Jago's Alter Ego: Race as Projection in Othello

JANET ADELMAN

OTHELLO FAMOUSLY BEGINS NOT WITH OTHELLO BUT WITH IAGO. Other

tragedies begin with ancillary figures commenting on the character who

will turn out to be at the center of the tragedy-one thinks of Lear, Macbeth,
Antony and Cleopatra-but no other play subjects its ostensibly tragic hero to
so long and intensive a debunking before he even sets foot onstage. And the
audience is inevitably complicit in this debunking: before we meet Othello,
we are utterly dependent on lago's and Roderigo's descriptions of him. For
the first long minutes of the play, we know only that the Moor, "the thicklips"
(1.1.66),' has done something that Roderigo (like the audience) feels he
should have been told about beforehand; we find out what it is for the first
time only through lago's violently eroticizing and racializing report to Bra-
bantio: "Even now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe"
(11. 88-89).2
At this point in my teaching of the play, I normally point to all the ways in
which Othello belies lago's description as soon as he appears; in the class-
room my reading of race in Othello turns on this contrast as Shakespeare's way
of denaturalizing the tropes of race, so that we are made to understand
Othello not as the "natural" embodiment of lago's "old black ram" gone
insanely jealous but as the victim of the racist ideology everywhere visible in
Venice, an ideology to which he is relentlessly subjected and which increas-
ingly comes to define him as he internalizes it-internalizes it so fully that,

I Quotations follow the Arden edition of Othello, edited by M. R. Ridley (London: Methuen,
1958). Ridley follows the 1622 quarto, which often differs from the Folio Othello; I have noted the
differences where they seem significant to my argument. Citations of plays other than Othello
follow William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969).
2 Race is of course a vexed term; many have pointed out that the word race gained its current
meaning only as it was biologized in support of the economic institution of slavery and that the
link between race and skin color is a peculiarly contemporary obsession, that (for example) Irish
and Jews might in 1604 have been thought of as racially separate from the English. For a
particularly lucid account of the questions surrounding the invocation of race as a category
in early modern England, see Lynda E. Boose, " 'The Getting of a Lawful Race': Racial dis-
course in early modern England and the unrepresentable black woman" in Women, "Race," and
Writing in the Early Modern Period, Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds. (London and New
York: Routledge, 1994), 35-54, esp. 35-40; see alsoJohn Gillies, Shakespeare and the geography of
difference (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), for the claim that early modern otherness was based
on geography rather than on the anachronistic category of race (25). Nonetheless, in lago's
capacity to make Othello's blackness the primary signifier of his otherness -as Boose observes,
"once his Ensign has raised the flag inscribing Othello within the difference of skin color, all the
presumably meaningful differences Othello has constructed between himself and the infidel
collapse" (38) -the text insists on the visible difference of skin color that will increasingly come
to define race, perhaps because, unlike religion, it (proverbially) cannot be changed. For a
discussion of the significance of visible difference in early modern England, see Kim Hall,
"Reading What Isn't There: 'Black' Studies in Early Modern England," Stanford Humanities
Review 3 (1993): 23-33, esp. 25-27; in her account "science merely takes up already pre-existing
terms of difference, such as skin color and features, that have [previously] been combined with
physical and mental characteristics" (25).

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 126 SSHAESPEARE QUARTERLY

searching for a metaphor to convey his sense of the soil attaching both to his
name and to Desdemona's body, Othello can come up with no term of com-
parison other than his own face ("My name, that was as fresh / As Dian's
visage, is now begrim'd, and black / As mine own face" [3.3.392-94] ).3 Othel-
lo's "discovering" that his blackness is a stain-a stain specifically associated
with his sexuality-and "discovering" that stain on Desdemona are virtually
simultaneous for him; hence the metaphoric transformation of Dian's visage
into his own begrimed face. If Desdemona becomes a "black weed" (4.2.69)4
for Othello, her "blackening" is a kind of shorthand for his sense that his
blackness has in fact contaminated her; as many have argued, his quickness to
believe her always-already contaminated is in part a function of his horrified
recoil from his suspicion that he is the contaminating agent.5
In other words, in the classroom I usually read race in Othello through what
I take to be the play's representation of Othello's experience of race as it
comes to dominate his sense of himself as polluted and polluting, undeserv-
ing of Desdemona and hence quick to believe her unfaithful. But although
the play locates Othello in a deeply racist society, the sense of pollution
attaching to blackness comes first of all (for the audience if not for Othello)
from lago; though lago needed Brabantio to convince Othello of Desdemo-
na's tendency to deception and the "disproportion" of Othello as her mar-
riage choice, lago legitimizes and intensifies Brabantio's racism through his
initial sexualizing and racializing invocation of Othello. And if the play offers
us a rich representation of the effects of racism on Othello, it offers us an
equally rich-and in some ways more disturbing-representation of the
function of Othello's race for Iago. I offer the following reading of that rep-

3 Ridley follows the Folio reading of line 392, since this line occurs in a passage not found in
QI; Q2 (1630) famously reads "Her name" in place of F's "My name," perhaps to rationalize
Othello's peculiar association of his name with the fairness of a figure for female virginity. I
prefer "My name," partly because it suggests the identificatory dynamics that underlie Othello's
love for Desdemona; but either reading points toward Othello's association of the stain on
Desdemona's virgin body with the blackness of his own face.
I Desdemona becomes a "black weed" only in the quartos; F omits the adjective.
5 This position was powerfully-and variously-articulated in three classic essays published in
1979-80: Edward A. Snow's "Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello," English
Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 384-412; Stanley Cavell's "Othello and the Stake of the Other"
in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 125-42
(originally published in 1979 in The Claim of Reason [Oxford: Oxford UP]); and Stephen Green-
blatt's "The Improvisation of Power" in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare
(Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1980), 222-54, esp. 232-52. For the association of
Othello's blackness specifically with sexual contamination, and Othello's internalization of this
association, see especially Snow, 400-402; and Cavell, 136-37. For a fuller reading of the asso-
ciation between blackness and monstrous sexuality in early modern English culture and in
Othello, see especially Karen Newman, " 'And wash the Ethiop white': femininity and the mon-
strous in Othello" in Shakespeare Reproduced: The text in history and ideology, Jean E. Howard and
Marion F. O'Connor, eds. (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 143-62, esp. 148-53; for a
fuller reading of the ways in which Othello internalizes the Venetian construction of his black-
ness, see Edward Berry, "Othello's Alienation," Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 30 (1990):
315-33. The "blackening" of Desdemona has become a critical commonplace: see, for example,
Michael Neill, "Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello," Shakespeare Quarterly
40 (1989): 383-412, esp. 410; Berry, 328; Ania Loomba, Gender, race, Renaissance drama
(Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1989), 59; Parker, "Fantasies of 'Race' and 'Gen-
der': Africa, Othello and bringing to light" in Hendricks and Parker, eds., 84-100, esp. 95; and
especially Newman, 151 -52, for whom the blackening of Desdemona indicates the convergence
of woman and black in the category of monstrous sexuality.

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 RACE AS PROJECTION IN OTHELLO 127

resentation as a thought-experiment with two aims: f

plicability of psychoanalytic theory-especially Kleinian theory-to prob-
lems of race, an arena in which its applicability is often questioned; and,
second, to identify some of the ways in which racism is the psychic property
(and rightly the concern) of the racist, not simply of his victim.

lago erupts out of the night (this play, like Hamlet, begins in palpable
darkness), as though he were a condensation of its properties. Marking him-
self as opposite to light through his demonic "I am not what I am," lago calls
forth a world, I will argue, in which he can see his own darkness localized and
reflected in Othello's blackness, or rather in what he makes-and teaches
Othello to make-of Othello's blackness.
lago's voice inducts us into the play: long before Othello has a name, much
less a voice, of his own, lago has a distinctive "I." The matter of Othello, and
satisfaction of the audience's urgent curiosity about what exactly Roderigo has
just learned, are deferred until after we have heard lago's catalogue of inju-
ries to that "I" ("I know my price, I am worth no worse a place" [1.1.11];
"And I, of whom his eyes had seen the proof, ... must be lee'd, and calm'd"
[11. 28-30]; "And I, God bless the mark, his worship's ancient" [1. 33]). lago's
"I" beats through the dialogue with obsessive insistence, claiming both self-
sufficiency ("I follow but myself" [1. 58]) and self-division, defining itself by
what it is not ("Were I the Moor, I would not be lago" [1. 57]), in fact
simultaneously proclaiming its existence and nonexistence: "I am not what I
am" (1. 65). I, I, I: lago's name unfolds from the Italian io, Latin ego; and the
injured "I" is his signature, the ground of his being and the ground, I will
argue, of the play. For lago calls up the action of the play as though in
response to this sense of injury: "Call up her father,.. . poison his delight"
(11. 67-68), he says, like a stage manager, or like a magician calling forth
spirits to perform his will; and with his words, the action begins.
The structure of the first scene models lago's relation to the world that he
calls up, for the play proper seems to arise out of lago's injured "I": it is not
only set in motion by lago's "I" but becomes in effect a projection of it, as
lago successfully attempts to rid himself of interior pain by replicating it in
Othello. Othello-and particularly in relation to Desdemona-becomes Ia-
go's primary target in part because Othello has the presence, the fullness of
being, that lago lacks.6 Othello is everywhere associated with the kind of

6 See W. H. Auden's related account of Jago as practical joker: "The practicaljoker despises his
victims, but at the same time he envies them because their desires, however childish and mis-
taken, are real to them, whereas he has no desiTe which he can call his own.... If the word motive
is given its normal meaning of a positive purpose of the self like sex, money, glory, etc., then the
practical joker is without motive. Yet the professional practical joker is certainly driven,. . . but
the drive is negative, a fear of lacking a concrete self, of being nobody. In any practical joker to
whom playing such jokes is a passion, there is always an element of malice, a projection of his
self-hatred onto others, and in the ultimate case of the absolute practical joker, this is projected
onto all created things" (The Dyer's Hand and other essays [New York: Random House, 1962],
256-57). The emptiness of Auden's practical joker is sometimes associated by later critics with
lago's facility in role-playing; see, e.g., Shelley Orgel, whose lago gains a temporary sense of self
by playing the roles that others project onto him ("lago," American Imago 25 [1968]: 258-73, esp.
272). Greenblatt's lago "has the role-player's ability to imagine his nonexistence so that he can
exist for a moment in another and as another"; but for Greenblatt, lago's imagined emptiness is
less an ontological state than a cover for his emptying out of his victim (235 and 236). More
recently lago's emptiness has reminded critics of a Derridean absence of self or meaning; see,

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 128 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

interior solidity and wholeness that stands as a reproach to lago's interior

emptiness and fragmentation: if lago takesJanus as his patron saint (1.2.33)
and repeatedly announces his affiliation with nothingness ("I am not what I
am"; "I am nothing, if not critical" [2.1.119]), Othello is initially "all in all
sufficient" (4.1.261), a "full soldier" (2.1.36), whose "solid virtue" (4.1.262)
and "perfect soul" (1.2.31) allow him to achieve the "full fortune" (1.1.66)
of possessing Desdemona. "Tell me what you need to spoil and I will tell you
what you want," says Adam Phillips:7 the extent to which Othello's fullness
and solidity are the object of lago's envy can be gauged by the extent to which
he works to replicate his own self-division in Othello. Split himself, lago is a
master at splitting others: his seduction of Othello works by inscribing in
Othello the sense of dangerous interior spaces-thoughts that cannot be
known, monsters in the mind-which Othello seems to lack, introducing him
to the world of self-alienation that lago inhabits;8 by the end, Othello is so
self-divided that he can take arms against himself, Christian against Turk,
literalizing self-division by splitting himself graphically down the middle.9
Though lago is not there to see his victory, we might imagine him as invisible
commentator, saying in effect, "Look, he is not all-in-all sufficient, self-
sustaining and full; he is as self-divided as I am."''0

e.g., Bonnie Melchior, "Jago as Deconstructionist," Publications of the Arkansas Philological Asso-
ciation 16 (1990): 63-81, esp. 79; or Karl F. Zender, "The Humiliation of Jago," SEL 34 (1994):
323-39, esp. 327-28. In Alessandro Serpieri's brilliant semiotic reading, Jago suffers from an
"envy of being" that is the deconstructionist's equivalent of the state Auden describes: "Jago
cannot identify with any situation or sign or Mnonci, and is thus condemned to deconstruct
through his own ononciations the inoncis of others, transforming them into simulacra. Othello is
precisely the lord of the inonci" (Serpieri, "Reading the signs: towards a semiotics of Shake-
spearean drama," trans. Keir Elam, in Alternative Shakespeares, John Drakakis, ed. [London and
New York: Methuen, 1985], 119-43, esp. 139). In its emphasis on envy and projection, Auden's
and Serpieri's work is closest to my own; but see also David Pollard's powerful Baudelairian
reading of lago's emptiness and the sadistic projections through which he attempts to fill it
("lago's Wound" in Othello: New Perspectives, Virginia Mason Vaughan and Kent Cartwright, eds.
[Rutherford, Madison, and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP; London and Toronto: Associ-
ated University Presses, 1991], 89-96).
7Adam Phillips, "Foreword" in Harold N. Boris, Envy (Northvale, NJ, and London: Jason
Aronson, 1994), vii-xi, esp. ix.
8 For some, Othello is split long before Jago begins his work. In Berry's account, for example,
Othello is divided from the beginning by the two contradictory self-images he absorbs from
Venice; his failure to escape this limiting framework and hence to "achieve a true sense of
personal identity" is a powerful source of tragic feeling in the play (323 and 330). But for critics
who read Othello as an early instance of a colonized subject, this "failure" is not personal but
systemic: both Loomba (32, 48, and 54) and Jyotsna Singh ("Othello's Identity, Postcolonial
Theory, and Contemporary African Rewriting' of Othello" in Hendricks and Parker, eds., 287-
99, esp. 288) position Othello specifically in opposition to what Singh calls "the dominant,
Western fantasy of a singular, unified identity" (288). But lago at least insists that he is the
divided one, and Othello initially claims that his soul is "perfect" or undivided; whatever the
state to which Othello is reduced, Othello-like The Tempest-seems to me to encode the fantasy
that the exotic other possesses a primitive unitary identity before his induction into a Western-
style split self.
9 I first read this paper to a very helpful and responsive audience at Notre Dame in November
1994, on which occasion Richard Dutton called my attention to the way in which Othello's
self-division is literally played out on the stage.
10 As lago's self-alienation passes to Othello, so does his habit of soliloquizing. Soliloquies are
usually in Shakespearean tragedy the discourse of self-division: only those whose selves are in
pieces need to explain themselves to themselves and have distinct- enough interior voices to carry
out the job for our benefit. Initially lago's soliloquies formally mark him as fractured in com-
parison with Othello's wholeness; by the end, Othello is the soliloquizer.

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 RACE AS PROJECTION IN OTHELLO 129

To shatter the illusion of Othello's fullness and pres

the illusion of his erotic power; his division from him
division from Desdemona and from the fair portion
her. If Cassio is any indication, that erotic power is h
Italians:

Great Jove, Othello guard,

And swell his sail with thine own powerful breath,
That he may bless this bay with his tall ship,
Make love's quick pants in Desdemona's arms
Give renew'd fire to our extincted spirits....
(2.1.77-81)11

But for lago it is intolerable: what begins as a means to an end (lago creates
Othello's suspicions about Desdemona to discredit Cassio in order to replace
him as lieutenant) increasingly becomes an end in itself, as lago drives Oth-
ello toward a murderous reenactment of sexual union on the marriage bed,
even though that reenactment will make Othello incapable of bestowing the
position lago initially seeks. The thrust of his plot toward the marriage bed,
even at the cost of his own ambition, suggests that what lago needs to spoil is
on that bed: the fullness and presence signified by Othello's possession of
Desdemona, the sexual union that reminds him of his own extincted spirits.
For lago's own erotic life takes place only in his head; though he seems to
imagine a series of erotic objects-Desdemona (11. 286-89), Cassio (3.3.419-
32), and Othello himself (in the coded language-"the lustful Moor / Hath
leap'd into my seat" [2.1.290-91]-that makes cuckoldry an anal invasion of
lago's own body) -he imagines them less as realizable erotic objects than as
mental counters in his revenge plot, and he imagines them only in sexual
unions (Othello with Desdemona, Othello with Emilia, Cassio with Desde-
mona, Cassio with Emilia) that everywhere exclude and diminish him. And in
response, he effectively neutralizes the erotic potency that mocks his own lack.
His primary tool in this neutralization is the creation of Othello as "black":
and in fact it is Othello as progenitor that first excites lago's racializing rage.
His first use of the language of black and white is in his call to Brabantio: "An
old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe." If Cassio needs to make Othello
into an exotic super-phallus, capable of restoring Italian potency, lago needs
to make him into a black monster, invading the citadel of whiteness. (The
idealization and the debasement are of course two sides of the same coin, and
they are equally damaging to Othello: both use him only as the container for
white fantasies, whether of desire or fear.) Your white ewe/you: lago's half-pun
invokes the whiteness of his auditors yia the image of Othello's contaminating
miscegenation;'2 true to form in racist discourse, "whiteness" emerges as a

" I here depart from Ridley in following F's version of line 80; Ridley and QI (1622) give "And
swiftly come to Desdemona's arms." Ridley himself finds QI's version of line 80 "pallid" and
thinks Shakespeare probably revised it for F; that he nonetheless rejects the Folio version on the
grounds that it is inconsistent with Cassio's character suggests his resistance to seeing just how
eroticized Cassio's idealizing of Othello is (xxix-xxx and 52n). In the context of lovemaking,
spirits is not a neutral term; for its specifically sexual senses, see Stephen Booth, Shakespeare's
Sonnets (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1977), 441-43.
12 See Neill's powerful account of the ways in which the audience is implicated in lago's
invocation of the horrors of miscegenation, the improper sexual mixture that medieval theolo-
gians called adultery (395-99 and 407-9). For Arthur L. Little Jr. the whole of the play consti-
tutes "the primal scene of racism," a forbidden sexual sight/site from which the audience

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 130 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

category only when it is imagined as threatened by its opposite. lago's lan-

guage here works through separation, works by placing "blackness" outside
of "whiteness" even as it provokes terror at the thought of their mixture. But
the play has already affiliated lago himself with darkness and the demonic; the
threat of a contaminating blackness is already there, already present inside
the "whiteness" he would invoke. lago creates Othello as "black"-and
therefore himself as "white"-when he constructs him as monstrous pro-
genitor; and he uses that racialized blackness to destroy what he cannot
tolerate. But the trope through which lago imagines that destruction makes
lago himself into the monstrous progenitor, filled with a dark conception that
only darkness can bring forth: "I ha't, it is engender'd," he tells us; "Hell and
night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light" (1.3.401-2).
This trope makes the blackness lago would attribute to Othello-like his
monstrous generativity- something already inside lago himself, something
that he must project out into the world: as though lago were pregnant with
the monster he makes of Othello.'3
If the structure of the first scene predicts the process through which lago
becomes the progenitor of Othello's racialized blackness, the trope of the
monstrous birth in the first act's final lines perfectly anticipates the mecha-
nism of projection through which lago will come to use Othello's black skin
as the container for his own interior blackness. Cassio uses Othello as the
locus for fantasies of inseminating sexual renewal; Jago uses him as the re-
pository for his own bodily insufficiency and his self-disgust. For lago needs
the blackness of others: even the "white ewe" Desdemona is blackened in his
imagination as he turns "her virtue into pitch" (2.3.351). How are we to
understand lago's impulse to blacken, the impulse for which Othello be-
comes the perfect vehicle? What does it mean to take another person's body
as the receptacle for one's own contents? The text gives us, I think, a very
exact account of what I've come to call the psycho-physiology of lago's pro-
jection: that is, not simply an account of the psychological processes them-
selves but also an account of the fantasized bodily processes that underlie
them. "Projection" is in its own way comfortingly abstract; by invoking the
body behind the abstraction, Othello in effect rubs our noses in it.'4

"constructs the significance of race" (" 'An essence that's not seen': The Primal Scene of Racism
in Othello," SQ 44 [1993]: 304-24, esp. 305-6).
13 The familiar associations of blackness with monstrosity (see, e.g., Newman, 148; and James
R. Aubrey, "Race and the Spectacle of the Monstrous in Othello," Clio 22 [1993]: 221-38) and
specifically with monstrous births (see Neill, 409- 10; and Aubrey, 222- 27) would probably have
made the subterranean connection between Othello and lago's monstrous birth more available
to Shakespeare's audiences than it is to a modern audience.
14 Projection has classically been invoked as a mechanism in Othello, but usually in the other
direction, from Othello to Jago; see, e.g., J.I.M. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare: Some
Recent Appraisals Examined ([London, New York, and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Company,
1949], 102-5), though Stewart ultimately abandons a naturalistic reading of the play through
projection for a symbolic reading of lago and Othello as parts of a single whole. For somewhat
later versions of lago as Othello's projection, see, e.g., Henry L. Warnken, "lago as a Projection
of Othello" in ShakespeareEncomium 1564-1964, Anne Paolucci, ed. (NewYork: The City College,
1964), 1-15; and Orgel, 258-73. In these accounts projection is loosely used to indicate that lago
expresses unacknowledged doubts or desires in Othello's mind (or, in Orgel's reading, Othello's
unacknowledged need for a punitive superego); they generally do not explore the mechanism of
projection or consider the degree to which the structure of the play posits lago-not Othello-
as its psychic starting point. For Auden, who reads the play through lago as practical joker,
projection begins with lago, not Othello (see n. 6, above); see also Leslie Y. Rabkin and Jeffrey

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 RACE AS PROJECTION IN OTHELLO 131

Let me begin, then, by thinking about the way lago thinks about bodies,
especially about the insides of bodies. For Jago is the play's spokesman for the
idea of the inside, the hidden away. At the beginning of his seduction of
Othello, he defends the privacy of his thought by asking "where's that palace,
whereinto foul things / Sometimes intrude not?" (3.3.141-42); no palace is
impregnable, no inside uncontaminated. Characteristically, Othello takes this
image and makes it his own, reinscribing it in his later anatomy of Desdemona
as "a cistern, for foul toads / To knot and gender in" (4.2.62-63). But merely
by insisting on the hidden inwardness of thought, lago has already succeeded
in causing Othello to conflate the hidden with the hideous, as though that
which is inside, invisible, must inevitably be monstrous ("he echoes me, / As
if there were some monster in his thought, / Too hideous to be shown"
[3.3.110-12]).15 According to this logic, the case against Desdemona is com-
plete as soon as lago can insinuate that she, too, has-psychically and ana-
tomically-an inside, unknowable and monstrous because it is inside, un-
seen.
If lago succeeds in transferring his own sense of hidden contamination to
Desdemona, localizing it in her body, the sense of the hideous thing within
monstrous birth or foul intruder-begins with him. Seen from this vantage
point, his initial alarum to Brabantio ("Look to your house, your daughter,
and your bags.... Are all doors lock'd?" [1.1.80, 85]) looks less like a de-
scription of danger to Brabantio or Desdemona than like a description of
danger to lago himself. For lago finds-or creates-in Brabantio's house the
perfect analogue for his own sense of vulnerability to intrusion, and he can
make of Othello the perfect analogue for the intrusive "foul thing," the old
black ram who is tupping your white ewe/you-or, as we later find out,
tupping lago himself in lago's fantasy, and leaving behind a poisonous resi-
due ("I do suspect the lustful Moor / Hath leap'd into my seat, the thought
whereof / Doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards" [2.1.290-92]).
But even the image of the body as a breached and contaminated "palace"
suggests rather more interior structure than most of lago's other images for
the body. Again and again lago imagines the body filled with liquid putrefac-
tion, with contents that can and should be vomited out or excreted. The three

Brown, who read Jago as a Horneyan sadist, assuaging his pain by projecting his self-contempt
and hopelessness onto others ("Some Monster in His Thought: Sadism and Tragedy in Othello,"
Literature and Psychology 23 [1973]: 59-67, esp. 59-60); and Pollard, who reads Jago as Baude-
lairian sadist, filling the world with sadistic projections with which he then identifies to fill his
inner emptiness (92-95). Serpieri sees Jago as the "artificer of a destructive projection"; in his
semiotic analysis, litotes-Jago's characteristic nay-saying figure-becomes the linguistic
equivalent of projection, "a figure of persuasion which, by denying, affirms in the 'other' all
that- the diabolical, the lustful, the alien -which it refutes or censures in the 'self' " (134 and
142). Attention to the status of "others" has made contemporary criticism particularly sensitive
to Othello as the site of lago's projections rather than as the originator of projection; see, e.g.,
Parker on "the violence of projection" (100). My account differs from those cited here largely
in giving projection a body and in specifying the mechanisms of projective identification at work
in the play.
15 Although Neill emphasizes the hidden/hideousness of the bed rather than of bodily inte-
riors (394-95), my formulation here is very much indebted to his. In the course of her enor-
mously suggestive account of the cultural resonances of the hidden/private in Othello and Hamlet,
Parker comments extensively on the association of the hidden with the woman's private parts,
partly via gynecological discourse; see Parker, "Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying, and the
'Secret Place' of Woman," Representations 44 (1993): 60-95, esp. 64-69.

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 132 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

fingers Cassio kisses in show of courtesy to Desdemona should be "clyster-

pipes" for his sake (1. 176), lago says; through the bizarre reworking of lago's
fantasy, Cassio's fingers are transformed into enema tubes, an imagistic trans-
formation that violently brings together not only lips and faeces, mouth,
vagina, and anus, but also digital, phallic, and emetic penetration of a body-
Desdemona's? Cassio's?-imagined only as a container for faeces. Early in
the play, poor Roderigo is a "sick fool.. . Whom love has turn'd almost the
wrong side outward" (2.3.47-48); by the end, he is a "quat" rubbed almost
to the sense (5.1.11), that is, a pus-filled pimple about to break. The congru-
ence of these images suggests that Roderigo becomes a "quat" for lago
because he can't keep his insides from running out: the love that has almost
turned him inside out is here refigured as pus that threatens to break through
the surface of his body. In lago's fantasy of the body, what is inside does not
need to be contaminated by a foul intruder because it is already pus or faeces;
in fact, anything brought into this interior will be contaminated by it. lago
cannot imagine ordinary eating, in which matter is taken in for the body's
nourishment; any good object taken in will be violently transformed and
violently expelled. When he is done with her, lago tells us, Othello will ex-
crete Desdemona ("The food that to him now is as luscious as locusts, shall
be to him shortly as acerb as the coloquintida," an emetic or purgative
[1.3.349-50]); when Desdemona is "sated" with Othello's body (1. 351), she
will "heave the gorge" (2.1.231-32). (Poor Emilia has obviously learned
from her husband: in her view men "are all but stomachs, and we all but
food; / They eat us hungerly, and when they are full, / They belch us"
[3.4.101-3].)
Given this image of the body's interior as a mass of undifferentiated and
contaminated matter, it's no wonder that lago propounds the ideal of self-
control to Roderigo in the garden metaphor that insists both on the rigid
demarcation and differentiation of the body's interior and on its malleability
to the exercise of will:

... 'tis in ourselves, that we are thus, or thus: our bodies are gardens, to the which
our wills are gardeners, so that if we will plant nettles, or sow lettuce, set hyssop,
and weed up thyme; supply it with one gender of herbs, or distract it with many;
either to have it sterile with idleness, or manur'd with industry, why, the power,
and corrigible authority of this, lies in our wills.
(1.3.319-26)

This is not, presumably, his experience of his own body's interior or of his
management of it; it seems rather a defensive fantasy of an orderly pseudo-
Eden, in which man is wholly in control both of the inner processes of his
body/garden and of the troublesome business of gender, and woman is
wholly absent.'6 His only explicit representation of his body's interior belies
this defense: the mere "thought" that Othello has leaped into his seat (even
though he "know[s] not if't be true" [1. 386]) "Doth like a poisonous min-
eral gnaw [his] inwards." No reassuring gardener with his tidy-or even his
untidy-rows here: lago's "inwards" are hideously vulnerable, subject to a
poisonous penetration. Through an imagistic transformation, Othello as pen-
etrator becomes conflated with the "thought" that tortures lago inwardly;

16 Gender can of course mean "kind"; but, as Ridley notes, "Shakespeare normally uses it
difference of sex" (40n).

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 RACE AS PROJECTION IN OTHELLO 133

Othello thus becomes a toxic object lodged inside him. (The garden passage
simultaneously expresses and defends against the homoerotic desire that here
makes Othello a poisonous inner object, insofar as it voices a fantasy of
"supply [ing] " the body with one gender rather than "distract [ing] " it with
many. 17)
What I have earlier called lago's injured "I"-his sense that he is chroni-
cally slighted and betrayed, his sense of self-division-produces (or perhaps
is produced by) fantasies of his body as penetrated and contaminated, espe-
cially by Othello. In fact, any traffic between inner and outer is dangerous for
lago, who needs to keep an absolute barrier between them by making his
outside opaque, a false "sign" (1.1.156 and 157) of his inside; to do less would
be to risk being (Roderigo-like) turned almost the wrong side outward, to
"wear [his] heart upon [his] sleeve, / For dawes to peck at" (11. 64-65).18 To
allow himself to be seen or known is tantamount to being stabbed, eaten alive:
pecked at from the outside unless he manages to keep the barrier between
inner and outer perfectly intact, gnawed from the inside if he lets anyone in.
Jago's need for sadistic control of others ("Pleasure, and action, make the
hours seem short" [2.3.369], he says, after managing Cassio's cashiering)
goes in tandem with his extraordinarily vivid sense of vulnerability: unable to
be gardener to himself, he will sadistically manage everyone else, simulta-
neously demonstrating his superiority to those quats whose insides are so
sloppily prone to bursting out, and hiding the contamination and chaos of his
own insides.
Roderigo plays a pivotal role in this process. As the embodiment of what
lago would avoid, Roderigo exists largely to give lago repeated occasions on
which to display his mastery over both self and other: in effect, lago can load
his contaminated insides into Roderigo and then rub him to the sense in
order to demonstrate the difference between them and, hence, the imper-
meability of Iago's own insides. Moreover, in managing Roderigo, Iago can
continually replenish himself with the fantasy of new objects to be taken into
the self: objects over which-unlike the thought of Othello, which gnaws at
his inwards-he can exert full control. Obsessively-six times in fourteen
lines-Iago tells Roderigo to "Put money in thy purse ... fill thy purse with
money" (1.3.340, 348). We know that Iago has received enough jewels and
gold from Roderigo to have half-corrupted a votarist (4.2.189), but we never
see Iago taking the miser's or even the spendthrift's ordinary delight in this
treasure; detached from any ordinary human motivation, the money accrues
almost purely psychic meaning, becoming the sign not of any palpable eco-
nomic advantage but of Jago's pleasure in being able to empty Roderigo out,
to fill himself at will. "Put money in thy purse," he repeats insistently, and
then adds, "Thus do I ever make my fool my purse" (1.3.381), as though the
emptied-out Roderigo becomes the container that holds the illusion of Iago's
fullness. For his repetition signals a compulsive need to fill himself with
objects in order to compensate for the contamination and chaos inside: hard
shiny objects that might be kept safe and might keep the self safe, objects that
could magically repair the sense of what the self is made of and filled with.

17 Ridley notes that "supply = satisfy" (40n); for a specifically sexualized use, see Measure for
Measure, 5.1.21 0.
18 "Doves" is the reading in Ridley and QI; I here depart from it in giving F's and Q2's
"dawes."

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 134 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

Iago's hoarding, his sadism, his references

can be read through the language of classical
anal fixation; in that language the equation o
enough, as is the association of sadistic cont
obsessive suspicion that Othello has leaped in
eroticized account of Cassio's dream, similarl
psychoanalytic reading of Iago as repressed h
ings are not "wrong" within their own term
limited, and not only insofar as they can b
inaccurate concept of the subject or of "the
within the terms of psychoanalysis insofar
quality of Iago's emotional relationships (his
libidinal bond, his tendency to treat others
terrifying theatrical seductiveness of the pro
ness through him. I want consequently to m
libidinal zones and conflicted object choices c
analysis to the areas opened up by the work
reading of Iago will, I think, help us to unde
imagination of his own interior shapes his o
interior onto the landscape of the play.

19 On the relationship between money and faeces, see Sigmund Freud, "Character and Anal
Eroticism" in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James
Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953-74),
9:167-76, esp. 171 and 173-74; ErnestJones, "Anal-Erotic Character Traits," Journal of Abnor-
mal Psychology 13 (1918): 261 -84, esp. 272-74 and 276-77; Karl Abraham, "Contributions to the
Theory of the Anal Character" in Selected Papers of Karl Abraham (New York: Brunner/Mazel,
1927), 370-92, esp. 383; and Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York:
Norton, 1945), 281. On sadism and anality, see Abraham, "The Narcissistic Evaluation of Excre-
tory Processes in Dreams and Neurosis" in Selected Papers, 318-22, esp. 319 and 321;Jones, 268;
and Fenichel, 283.
20 The loci classici for this reading are Martin Wangh, "Othello: The Tragedy of Iago," Psycho
analytic Quarterly 19 (1950): 202-12; and Gordon Ross Smith, "Iago the Paranoiac," America
Imago 16 (1959): 155-67. Both essays are based on Freud's account of delusional jealousy
defense against homosexual desire in the Schreber case. For an extension and elaboration of t
view, with particular focus on Iago's hatred of women, see also Stanley Edgar Hyman, lago: S
Approaches to the Illusion of His Motivation (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 101 -21. Contemporar
critics who comment on the homoerotic dynamic between Iago and Othello tend to locate th
readings not in this model but in the complex of metaphors that makes Iago's seduction
Othello into an aural penetration and insemination, with a resulting monstrous (and misce
nistic) conception; see, e.g., Coppelia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berk
ley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 1981), 144-45; and Parker in Hendricks
Parker, eds., 99-100. Parker notes that the imagined penetration is anal as well as aural (99);
also, e.g., Graham Hammill's brief discussion of Iago's anal eroticism, "The Epistemology
Expurgation: Bacon and The Masculine Birth of Time" in Queering the Renaissance, Jonathan Go
berg, ed. (Durham, NC, and London: Duke UP, 1994), 236-52, esp. 251n.
21 For historically based arguments against Iago-as-repressed-homosexual, see Jonath
Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 157-62; and Bruce R. Smi
Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago and London: U of Chicag
P, 1991), 61-63 and 75. Both Dollimore and Smith stress the social functions of the ma
homosocial bond rather than the dynamics of homoerotic feeling partly on the grounds that th
homosexual subject is an anachronism in the early modern period. But Shakespeare does
need to have the category of the "homosexual subject" available to him in order to represe
Iago as acting out of desires inadmissible to him, including sodomitical desires; and critics w
insist that we do away with "the homosexual" as a category sometimes throw out the baby w
the bathwater. In "Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England"
Goldberg, ed., 40-61) Alan Bray demonstrates the cultural (nonsexual) uses to which th

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 RACE AS PROJECTION IN OTHELLO 135

In Klein's account the primitive self is composed in part of remnants of

internalized objects (people, or bits and pieces of people, taken into the self
as part of the self's continual negotiation with what an outside observer would
call the world) and the world is composed in part of projected bits and pieces
of the self. Ideally, "the good breast is taken in and becomes part of the ego,
and the infant who was first inside the mother now has the mother inside
himself."22 Internalization of the good object "is the basis for trust in one's
own goodness";23 "full identification with a good object goes with a feeling of
the self possessing goodness of its own" and hence enables the return of
goodness to the world: "Through processes of projection and introjection,
through inner wealth given out and re-introjected, an enrichment and deep-
ening of the ego comes about.... Inner wealth derives from having assimi-
lated the good object so that the individual becomes able to share its gifts with
others."24 And the corollary is clear: if the infant cannot take in the experi-
ence of the good breast (either because of his/her own constitutional con-
ditions or because the experience is not there to be had in a consistent way),
the bad breast may be introjected, with accompanying feelings of one's own
internal badness, poverty, poisonousness, one's own inability to give back
anything good to the world.
But, in the words of Harold Boris, a contemporary post-Kleinian analyst of
envy, "the infant who cannot, sooner or later, feed the hand from which it
feeds ... is the child who will then attempt to bite it."25 The infant stuck with
a depleted or contaminated inner world will, Klein suggests, exist in a peculiar
relation to the good breast: even if it is there and apparently available, the
infant may not be able to use it. For if the infant cannot tolerate either the
discrepancy between its own badness and the goodness outside itself or the
sense of dependency on this external source of goodness, the good breast will
not be available for the infant's use: its goodness will in effect be spoiled by the
infant's own envious rage. The prototype for Kleinian envy is the hungry
baby, experiencing itself as helplessly dependent, empty, or filled only with
badness, confronted with the imagined fullness of a source of goodness out-
side itself: "the first object to be envied is the feeding breast, for the infant
feels that it possesses everything he desires and that it has an unlimited flow

"bedfellow" could be put; but in order for Smith, for example, to invoke Iago's report of Cassio's
"bedfellow" dream to make the argument that Iago is a self-conscious male-bonder rather than
a repressed homosexual, he has to ignore the explicit sexiness of the dream (the hard kisses
plucked up by the roots, the leg over the thigh). The dream clearly crosses the line-between
male friendship and sodomy- that Bray delineates, more strikingly because Iago need not have
included all that sexiness to convey his "information" to Othello; and whether or not the
reported dream proclaims Iago a "repressed homosexual," its effect on Othello clearly depends
as much on its crossing of that line as on the information that Cassio dreams about Desdemona.
As for subjectivity: whether or not the Renaissance shared our sense of the bourgeois subject-in
any case, emphatically not the subject as it is construed by psychoanalysis- Othello is obsessively
about what is hidden away within the person, the inner, private, and unknowable self that might
harbor inaccessible desires. For a good summary of these controversies-and a sensible middle
position -see Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics -Queer Reading (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P,
1994), 12-14.
22 Melanie Klein, "Envy and Gratitude" (1957) in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-
1963 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1975), 176-235, esp. 179.
23 Klein, 188.
24 Klein, 192 and 189.
25 Boris, xvi.

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 136 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

of milk, and love which the breast keeps for its own gratification."26 Klein's
insistence on the priority of the breast as the first object of envy effectively
reverses Freud's concept of penis envy; in Klein's account even penis envy
becomes secondary, derivative from this earlier prototype.27 But Klein's con-
cept of envy turns on an even more startling innovation: for most analysts of
infantile destructiveness and rage, the source and target is the frustrating
"bad" object-a maternal object that doesn't provide enough, is not at the
infant's beck and call, provides milk that in some way is felt to be spoiled; but
in Klein's reading of envy, the source and target of rage is not the frustrating
or poisonous bad breast but the good breast, and it is exactly its goodness that
provokes the rage. Hence the peculiar sensitivity of the envious to the good-
and the consequent need not to possess but to destroy it, or, in Klein's terms,
"to put badness, primarily bad excrement and bad parts of the self, into the
mother, and first of all into her breast, in order to spoil and destroy her."28
But the breast so destroyed is of course no longer available to the child as a
source of good: "The breast attacked in this way has lost its value, it has
become bad by being bitten up and poisoned by urine and faeces.' '29 Insofar
as the infant has succeeded in destroying the good object, he has confirmed
its destruction as a source of goodness within himself; hence the peculiarly
vicious circle of envy, which destroys all good both in the world and in the
self, and hence also its peculiar despair.
We do not, of course, need the help of a Kleinian perspective to identify
Iago as envious. His willingness to kill Cassio simply because "He has a daily
beauty in his life, / That makes me ugly" (5.1.19-20) marks the extent to
which he is driven by envy; in an older theatrical tradition he might well have
been named Envy. Here, for example, is Envy from Impatient Poverty:

A syr is not thys a ioly game ...

Enuy in fayth I am the same ...
I hate conscience, peace loue and reste
Debate and stryfe that loue I beste
Accordynge to my properte
When a man louethe well hys wyfe
I brynge theym at debate and stryfe.30

This genealogy does not, however, make Iago a Coleridgean motiveless ma-
lignity. For in Iago, Shakespeare gives motiveless malignity a body: incorpo-
rating this element of the morality tradition, he releases through Iago the
range of bodily fantasies associated with a specifically Kleinian envy.
Klein describes an envy so primal-,and so despairing-that it cannot tol-
erate the existence of goodness in the world: its whole delight lies not in
possessing what is good but in spoiling it. And that spoiling takes place in
fantasy through a special form of object-relating: through the violent projec-

26 Klein, 183.
27 For an early statement of this position, see Klein, "Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict"
(1928) in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945 (London: Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1975), 186-98, esp. 190-91 and 193-96.
28 Klein, Envy and Gratitude, 181.
29 Klein, Envy and Gratitude, 186.
30 Quoted here from Bernard Spivack's discussion of Jago and the morality tradition in Shake-
speare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains (New York:
Columbia UP, 1958), 184.

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 RACE AS PROJECTION IN OTHELLO 137

tion of bits of the self and its contaminated objects-often localized as con-
taminated bodily products-into the good object. By means of this projec-
tion, the self succeeds in replicating its own inner world "out there" and thus
in destroying the goodness it cannot tolerate; at the end of the process, in the
words of one Kleinian analyst, "There is nothing left to envy.'"'3 Through the
lens of a Kleinian perspective, we can see traces of this process as Iago fills
Othello with the poison that fills him.
In Iago's fantasy, as I have suggested, there is no uncontaminated interior
space: he can allow no one access to his interior and has to keep it hidden
away because it is more a cesspool than a palace or a garden. And there are
no uncontaminated inner objects: every intruder is foul; everything taken in
turns to pus or faeces or poison; everything swallowed must be vomited out.
This sense of inner contamination leaves him-as Klein would predict-
particularly subject to the sense of goodness in others and particularly am-
bivalent toward that goodness. His goal is to make those around him as ugly
as he is; but that goal depends on his unusual sensitivity to their beauty. Even
after he has managed to bring out the quarrelsome drunkard and class-
conscious snob in Cassio, transforming him into a man who clearly enjoys
sneaking around to see his general's wife, Iago remains struck by the daily
beauty in Cassio's life-at a point when that beauty has become largely in-
visible to the audience. To Roderigo, Iago always contemptuously denies the
goodness of Othello and Desdemona (he is an erring barbarian and she a
supersubtle Venetian); but in soliloquy he specifically affirms their good-
ness-and affirms it in order to imagine spoiling it. Othello's "free and open
nature" he will remake as the stupidity of an ass who can be led by the nose
(1.3.397-400). He will not only use Desdemona's virtue; he will turn it into
pitch, in a near-perfect replication of the projection of faeces into the good
breast that Klein posits.
For Iago the desire to spoil always takes precedence over the desire to
possess; one need only contrast him with Othello to see the difference in their
relation to good objects.32 Othello's anguish over the loss of the good object
gives the play much of its emotional resonance. He imagines himself as safely
enclosed in its garnery, nourished and protected by it, and then cast out: "But
there, where I have garner'd up my heart, / Where either I must live, or bear
no life, / The fountain, from the which my current runs, / Or else dries up,
to be discarded thence" (4.2.58-61). When he is made to imagine that object
as spoiled-"a cistern, for foul toads / To knot and gender in"-its loss is
wholly intolerable to him; even at the end, as he kills Desdemona, he is
working very hard to restore some remnant of the good object in her. Al-
though he approaches Desdemona's bed planning to bloody it ("Thy bed,
lust-stain'd, shall with lust's blood be spotted" [5.1.36]), his deepest desire is

31 BettyJoseph, "Envy in everyday life" in Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change: Selected Papers
of Betty Joseph, ed. Michael Feldman and Elizabeth Bott Spillius (London and New York: Tavis-
tock/Routledge, 1989), 181-91, esp. 185.
32 In Kleinian terms, Othello has reached the depressive position, characterized by the capacity
to mourn for the damaged object and to make reparations to it (see especially Klein, "A Con-
tribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States" [1935] and "Mourning and its Re-
lation to Manic-Depressive States" [1940], both in Love, Guilt and Reparation, 262-89 and 344-
69); Iago functions from within the more primitive paranoid-schizoid position, with its charac-
teristic mechanisms of splitting and projection/introjection (see especially Klein, "Notes on
Some Schizoid Mechanisms" in Envy and Gratitude, 1-24).

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 138 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

not to stain but to restore the purity of the good object, rescuing it from
contamination, even the contamination he himself has visited upon it. By the
time he reaches her bed, he has decided not to shed her blood (5.2.3).
Instead he attempts to recreate her unviolated wholeness ("that whiter skin
of hers than snow, / And smooth, as monumental alabaster" [11. 4-5]) in a
death that he imagines as a revirgination;33 in fantasy he cleanses "the slime /
That sticks on filthy deeds," remaking her unmarred and unpenetrated, "one
entire and perfect chrysolite" (11. 149-50, 146).
But Iago's only joy comes in spoiling good objects: Othello mourns being
cast out from the garnery/fountain that has nourished him; Iago mocks the
meat he feeds on (3.3.170-71). His description of the green-eyed monster he
cautions Othello against marks the workings of a very Kleinian envy in him:34
like the empty infant who cannot tolerate the fullness of the breast, he will
mock the objects that might nourish and sustain him, spoiling them by means
of his corrosive wit.35 (Or perhaps-in good Kleinian fashion-by tearing at
them with his teeth: especially in conjunction with the image of feeding on
meat, "mock" may carry traces of mammock,36 to tear into pieces, suggesting
the oral aggression behind Jago's biting mockery and hence the talion logic
in his fantasy of being pecked at.) Mockery-especially of the meat he might
feed on-is Iago's signature: different as they are, Othello, Cassio, and Ro-
derigo share an almost religious awe toward Desdemona; Jago insists that "the
wine she drinks is made of grapes" (2.1.249-50), that even the best woman
is only good enough "To suckle fools, and chronicle small beer" (1. 160). If

33As many have argued: see especially Cavell, 134; and Snow, 392. See also my Suffocating
Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York and Lon-
don: Routledge, 1992), 69-70.
34 Iago's words here, like Emilia's at 3.4.157-60, refer explicitly to jealousy but nonetheless
define the self-referential qualities of envy. Although the two terms are sometimes popularly
confused, they are distinct in psychoanalytic thought: jealousy occurs in a three-body relation-
ship, derived from the oedipus complex, in which the loss of a good object to a rival is at stake
envy occurs in a pre-oedipal two-body relationship, in which the "good" qualities of the object
are felt to be intolerable. Jealousy seeks to preserve the good object, if necessary by killing it; envy
seeks to spoil the good object. (For these distinctions, see Klein, Envy and Gratitude, 196-99; and
Joseph in Feldman and Spillius, eds., 182.) Jealousy is a derivative of envy but is more easily
recognized and more socially acceptable (Klein, Envy and Gratitude, 198;Joseph in Feldman and
Spillius, eds., 182); partly as a consequence, it can sometimes serve as "an important defence
against envy" (Klein, Envy and Gratitude, 198). This defensive structure seems to me at work both
in Iago and in the play at large: in Iago, who repeatedly comes up with narratives of jealousy as
though to justify his intolerable envy to himself (tellingly, he uses the traditional language of
envy-Spenser's Envy "inwardly... chawed his owne maw" in The Faerie Queene [I.iv.30] -to
register the gnawing effects of jealousy on him); and in Othello itself, insofar as its own narratives
of jealousy are far more legible and recognizably "human" than the envy represented through
Iago and dismissed in him as unrecognizable, inhuman, or demonic.
35 "Mock" has puzzled commentators for years, occasioning five pages of commentary in the
New Variorum edition of Othello (ed. Horace Howard Furness [Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott,
1886]). William Warburton (1747) glosses "mocke" (in terms strikingly close to my own) as
"loaths that which nourishes and sustains it" (176). With very little plausibility but some interest
for my argument, Andrew Becket (1815) transforms "mocke" to "muck," glossing it as to "bedaub
or make foul"; two other commentators-Zachariah Jackson and Lord John Chedworth-
approved of this emendation enough to come up with candidates for the monstrous animal that
befouls its food, mouse and dragon-fly, respectively (179).
36 Zachary Grey suggested in 1754 that "mock" is a contraction for "mammock" (Furness, ed.,
176); as far as I can tell, his suggestion has been entirely ignored.

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 RACE AS PROJECTION IN OTHELLO 139

"the first object to be envied is the feeding breast," Iag

maternal nurturance here is just what we might expect.
But envy does not stop there. As Klein suggests, "Exce
breast is likely to extend to all feminine attributes, in pa
an's capacity to bear children.... The capacity to give and
felt as the greatest gift and therefore creativeness becom
for envy."37 If Othello's potency and fullness make him
of Iago's envious rage, the destruction of Desdemona's ge
Iago's ultimate goal from the beginning: "poison his del
though he in a fertile climate dwell, / Plague him with
image half-echoes Hamlet's linking of conception and
stirring of maggots in dead flesh,38 for the "fertile cl
transform into a breeding ground for plague is Desd
body. Hence, I think, the urgency with which Iago propels t
marriage bed ("Do it not with poison, strangle her in h
she hath contaminated" [4.1.203-4]): the ultimate gam
destroy mother on that bed in a parody of the life-givin
might have taken place there.39
And hence the subterranean logic of Iago's favorite metaphor for that
destruction, his monstrous birth. For if Iago enviously devalues Desdemona's
generativity (she can only suckle, and only suckle fools; her body will breed
only flies), he also appropriates it, and appropriates it specifically through
imitation. Here both senses of mock-as devaluation and derisive imitation-
come together, as Boris's work on envy predicts: "The urge to take charge of
the envied object has several components to it. First, of course, is the denud-
ing (an idea) and disparagement (an emotion) of the inherent value of the
original. This makes possible what follows, namely the idea that the 'knock-
off' (the 'as-if') is in every way the equal of the real thing."40 In conceiving
of his monstrous birth, that is, Iago not only mocks but also displaces Desde-
mona's generativity by taking on its powers for himself, denying the differ-
ence-between her fruitfulness and his barrenness, between her fullness and
his emptiness -that he cannot tolerate. Iago's substitution in fact proceeds by
stages. When he first invokes the metaphor of pregnancy, he is merely the
midwife/observer: "There are many events in the womb of time, which will be
delivered" (1.3.369-70). But his triumphant "I ha't" only thirty lines later-
"I ha't, it is engender'd; Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to
the world's light"-replaces time's womb with his own: as I have already
argued, his is the body in which the monstrous birth is engendered, and hell
and night have become the midwives.

37 Klein, Envy and Gratitude, 201 - 2.

38 See Hamlet, 2.2.181-82.
39 This destruction also has the effect of separating the two figures whose conjunction has
haunted Iago's imagination. Klein hypothesizes the combined parent figure as a special target of
envy ("the suspicion that the parents are always getting sexual gratification from one another
reinforces the phantasy ... that they are always combined" [Envy and Gratitude, 198]); Iago in
fact evokes such a fantasy-figure in his initial description of Othello and Desdemona as fused, a
"beast with two backs" (1.1.116), always in the process of achieving the "incorporate conclu-
sion" (2.1.258-59) that is always denied him.
40 Boris, 36.

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 140 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

Through this metaphor, Iago's mental production becomes his substitute

birth, in which he replaces the world outside himself4"-the world of time's
womb, or of Desdemona's-with the projection of his own interior monstros-
ity; thus conceived, his plot manages simultaneously to destroy the genera-
tivity that he cannot tolerate and to proclaim the superior efficacy of his own
product. Emilia's description of the jealousy Iago creates in Othello-it is "a
monster, / Begot upon itself, born on itself" (3.4.159-60) -is not accurate
about Othello, but it suggestively tracks Iago's own envy to its psychic sources.
If Jago imagines himself enacting a substitute birth, making the world con-
form to the shape of his envy by undoing the contours of the already-existing
generative world, Emilia expresses the wish behind his metaphor: the wish to
be begot upon oneself, born on oneself, no longer subject to-dependent on,
vulnerable to-the generative fullness outside the self and the unendurable
envy it provokes.42 Unable to achieve that end, he will empty himself out on
the wedding bed, substituting his own monstrous conception for the genera-
tive fullness that torments him, and destroying in the process the envied good
object in Desdemona.
And it is just here, in this fantasy, that Othello's blackness becomes such a
powerful vehicle for Iago. I have already suggested that Iago's capacity to spoil
good objects rests on his capacity to blacken them, and to blacken them
through a bodily process of projection. His monstrous birth is from the first
associated with the darkness of hell and night; and when, in his conversation
with Desdemona, he imagines his invention as his baby, that baby is associated
specifically with the extrusion of a dark and sticky substance:

my invention
Comes from my pate as birdlime does from frieze,
It plucks out brain and all: but my Muse labours,
And thus she is deliver'd....
(2.1.125-28)43

41 My formulation here is partly indebted toJanine Chausseguet- Smirgel's work on perversion,

especially anal perversion, which she sees as an attempt to dissolve generational and gender
differences in order to defend against acknowledgment of the pervert's own puniness and vul-
nerability; though she does not draw specifically on Klein's concept of envy, her work sometimes
intersects usefully with Klein's. In Chausseguet-Smirgel's reading, Sade's intention, for example,
is "to reduce the universe to faeces, or rather to annihilate the universe of differences" ("Per-
version and the Universal Law" in Chausseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion [New York:
W. W. Norton, 1984], 4). Insofar as perversion attempts to replace God's differentiated universe
with its own undifferentiation, it is "the equivalent of Devil religion" (9); the undifferentiated
anal universe "constitutes an imitation or parody of the genital universe of the father" (11).
While this formulation is suggestive for Iago, f think that Chausseguet-Smirgel is hampered by
her Lacanian milieu, with its overvaluation of the phallus and the father's law; Iago is at least as
intent on imitating and ultimately replacing the mother's generative function as the father's law.
42 With the kind of psychological intuition that everywhere animates his portrayal of Satan,
Milton reworks Emilia's comment: unable to stand the "debt immense of endless gratitude" to
the God who has created him (Paradise Lost, Bk. 4, 1. 52), Satan proclaims himself "self-begot,
self-rais'd / By our own quick'ning power" (Bk. 5, 11. 860-61). Klein cites Milton's Satan as an
instance of "the spoiling of creativity implied in envy" (Envy and Gratitude, 202).
43 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, birdlime is a sticky substance made out of the bark
of the holly tree and smeared on branches to entrap birds; "With the barkes of Holme they make
Bird-lyme," cited from Henry Lyte's 1578 Niewe herball or historie of plantes (Oxford English Dictio-
nary, prep. J. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, 2d ed., 20 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989],
2:216). Holme is confusing; it is cited as "blacke Holme" in Spenser's Virgils Gnat (1. 215), but
there apparently refers to the oak, not the holly. In any case, despite the echo of lime, birdlime
seems to have been dark, not white.

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 RACE AS PROJECTION IN OTHELLO 141

Presumably Iago means that his invention is as slow-as laborious-as the

process of removing birdlime from rough cloth (frieze), in which the nap of
the cloth is removed along with the soiling agent (hence "plucks out brain
and all"). But the route to this relatively rational meaning is treacherous: the
syntax first presents us with birdlime oozing from his head ("invention / Comes
from my pate as birdlime does"), takes us on an apparent detour through
the soiling of cloth (the birdlime stuck to the frieze), and ends with the image
of his head emptied out altogether ("plucks out brain and all"), as though
in a dangerous evacuation. Then, through a buried pun on conception, the
concealed intermediary term, the evacuation becomes a pregnancy and de-
livery, displaced from his own body to that of the Muse, who labors and is
delivered.
Invention, in other words, becomes the male equivalent of pregnancy, the
production of a sticky dark baby. What we have here, I suggest, is the vindic-
tive fantasy of a faecal pregnancy and delivery that can project Iago's inner
monstrosity and darkness into the world:44 initially displaced upward to the
evacuated pate, this faecal baby is then returned to its source as his monstrous
birth, the baby he has conceived in response to Desdemona's request for
praise (2.1.124) and the easy generativity (his own is a difficult labor) that he
envies in her. This baby's emergence here marks, I think, both the source of
his envy and the exchange that envy will demand: he will attempt in effect to
replicate his dark sticky baby in her, soiling her generative body by turning
her virtue into pitch,45 spoiling the object whose fullness and goodness he
cannot tolerate by making it the receptacle for his own bodily contents. And
he counts on the contagion of this contaminated object: he will turn Desde-
mona into pitch not only because pitch is black and sticky-hence entrap-
ping-but because it is notoriously defiling;46 his scheme depends on using
Desdemona as a kind of tar baby, counting on her defilement-her black-
ening- to make Othello "black." In fantasy, that is, Iago uses Desdemona
and Othello to contaminate each other; they become for him one defiled
object as he imagines them on that wedding bed. But at the same time,
Othello plays a special role for Iago: in Othello's black skin Iago can find a
fortuitous external sign for the entire process, or, more accurately, a con-
tainer for the internal blackness that he would project outward, the dark baby
that hell and night must bring to the world's light; emptying himself out, Iago
can project his faecal baby into Othello, blackening him with his own inner
waste.
Iago plainly needs an Othello who can carry the burden of his own con-
tamination; and to some extent the play makes us complicit in the process, as

44 The equation of faeces with baby is familiar to psychoanalysis; see, e.g., Freud, "On the
Sexual Theories of Children," on the cloacal theory of birth ("If babies are born through the
anus, then a man can give birth just as well as a woman" [9:205-26, esp. 219-20]); Jones,
274-75; and Susan Isaacs, "Penis-Feces-Child," InternationalJournal of Psycho-analysis 8 (1927):
74-76. For fantasies that overvalue the power of faecal creation "to create or destroy every
object," see Abraham, "The Narcissistic Evaluation of Excretory Processes," 322; about one of
his patients he reports, "That night he dreamed that he had to expel the universe out of his
anus" (320).
45 Oddly, Ridley associates the pitch into which Iago will turn Desdemona's virtue with birdlime
without noting its source in Iago's earlier metaphor (88n).
46 For Shakespeare's reworkings of the proverbially defiling properties of pitch, see, e.g., Love's
Labor's Lost, 4.3.3; 1 Henry IV, 2.4.394-96; and Much Ado About Nothing, 3.3.53.

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 142 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

it makes Othello in effect into Iago's monstr

"conception" as he murders Desdemona on
perverse version of the childbirth that migh
himself seems to recognize that a birth of sorts
not recognize it as Iago's: preparing to kill D
that her denials "Cannot remove, nor choke
do groan withal" (5.2.56-57),4 as though he h
Iago's monstrous birth. And in fact he has: pa
play is that Othello becomes so effective a r
Iago's fantasies. If Iago imagines himself fil
mineral through what amounts to Othello's anal insemination of him
(2.1.290-92), he turns that poison back on Othello: "I'll pour this pestilence
into his ear" (2.3.347). This retaliatory aural/anal insemination fills Othello
with Iago's own contents, allowing Iago to serve his turn on Othello by doing
to Othello what he imagines Othello has done to him. ("I follow him to serve
my turn upon him" is sexualized in ways not likely to be audible to a modern
audience [1.1.42]. For turn, see Othello's later "she can turn, and turn, and
yet go on, / And turn again" [4.1.249-50];48 characteristically, Othello rep-
licates in Desdemona the "turn" Iago has replicated in him.) And "The Moor
already changes with my poison," Iago says, adding for our benefit-in case
we have not noticed the links between his poisonous conceit and Othello's-
"Dangerous conceits are in their natures poisons, / Which ... Burn like the
mines of sulphur" (3.3.330-34).
"The Moor already changes with my poison": the line marks what is di
tinctive about projection in this play-and distinctively Kleinian. Before
Klein, projection was usually understood as a relatively uncomplicated process
in which disowned ideas and emotions were displaced onto an external figure.
Klein insisted both on the fantasies of bodily function accompanying this
process and on the extent to which it is specifically pieces of the self and its
inner objects that are thus relocated, with the consequence that pieces of the
self are now felt to be "out there," both controlling the object into which they
have been projected and subject to dangers from it; Klein renamed this
process "projective identification." And her followers have expanded on the
concept, stressing the effects of these projected contents on the recipient of
the projection, the ways in which the projector can in fact control the recipi-
ent. In this version of projective identification, the recipient will not only
experience the bits of self projected into him but also enact the projector's
fantasy scenarios, hence relieving the projector of all responsibility for

I7 I here depart from Ridley in following F and Q2; Q1, Ridley's copytext, gives "conceit." The
half-buried metaphor of childbirth is, I think, present in either case, both through the associa-
tion of "groan" -especially in proximity to a bed-with childbirth (see, e.g., All's Well That Ends
Well, 1.3.140 and 4.5.10; and Measurefor Measure, 2.2.15) and through the family relation between
conceit and Latin conceptus, cited in the OED; the OED also gives "Conception of offspring" as an
obsolete meaning for conceit with a 1589 instance, though it notes that this usage is "Perhaps only
a pun" (3:647-48, esp. 648).
48 See also "the best turn i' th' bed" (Antony and Cleopatra, 2.5.59). For serve, see Lear's Osw
"A serviceable villain, / As duteous to the vices of thy mistress / As badness would d
(4.6.248-50); for serve my turn, see Costard's exchange with the king (Love's Labor's Lost, 1.1
82). For follow/fallow, see Parker in Hendricks and Parker, eds., 99, citing Herbert A. E
Shakespeare's Lusty Punning in Love's Labour's Lost (1973).

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 RACE AS PROJECTION IN OTHELLO 143

them.49 When lago imagines Roderigo turned inside ou

pus, he seems to me to be engaging in something clo
projection: he is attributing to Roderigo portions of h
himself, that he would like to disown; and, as far as w
not come to experience himself as pus-filled or inside
imagines filling Othello with his poison, when he im
mulation) "the forceful entry into the object and co
parts of the self,"50 he is much closer to a specificall
identification; and, as Klein's followers would predic
change with lago's poison, as he begins to experience
nated and hence to act out lago's scenarios.
And the play depends on precisely this specialized kind of projective iden-
tification, in which lago's fantasies are replicated in Othello's actions. When
we first meet Othello, he is confident enough about his status and his color
that he wishes to be found; he can confidently wish "the goodness of the
night" (1.2.35) on Cassio and the duke's servants because blackness has not
yet been poisoned for him. But as lago projects his faecal baby into him,
Othello comes more and more to imagine himself as the foul thing-the old
black ram-intruding into the palace of Venetian civilization or the palace of
Desdemona's body; as lago succeeds in making Othello the container for his
own interior waste, Othello himself increasingly affiliates his blackness with
soiling (he becomes "collied" or blackened by passion [2.3.197];51 his name
is "begrim'd, and black" as his face) and with bad interior objects. (In "Arise,
black vengeance, from thy hollow cell" [3.3.454], he calls on "black ven-
geance" to arise as though from within the hollow of himself.)52 His experi-
ence of himself, that is, comes increasingly to resemble what lago has pro-
jected into him; and he begins to act in accordance with that projection,
replicating in Desdemona the contagion of projection itself. The Othello who
feels himself begrimed because he has internalized lago's foul intruder will
necessarily see Desdemona as "foul" (5.2.201), as a "begrim'd" Diana or a
"black weed," and will evacuate his good object as lago had predicted
(1.3.350); by the end of the play, Emilia can call Othello "the blacker devil,"
Desdemona's "most filthy bargain," "As ignorant as dirt" (5.2.132, 158, 165)
because he has so perfectly introjected lago's sense of inner filth.

4 This is an oversimplified summary of a very complex development in psychoanalytic theory;

for a fuller summary, see "Projective Identification" in R. D. Hinshelwood's A Dictionary of
Kleinian Thought (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 179-208; or Elizabeth Bott Spillius's
"Clinical experiences of projective identification" in Clinical Lectures on Klein and Bion, Robin
Anderson, ed. (London and New York: Tavi~stock/Routledge, 1992), 59-73, esp. 59-64. For
Klein's initial development of the concept of projective identification, see Envy and Gratitude,
8-11. The development of the concept by her followers has had broad ramifications for clinical
work; for a particularly lucid account of some of these, see, in addition to Spillius, Joseph,
"Projective identification-some clinical aspects" in Melanie Klein Today: Developments in Theory
and Practice, Elizabeth Bott Spillius, ed., 2 vols. (London and New York: Routledge, 1988),
1:138-50.
50 Klein, Envy and Gratitude, 11.
51 Collied is conjecturally related to coaly by the OED, 3:390-91.
52 Folio gives "hell" for Qi's "cell." The Folio reading would ally black vengeance with la
monstrous birth. In either reading, the apparently superfluous hollowness suggests an in
space; as Ridley notes, it occurs, again redundantly, in the reference to a "hollow mine" (4.2
Shortly after he calls up black vengeance, and again in 5.2, Othello imagines his revenge sw
lowing up his victims (3.3.467 and 5.2.76), as though returning them to the interior source of
vengeance.

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 144 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

Insofar as lago can make Othello experience his own blackness as a con-
tamination that contaminates Desdemona, he succeeds in emptying himself
out into Othello; and insofar as Othello becomes in effect lago's faecal baby,
Othello-rather than lago-becomes the bearer of the fantasy of inner filth.
Through projective identification, that is, lago invents blackness as a contami-
nated category before our eyes, enacting his monstrous birth through Oth-
ello, and then allowing the Venetians (and most members of the audience) to
congratulate themselves-as he does-on their distance from the now-
racialized Othello. Through this process, Othello becomes assimilated to, and
motivated by, his racial "type" -becomes the monstrous Moor easily made
jealous-and lago escapes our human categories altogether, becoming un-
knowable, a motiveless malignity.
But this emptying out of lago is no more than lago has already performed
on himself: if the projection of his own inner contamination into Othello is
lago's relief, it is also his undoing, and in a way that corroborates both the
bodiliness of the fantasy of projection and its dangers to the projector as well
as the recipient. Klein notes that excessive use of projective identification
results in the "weakening and impoverishment of the ego"; in the words of
Betty Joseph, "at times the mind can be ... so evacuated by projective iden-
tification that the individual appears empty.' 53 If at the end of the play there
is nothing left to envy, there is also no one left to experience envy: lago's
projection of himself into the racial other he constructs as the container for
his contamination ends not only by destroying his (and our) good objects but
also by leaving him entirely evacuated. Having poured the pestilence of him-
self into Othello, lago has nothing left inside him: his antigenerative birth
hollows him out, leaving him empty. The closer he is to his goal, the flatter his
language becomes; by the end, there is no inside left, no place to speak from.
The play that begins with his insistent "I" ends with his silence: from this time
forth he never will speak word.

53 Klein, Envy and Gratitude, 11; Joseph in Spillius, ed., Melanie Klein Today, 140.

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