Handkerchief In Othello

Whether you realize it or not, you interact with symbols on a daily basis. From waving hello to rolling your eyes, symbols play a critical role in how humans interact with and interpret the world. The beauty of symbolism is that anything can be a symbol for anything else, as long as it is well established and can be interpreted correctly by its audience. Thumbs up means, good job! A wedding ring says, I’m taken! Symbols derive their meaning not from their surface, but from the meaning society has assigned them. Few symbols in literature have been so thoroughly studied as Desdemona's handkerchief from Shakespeare's play Othello. The handkerchief symbolizes love, virginity, power, marriage, and race to name just few of the many attributed meanings.

This symbolic power drives much of the action of the play. Othello assigns the handkerchief meaning through language, with his demand for “ocular proof” (Shakespeare, 3.3.412). This demand clearly shows that to Othello, the handkerchief represents his wife’s fidelity. He is asking for a physical object to prove his wife’s faithfulness. The physical object itself has no significance at all, but rather the meaning imbued on it. The handkerchief could have been any other object and still have had the same symbolic value to Othello. It is the meaning Othello has given the handkerchief though his language and thoughts that shape how he reacts to how the symbol is used, and what allows an object as insignificant as a handkerchief to cause so much

In this instance, it is again the characters that apply the meaning to the object through their language. Othello interprets the handkerchief as an object of power within his relationship, according to scholar Harry Berger; "[Othello] interprets [the loss of the handkerchief] as misuse of the generous gift of power he has bestowed on [Desdemona], the apotropaic power to ward off the contamination of their coupling by moderating the sexuality she arouses. This...alienated power, together with the sexuality he both desires and fears, makes Desdemona her captain’s captain and her general’s general" (Berger 238). Iago even recognizes this and mentions his commander’s new “general” (Shakespeare, 2.3.333-334). This power is specifically assigned to the handkerchief by Othello when he says it has the power to subdue him entirely to her love (Shakespeare 3.4.70). When Othello thinks he has been betrayed, he falls back on the symbolic meaning he has assigned the handkerchief; asking for it back as an attempt to redefine the power structure of the