the trouble with gender in othello - Auburn University Electronic ...

Therefore, the fact of Desdemona’s “breaking the script,” as it were, by her
desire for a black man is just as incriminating as her act of disobedience. These
two “errors” in her gender performance are the keys to her destruction.
Conversely, even perversely, however Desdemona would be doomed by the
script, even if she had never “err’d from nature”. It is not only the places where
Desdemona follows the script that dooms her; it is the script itself. Iago ties
together the arguments that because Desdemona violated the script once, she
must do it again with the argument that all women, sooner or later, will become
sexually transgressive. “It is against nature,” Iago argues, “for Venetian women
to sleep with Black Men.” Fair enough, but then he continues to argue, “and it is
nature of women, (particularly Venetian women) to be unfaithful to their
husbands.” It would seem that, at least in the mind of Iago, and Rodrigo, and
finally, Othello himself, because a woman defies the script in some ways,
(disobedience, marrying outside her race) does not mean that she will not stick to
the script in others, particularly in those ways in which women are prone
“naturally” to badness. But, if we agree with Butler that there is no “natural”
woman, that all of her gendered actions are scripted by forces outside herself,
Iago is convincing those around him that his version of the script for “natural”
women is the correct one. And in Iago’s script:
You are pictures out of doors,
Bells in your parlors, wildcats in your kitchens,
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