Racism, Misogyny, and the "Othello" Myth: Inter-Racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee

Racism, Misogyny, and the Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee, by Celia R. Daileader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. ix + 253. Cloth $70.00; Paper $25.99. Reviewer: Christy Desmet In this book, Celia Daileader has set herself a large task. Spanning four centuries, her study of what she calls or the also moves back and forth across the Atlantic. Rather than detail lovingly the historical variations on her theme, Daileader pursues with a clear singleness of purpose the process by which Othello's story not only retains its currency, but also edges out other ideological variations on interracial sexual relations. Racism, Misogyny, and the Myth proceeds from the simple observation that in Anglo-American culture from the Renaissance onward, the most widely read, canonical narratives of inter-racial have involved black men and white (7). While a desire to exorcise 'collective psychological demons' might well be at work in the texts Daileader studies, she posits that Anglo-American culture's obsession with between black men and white women (a formula that inverts the sad realities of imperialism and slave culture) has less to do with per se than with an imaginative appropriation of black men to control women, both black and white: as a cultural construct is first and foremost about women-white women explicitly, as the 'subjects' of representation; black women implicitly, as the abjected and/or marginalized subjects of the suppressed counter-narrative (10). While she argues strongly against the absorption of sex as a critical category into race in a monolithic story of marginalization, Daileader is not just making a plea for taking women seriously in tales of interracial relations. From her perspective, the Othello figure who spies on and murders his unfaithful wife is a raced stand-in for the reader or spectator in masculinist-racist discourse. The Othello myth lets the (male) (racist) reader have it both ways. Thus, Desdemona gets what she deserves because pitch always defiles, so that Othello's blackness must rub off on her. At the same time, by virtue of his race, within the narrative of miscegenation Othello himself can be disposed of as a cultural afterthought or abjected as just another manifestation of dark femininity. On the surface, Daileader's project might seem unwieldy, at once too grand and a bit tenuous. Some of the texts she studies make little or no direct reference to Othello or its principal characters, and building a broad cultural argument on paradigmatic works is always a tricky business. On the one hand lies the Scylla of synecdochic fallacy (these select texts prove a global thesis); on the other, the Charybdis of the critical hobbyhorse (Othello and Othellophilia are everywhere, especially where one expects them least). I am happy to say that Racism, Misogyny, and the Myth steers a clear path between these critical dangers and that Daileader's argument is, in the end, both provocative and persuasive. One reason for the book's success is the author's careful selection of texts. The chapters pair familiar with lesserknown texts, a strategy in keeping with the book's concern with canonicity and the question of why the Othello myth is so entrenched in AngloAmerican culture. Within each chapter, the chosen texts speak energetically to one another. In some cases, the connection is historical; Harriet Jacobs, for instance, offered her story to Harriet Beecher Stowe before she gave it to Lydia Maria Child, establishing a factual connection among three of the authors discussed in chapter 4. Thomas Southerne's stage version of Oroonoko, discussed in chapter 2, is a clear revision of Aphra Behn's novel. More broadly, genre holds together the discussion of three Gothic tales in chapter 3. Daileader's talent for close reading solidifies the case for a persistent constellation of images and attitudes in the works covered by Racism, Misogyny, and the Myth. …