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.
