all be masters, nor all masters / Cannot be truly followed”. Speaking in a style and register almost akin to popular sayings, he allows the audience to perceive that the universe of the play is one where allegiances are superficial and forced and will only be tolerated to a certain point. It prepares the audience for the duplicity which will drive the plot of Othello’s downfall.

Perhaps more significantly still are Iago’s images of being “trimmed in forms and visages of beauty”. They illustrate the disparity of a dark interior being masked by a noble exterior which characterise Iago’s interactions with Othello in the development of the play. “Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago. / In following him I follow but myself (…) I am not what I am” are also fundamentally related to that idea; these lines, characterised by elliptical and antithetic patterns, illustrate both the complex, cryptic nature of Iago’s deceits, which are based on suggestion and manipulation, as well as the duality of light and dark of Iago’s character. This duality allows for interpretations related to a fellow stock figure of Elizabethan theatre, the Machiavel. A central characteristic of Machiavels is their dual faces, one which charms the exterior world while another, revealed as “the native act and figure of my [Iago’s] heart” only in intimate conversations or soliloquies, plots against everyone else ruthlessly. Iago alludes to this characteristic in the line “By Janus” in Scene 2’s dialogue with Othello, in reference to the two-faced Roman god of duality and deception. Shakespeare immediately fulfils in Iago the requirements for this stock figure, allowing for his contemporary Elizabethan audiences to understand exactly who Iago is and what his role in the play will be.

However, Iago’s and Roderigo’s speech may also be interpreted as foreshadowing some of the play’s wider themes. The overriding theme of their conversation is envy: Roderigo and Iago are envious of Othello’s marriage, while Iago is especially bitter about being refused the post of lieutenant in favour of Michael Cassio, a military theorist with no experience of the battlefield. Iago’s infuriated language provides insight into the corruption of his contemporary politics: “Christian and heathen, must be be-leed and calmed / By debitor and creditor. This counter-caster (…) must his lieutenant be / and I (…) his Moorship’s ancient!”. This may be superficially read as Iago’s sarcastic attack on Cassio, who is dismissively called a “counter caster” or accountant, as well as on Othello, whose superior position and Moorish origins incense Iago to the point of being referred to with a parody of honorific speech. However, the patterned use of antitheses in “Christian and heathen”, “debitor and creditor” suggest towards Iago’s use of stylised language for manipulative purposes, foreshadowing the string of deceiving acts he will perform from this Scene onwards. Jealousy and racial prejudice are his key motivations, and Shakespeare allows these emotions to become two overarching themes in Othello. They are in essence the foundation in which all the conflict in the play is built.

The conflictual episode which follows at Barbantio’s house is also a significant example of Shakespeare’s foreshadowing of the deceiving of Othello. The shocking loudness and suddenness of this conflict grabs the audience’s attention and alerts towards the key figurative language. Othello is repeatedly dehumanised in Act 1, and the names and adjectives with which he is referred to or described – “Moor”, “thicklips”, and most significantly here, “old black ram”, “lascivious”, “Barbary horse” and “devil”, allow and Roderigo to paint an increasingly unattractive picture of Othello as a lustful and predatory barbarian. As the audience has not seen Othello yet, Iago is arguably manipulating the spectators just as much as he is manipulating Barbantio. Here Iago’s actions are comparable to the Medieval Vice figure, a stock character that retained some level of influence in Shakespeare’s time. Iago incarnates the principles of this stage villain through his manipulation of other character’s feelings of fear and suspicion, as well as through his use of “profane” and bawdy language rich with animal imagery which borders on the obscene. The fact that Iago reveals his true purposes and motivations to the audience also suggests towards this particular stock character. Like the Vice, Iago is labelling noble characters with negative characteristics that he himself ironically possesses. The result is the conflict which follows in Scenes 2 and 3 in which Barbantio is consumed with suspicion and animosity towards Othello. Accusing him of witchcraft and sexual impropriety, Barbantio is revealed to possess similar racial prejudice as Iago and Roderigo. Othello’s foreignness, to these Venetians, is associated with the unknown and with the dark. Shakespeare here foreshadows the racism to which Othello will be subjected to.

In the light of this dehumanisation, Othello can be equally said to be a multifaceted character; his poetic register in his Scene 3 speeches contrasts strongly with the insults levelled at him, and the heroic qualities of bravery and masculinity which are revealed in his life’s description similarly contrast with the stereotypical depictions of Moors as fickle and jealous. However, to a Shakespearean audience Othello would have carried with him constantly the dark undertones of the negative stereotypes regarding Moors in Elizabethan times. Iago reminds the audience of this in “these Moors are changeable in their wills”, and Barbantio’s lines to Othello, “Look to her [Desdemona] if thou hast eyes to see: / She has deceived her father, and may thee”, plant in Othello’s and in the audience’s minds the suspicion of Desdemona being unfaithful to her marriage. Desdemona’s death by Othello’s hand in the climax of Othello is ultimately prepared henceforth.

All-Equalising Nature in “Anna Karenina”

When Levin delves into his countryside estate in Anna Karenina, the novel’s pace slows down. Working side to side with the peasant farmers on his land approximates him, for a brief episode, to the lives of common-folk. This spurs a sudden philosophic-political internal monologue which touches on contemporary philosophers’ assessment of Russia’s economic and class system, and develops Tolstoy’s spiritual idea that returning to nature and to humanity’s humble roots will purify Russians from a divisive and unfair modern society.

Observing himself and the peasants, Levin is assaulted by a notion:

“All had been drowned in the sea of their joyful common toil. God had given them the day and the strength, and both the day and the strength had been devoted to labour which had brought its own reward. For whom they had laboured and what the fruits of their labour would be was an extraneous and unimportant affair.”

The hard, compact sentences suggest a sweeping Scriptural gesture; the reference to God, the metaphorical allusion to the Flood in Genesis, and the viewing of labour as something which both unites people and submits them into an ant-like hierarchy enforces this. At the same time, the words “common toil”, and the joyful tone with which they resound, echo the spreading popularity of liberal Marxist politics in Russia in the late-19th to early-20th centuries. However, Tolstoy takes an ultimately different approach to social revolution. For Levin, it “depend(s) on himself to change his wearisome, idle, and artificial personal life for that pure, delightful life of common toil.” Though the apparent utopia is clearly opposed to capitalism and classism, Levin is not being forced into considering a peasant’s life; rather he comes into it on his own terms and through physical contact with nature.

Increasing detail in Tolstoy’s descriptive paragraphs contributes to a slowing down of the novel’s pace:

” “How beautiful!” he thought, looking up at a strange mother-of-pearl coloured shell formed of fleecy clouds, in the centre of the sky just over his head. “How lovely everything is, this lovely night! And how did this shell get formed so quickly? A little while ago when I looked at the sky all was clear, but for two white strips. My views of life have changed in just the same unnoticeable way.”

Describing the clouds as a shell associates them with protection, and also with separation. In this idyllic passage, Levin is in a dream-like state brought on by his physical exertion and by his lack of sleep; immediately after, he will consider leaving his life of privilege in favour of a peasant’s life. The pink colour of the clouds wryly suggests that Levin is probably looking at the world – and, implicitly, at his own life – through rose-tinted glasses. A similar play on words is present when Levin mentions that the sky had become more clouded: in parallel, his own vision is becoming clouded with unrealistic thoughts.

Though very brief, this episode where Levin reconsiders his life is strongly reminiscent of Anna Karenina’s abandonment of social status to pursue her passion with Vronsky. They are both alarming and seductive to the reader by the weight of their descriptive language, and by the passionate emotions portrayed.

When Levin suddenly shifts back into reality, the transition from the previous dream-like monologue to the next paragraph is abrupt.

“At the very moment when this vision was about to disappear, her candid eyes fell on him. She recognized him and joyful surprise lit up her face. He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes in the world like them. In the whole world there was only one being able to unite in itself the universe and the meaning of life for him. It was Kitty. He guessed that she was on her way from the station to her sister’s house at Ergushevo. All that had so disturbed Levin during the sleepless night and all his resolutions vanished suddenly. He recalled with disgust his thoughts of marrying a peasant girl. There alone, inside that coach on the other side of the road, so rapidly receding from him, was the one possible solution of the riddle which had been weighing him so painfully as of late.”

The sentences become shorter as the reach a climactic point in the middle of the paragraph, the short sentence “It was Kitty.” The power of this revelation does not inhabit the same high poetic register as the contemplation of peasant life; the shortness of the sentences emphasise that this is something which deeply shocks Levin. As a result, his thoughts immediately shift after the climactic point.

The vigour of this climax also gives the reader an idea of how intense Levin’s attraction to Kitty is. The revelation of her name is immediately preceded by a powerful philosophically charged build-up, in tune with the metaphysical language used to describe Anna Karenina’s and Vronsky’s passion.

Psychic Failures: Inaction, Circularity and Paralysis in “Dubliners”

A sense of inaction is a recurring motif in James Joyce’s Dubliners. In the stories, characters may find themselves failing to act, when facing critical, climactic moments, or even living their whole lives under the shadow of monotony. Joyce uses the symbol of circularity to suggest inaction and the failure to act; he also develops its presence in the lives of Dublin citizens, who range from young children to adults. However, Joyce’s language when describing the characters’ experience of climactic moments suggests that a lot of action is indeed going on at an emotional level: the psychological conflicts that the characters experience when experiencing an epiphany about their lives are rendered in such intense ways that they seem to be almost physical – such as Eveline feeling a bell “clanging” inside her during such a moment.

Araby, the third story in the collection, poignantly describes a boy’s ultimately failed experience of infatuated love; he travels across Dublin to the Araby bazaar, to buy a gift for his beloved, but upon arriving finds himself unable to buy anything. After a rising sense of tension and wonder during his journey, he anticlimactically finds himself in an empty, silent and dark building. “Nearly all the stalls were closed and the greater part of the hall was in darkness. I recognised a silence like that which pervades a church after a service”: this imagery of darkness and silence evokes the boy’s bathetic, disappointed feeling; this is further intensified by the comparison to a church where the service, the main action, has gone away. The painfulness of this disappointment enhances a sense that he has somehow failed in his journey. With “jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys (…) I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes”, the boy’s idealised language is disparate from the seediness of Dublin, shown by the contrast between the dark, diabolical aural imagery with the romantic image of him as a knight on a quest for his beloved. His ecstatic imagination is in conflict with reality, making his incoming failure the more devastating.

The imagery of darkness also enhances the idea of circularity. Araby begins by evoking the dark street in which the boy lives; Joyce echoes that image at the very end, to represent the circularity of the boy’s journey, and, from a wider perspective, the story itself. It visually represents inaction or the failure to act, as with circular motion no end is being achieved; it is also alluded to in the language of An Encounter, where an old man’s circular, sexually obsessive speech is compared by the narrator to a circle or orbit. The story’s plot is also bathetically circular, as the boys’ desire for a great adventure comes to a puzzling and anticlimactic end where they encounter the old pervert – their childish curiosity is met with a frightening reality. In both these stories, this symbolic representation of entrapment, as well as the use of bathos to suggest failure, suggest that these stories are dominated to some extent by inaction.

In Araby, however, the poignancy of the boy’s language, in its expressions of love and disappointment, also suggests that some very powerful action is occurring an an emotional level. Consumed with disillusion, the boy sees himself as “a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger”: here he uses powerful emotional language that conveys shame and bitterness; these emotions are further impelled by the harsh alliterative use of “d”, “v” and “a”. Similarly, he expresses his infatuation for his neighbour in passionate terms: “her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood”; the grandiose act of a summons, and the intense physical sensation that is suggested by blood have a hyperbolic effect which magnifies the intensity of his love. Like An Encounter, the narrator’s imaginative world is contrasted with the dark grittiness of reality; when these two meet, the protagonists will be left disillusioned and ashamed.

In Eveline, the heroine’s anticlimactic failure to elope from Dublin and from her abusive father is akin to the failed journey in Araby. Immediately before the climactic moment where Eveline, recalling Araby‘s narrator, becomes incapable of moving or speaking to her lover, she “prayed to God to direct her (…) her distress awoke a nausea in her body and she kept moving her lips in silent fervent prayer”: Eveline’s constantly repeated prayer echoes the circular speech in An Encounter. Even though she tries to use it to resolve her indecision, she fails to decide and act; effectively, she is trapped in her circle. The prayer also recalls The Sisters, as in that story the narrator, another young boy, encounters the rites and language of the Catholic Church and is unable to truly grasp their meaning, paralysing him when he encounters death. In a critical moment, Eveline’s connection to Catholicism also ends up paralysing her; this connection to The Sisters enforces this feeling. Because of this, the repeated prayer may be seen as an ominous foreshadowing of her failure: already the reader can see that Eveline’s journey will end in failure, like Araby.

However, Eveline, like the narrator of Araby, is given language that suggests a powerful emotional turmoil. The aforementioned prayer is described in harsh terms, where “distress” and “fervent” suggest a psychological suffering; “nausea” suggests a physical effect of this distress. Such language is also present as the story is on the verge of the climax: “A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand”. These verbs indicate a violent action: the clanging and the seizing are intense, even brutal; the sound in particular is heard physically, and so intensifies the sense of a physical turmoil. It also suggests tension and urgency, as it recalls an alarm; the sense of dread towards Eveline’s looming indecision is dramatically magnified. As Eveline will be consumed by fear in the story’s conclusion, the sound of the bell becomes a representation of her panic.

The character Maria also undergoes a journey in Clay; while it is essentially banal and monotonous, to Maria her experiences are riveting. She focuses on the mundane details of her clean kitchens and listing all her shopping for her daily trip to the shops. However, this monotony is magnified by Maria; when realising that she has lost her, she “coloured with shame and vexation and disappointment”: for such a mundane incident as that, her reaction of three intense emotional nouns is hyperbolic to an almost comical effect. This harsh language recalls the disillusioned feeling of Eveline and the young boy in Araby; but its application here to an everyday problem suggests that this story is circular in the sense that its main character is trapped in an empty and monotonous routine: these deadening details are her life’s interests. In the light of this, Maria can be seen as an older counterpart to the younger preceding narrators; while Eveline and Araby’s young boy have their aspirations defeated in their stories’ conclusions, Maria is accommodated to her trapped existence. Her sense of emptiness suggests that hope has gone for middle-aged Dubliners.

However, this emotional language. While in the tram, she talks to a man whom she thinks is a “colonel-looking gentleman” and believes him to be more polite than younger men. Her attribution of a title which suggests nobility and gallantry, is at odds, ironically, with the man’s “red face”, which suggests that he is a drunk. This irony in turn suggests that Maria is being delusional to some extent at being flattered by this man’s attentions. However, Maria later acknowledges the man’s drunkenness, and seeing as she is an unattractive spinster her excitement becomes more pathetic in effect. Similarly, Maria finds self-satisfaction in mundane accomplishments: the first page is punctuated with statements told using Maria’s voice, “Maria had cut them herself. (…) Everyone was so fond of Maria.”. Beyond the banal events, Maria’s genuine self-satisfaction suggests a complete psychological emptiness. In her perspective, these short moments of excitement are powerful and momentous experiences as they seem to be the few things that distract from her monotony.

Although the characters in Dubliners are trapped in paralysed, decaying existences, Joyce presents these stories from a perspective that ties to each protagonist’s inner world to the extent that the reader can see both the naturalistic details of the Dubliners’ impoverished lives as well as the psychological conflicts that come from living such lives. Joyce critiques Dublin’s stagnation by focusing on the characters’ need to escape, from either the boys’ dull routines, or, like Eveline, to abroad. In conclusion, these stories present different forms of both action and inaction; the resulting collective portrait is one of emotion and sympathy.