A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare's Venice

27. Desdemona’s Greedy Ear

desdemona’s greedy ear ‡ 141 had denied him before: “Now art thou my lieutenant” (3.3.481). But it is a commission in the wrong field, and Iago accepts it as if it were an offer of marriage: “I am your own forever” (3.3.482). He thus tightens the knot Othello began tying earlier with “I am bound to thee forever” (3.3.217). 27. desdemona’s greedy ear If, as Cavell argues, Othello has a use for Iago in 3.3, we learn from the disclosure in the same scene that he has had a use for Cassio since before the beginning of the play. He seems to have used Cassio both to stir up Desdemona’s desire and to keep his own distance from it. He desires her desire but is troubled by it. The marks of his diffidence are clearly inscribed in the courtship account he gives the senators in 1.3. Let’s turn to that passage and look at Othello’s strangely twisted story of who does what to whom: Her father loved me, oft invited me, Still questioned me the story of my life From year to year—the battles, sieges, fortunes That I have passed. I ran it through, even from my boyish days To th’ very moment that he bade me tell it, Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances, Of moving accidents by flood and field, Of hair-breadth scapes i’th’imminent deadly breach, Of being taken by the insolent foe And sold to slavery; of my redemption thence And portance in my travailous history; Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle, Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven It was my hint to speak—such was my process— And of the cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders. It’s significantly at this point, following the reference to predatory homophagy, that Othello brings Desdemona into his story: 142 ‡ contaminated intimacy in othello This to hear Would Desdemona seriously incline, But still the house affairs would draw her thence, Which ever as she could with haste dispatch She’d come again, and with a greedy ear Devour up my discourse; which I, observing, Took once a pliant hour and found good means To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart That I would all my pilgrimage dilate, Whereof by parcels she had something heard But not intentively: I did consent. (1.3.129–56) Here is a rough paraphrase of the critical section, the characterization of Desdemona’s response beginning at line 146 (“This to hear . . .”): observing her “rapacious appetite” for my discourse, I found means to persuade her to implore me to retell the whole story, only parts of which her household chores had allowed her to hear.1 I then consented, and was often able to beguile her of her tears with my accounts of one or another bad thing that befell me in my youth. Othello displaces the perversions of Ignoble Savages (whose skin color might resemble his) to curiosities, freaks, monsters, totally unrelated and perhaps inimical to the speaker. But the decontaminating gesture fails almost as soon as he redirects attention from the monsters to Desdemona. His story strangely positions Desdemona as an intruder who disrupts his idyllic relation to her father. The news of her intrusion affects our sense of Brabantio’s response to their elopement.2 His anger may be fueled by jealousy. The unexpected vividness of the figure “greedy ear”—its reductiveness , its weight as a synecdoche—registers a moment of recoil. It glances back to his mention in line 144 of “the cannibals that each other eat,” and since Othello’s language also betrays his complicity in taking advantage of Desdemona’s appetite, it binds them closely together in 1. The phrase “rapacious appetite” is borrowed from Greenblatt, Renaissance SelfFashioning , 239. 2. See the brilliant comments on Brabantio by Edward A. Snow in “Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello,” English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 410 and by Girard in A Theater of Envy, 183–84 and 293. desdemona’s greedy ear ‡ 143 mutual cannibalism. At least in the defiles of his rhetoric, their courtship falls under the shadow of the beast with two backs. It is from this shadow that his narrative strives to escape by shifting the cause of...