E + I : The Story of a Ridiculously Dysfunctional Marriage

 

 

 

From the start, I knew I wanted my make-a-thing project to center around Iago and Emilia. But I felt like I was grasping at straws—after all, there is a lot that could be and has been said about them as characters and their roles in Othello overall. However, I knew that I wanted to do Emilia’s bravery and power justice, as well as Iago’s all-consuming psychopathy, because these were the traits that made me so interested in them.

To me, Iago is a black hole. He’s perfectly concentrated, focused energy that is bent on destruction no matter what the consequences are. He’s almost inhuman in his pure determination, even though no one knows what drives it. He gives us a laundry list of reasons behind his hatred, but none of them add up, none of them can fully spearhead that much rage. That’s what makes Iago endlessly interesting—even to the audience, who are made privy to his soliloquies in which he reveals his plans and true feelings, he is a mystery and his real motives can’t be neatly pinned down.

 Then there’s Emilia who, in the last scene of the play, blazes onto the stage like a fiery wrecking ball to bring her husband down. Throughout the play, Emilia read as a tragic hero herself, a woman trapped in an insidious and abusive marriage. She cannot escape Iago’s hate, so she copes with it by vying for his affections, desperately seeking to find a soft side to him. In her scenes with Iago, Emilia is almost pathetic in her quest for marital peace. But with her friend and mistress Desdemona, she reveals herself to be a very cynical woman mourning the roles in which the men in her life have forced her, just like Desdemona is now stuck in her role as the doting and dutiful wife to Othello. Desdemona’s loyalty to Othello even in the face of abuse is a disturbing mirror of Emilia’s own marriage, and when all the tension of the play finally comes to a head, she doesn’t seem surprised, only furious that men have yet again failed her.

Only this time, they also failed an innocent bystander, Desdemona. After discovering that Othello killed his wife, Emilia fearlessly challenges him, and as soon as enough witnesses arrive, exposes Iago for orchestrating the chaos. She dies at Iago’s hands, still defending her friend’s honor and damning the real villains with her last breath.

So, as for my far-too-abstract painting, I portrayed Iago as the gaping black hole in the background, like a mouth of darkness unapologetically swallowing everything in sight. But blazing before him stubbornly, in spite of all odds, is Emilia, a white-hot shooting star being spit from a maw of red fire. An unstoppable force for justice, both for herself and her Desdemona, who are murdered in the end because of Iago’s greed and Othello’s deep insecurities. They seem such unworthy things to die for, and Emilia knew it.

My painting was greatly influenced by a feminist article I read about the movie version of Othello we were watching in class. This article made me think about how much Emilia was influenced by her age, her assigned role in society, and her abusive marriage. All these tensions in her life finally exploded to reveal a woman just as pure in her bravery as Iago is pure in his hatred.

Here is the article: http://www.btchflcks.com/2013/01/classic-literature-film-adaptations-week-shades-of-feminism-in-othello.html#.VV393Xi9LCR

 



Exorcising Our Demons and Letting the Ghosts Move In

It’s hard for me to remember life before Tim Burton. My aunt, only nine years older than me, made sure that I was raised with all the campy classics, so it’s pretty impossible for me to pin down when exactly I first saw “Beetlejuice.”

“Beetlejuice” is easily the campiest ghost movie I can think of besides good old “Ghost.” But unlike “Ghost,” it’s pretty self-aware and there isn’t a shred of romanticism or real seriousness to be found. On the other end of the spectrum of wide-ranging ghost stories is Beloved. How am I going to thread a dumb 80’s black comedy with one of the most moving novels I’ve ever read? With a prayer. Here we go.

I never really thought much about ghost stories before reading Beloved. I’ve always been more into vampires, though I can’t imagine why. But now I can’t stop thinking about ghosts, and what it means that humanity’s imagination has always been grappling with the idea of them. What does it mean about our attitude towards death, that we can’t help but feel that lost loved ones are still haunting us? What does it mean about the importance of the past? Will we always want it to be exorcised or might we fiercely cling to our ghosts? With Sethe, two extremes are demonstrated. Her past is what she exorcises, though not in any real or permanent sense. Her traumatic memories are always lingering and resting just below the surface because she hasn’t dealt with them. However, when she accepts Beloved as the resurrection of her dead baby, she clasps greedily onto her.

I think this is because she sees Beloved as a chance to really get rid of the past once and for all, if she could just explain what she did, if she could just be absolved of the murder. If Beloved could just understand, the two of them could look towards the future.

But Sethe’s got it backwards, I think. Beloved, in the end, is what has to be exorcised because she becomes so all-consuming and destructive. But Sethe’s past is a part of her. It is the ghost that will always be with her, so she might as well let it make itself at home.

One of the many things this book has taught me is that we have to find enough self-awareness to understand the difference between a healthy relationship and a crutch, a distraction. Beloved is very much a distraction for Sethe because Beloved doesn’t allow her to move forward, even though she thinks that’s all that she’s doing. The actual vital and healthy thing for Sethe to do is to really look at her forgotten memories, to make sense of them. She has to visit with these ghosts, not that of her vengeful baby who only seeks to drain her.

“Beetlejuice,” surprisingly enough, takes my broad idea of demons vs. benign ghosts in a way more straightforward sense. There’s the deceased couple, the Maitlands—squares but romantics, young but somewhat stuffy and old-fashioned. To Lydia, the Goth teenage girl now living in their idyllic country home, they represent a past that should be respected instead of forgotten. And the rest of the world has largely forgotten the Maitlands. Their very house is now unrecognizable, thanks to Lydia’s yuppie parents. In the face of obscurity and void, the couple fights by the skin of their teeth to stay relevant, to stay present, to stay alive. In the article I read, “Beetlejuice: A Ghostly, Gothed-Out 80s Fairy Tale for the Ages,” Bridget McGovern made me really think about the film through Lydia’s perspective, which I never really had done before. The dead couple is Lydia’s necessary ghosts, who remind her about the value of life and simple happiness. I think we all know what her demon’s name is.

The main antagonist, Betelgeuse, enters the scene as the quick solution to the central conflict: the Maitlands don’t know how to scare their new roomies out of their house. But Betelgeuse quickly proves himself to be unstable and dangerous, and only by Lydia’s bravery and unselfishness is he successfully exorcised. In the end, the ghosts learn to live with Lydia and her family in harmony.

According to McGovern, “In the end, defeating Betelgeuse brings everyone together happily under one roof,” which, of course, isn’t quite what happens at the end of Beloved. However, all the crazy events leading toward the end have paved the way for future happiness and familial peace, because the devouring demon has been exorcised and the benign ghosts are here to stay—and I think that Paul D and Sethe are finally at a place where they can explore their shared history together, and finally build a real future.

Article: www.tor.com/blogs/2012/10/beetlejuice