Harmony and Rupture in Desdemona: Toni Morrison's Remaking of Shakespeare's Othello

Abstract

In Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, a theatrical remaking of Shakespeare’s Othello, two characters are wholly reconfigured: the white Venetian Desdemona, and a barely mentioned figure in the Shakespearean text, Barbary, Desdemona’s Black maid of African descent. In Morrison’s portrayal, Barbary, through deft storytelling, becomes a conduit for Desdemona to access other contexts, other worlds and other multivoiced discourses. In the play’s broad strokes imagery, the tension between the two characters becomes deeply symbolic of conflictual white/Black relations in America as Morrison sees them, a state of affairs she dramatizes as allegorically existing in a Dantean purgatorial state, or midway station, or state of undecidability. This ambiguity arises from the continued presence in the play of master/slave histories. But Morrison’s Desdemona goes beyond the context of America and slave histories of the American South, extending her interrogation, widening her angle to the Caribbean, but also to England, France, Spain and other European contexts, as well as to West African rulers and slave traders associated with the four-hundred-year history of transatlantic slaveries. That the character of Barbary has always been performed by an African tale-teller/singer in African narrative style is the central dramatic device giving the play global aesthetic and historical scope. The multi-locale setting extends Morrison’s interrogation to a more global level. This immense expansion of scope making Desdemona an intertextually rich work influenced by prior works, may also –indeed, almost certainly will— influence future texts, performances and theater criticism of the canonical Othello.