But this eagerness for revenge is only one phase of his passion.
Though it leads him, in a frenzy of despair, to smother his wife, it
is yet, even in his violent soul, subordinate to those feelings of
_wounded honor and outraged affection_ which constitute the essence of
true jealousy. When he supposes himself betrayed by his wife and his
friend he clutches, as Ulrici remarks (I., 404), with the blind
despair of a shipwrecked man to his sole remaining property--_honor_:
"His honor, as he thinks, demands the sacrifice of the
lives of Desdemona and Cassio. The idea of honor in
those days, especially in Italy, inevitably required
the death of the faithless wife as well as that of the
adulterer. Othello therefore regards it as his duty to
comply with this requirement, and, accordingly it is no
lie when he calls himself 'an honorable murderer,'
doing 'naught in hate, but all in honor,'.... Common
thirst for revenge would have thought only of
increasing the sufferings of its victim, of adding to
its own satisfaction. But how touching, on the other
hand, is Othello's appeal to Desdemona to pray and to
confess her sins to Heaven, that he may not kill her
soul with her body! Here, at the moment of the most
intense excitement, in the desperate mood of a
murderer, his love still breaks forth, and we again see
the indestructible nobility of his soul."
Schlegel erred, therefore, when he maintained that Othello's jealousy
was of the sensual, Oriental sort. So far as it led to the murder, it
was; but Shakspere gave it touches which allied it to the true
jealousy of the heart of which Schlegel himself has aptly said that it
is "compatible with the tenderest feeling and adoration of the beloved
object." Of such tender feeling and adoration there is not a trace in
the passion of the Indian who bites off his wife's nose or lower lip
to disfigure her, or who ruthlessly slays her for doing once what he
does at will. Such expressions as "outraged affection," or "alienated
affection," do not apply to him, as there is no affection in the case
at all; no more than in that of the old Persian or Turk who sews up
one of his hundred wives in a sack and throws her into the river
because she was starving and would eat of the fruits of the tree of
knowledge. This Oriental jealousy is often a "dog-in-the-manger"
feeling. The Iroquois were the most intelligent of North American
Indians, yet in cases of adultery they punished the woman solely, "who
was supposed to be the only offender" (Morgan, 331). Affection is out
of the question in such cases, anger at a slave's disobedience, and
vengeance, being the predominant feelings. In countries where woman is
degraded and enslaved, as Verplanck remarks (III., 61),
"the jealous revenge of the master husband, for real or
imagined evil, is but the angry chastisement of an
offending slave, not the _terrible sacrifice of his own
happiness involved in the victim's punishment._ When
woman is a slave, a property, a thing, all that
jealousy may prompt is done, to use Othello's own
distinction, 'in hate' and 'not in love.'"
Another equally vital distinction between the jealousy of savagery and
civilization is indicated in these lines from _Othello_:
I had rather be a toad,
And live upon the vapor of a dungeon,
Than keep a corner in the thing I love
For other's uses.
And again:
I had been happy, if the general camp,
Pioners and all, had tasted her sweet body,
So I had nothing known.