Jealousy In Othello Research Paper

Jealousy in Othello

“No good karma comes from bitterness, jealousy, or negative thoughts. If someone finds love, even if you wish it were you they were fond of, try to be happy for them...” Melanie Vassilopoulos uses this quote to connect to people in the modern world about jealousy and how it can affect people negatively in the world around us. Throughout all of history, people have been positively and negatively affected by jealousy in their everyday lives because of things as simple as wanting something someone else has, to wanting to be with someone else’s wife or husband. We as humans naturally feel emotions such as jealousy in our everyday lives, and these emotions were no different when affecting people in the past. The theme of

Emilia begins to display jealousy from the very first moment we meet her in the book by kissing another man right in front of her own husband just to try and induce some kind of spite from him. Emelia believes that her actions of jealousy however subsequently fall on the fault of her husband. She even states to Desdemona: “If wives do fall. Say that they lack their duties/ And pour our treasures into foreign laps; / Or else break in peevish jealousies….Yet have we some revenge….The ills we do, their ills instruct us to” (Ⅳ. ⅲ. 90.-105.). In this quote we get an insight into how Emelia’s mind works and how she sees cheating and jealousy. Portrayed here is how she feels that if she uses her jealousy to cheat then she can cause a jealousy to form in her husband's heart as well. In Guadagno’s and Sargarin’s article Sex Differences in Jealousy we see an in depth look as to why Emelia may have reacted this way. It was found that: “Across the emotional responses, we found that people in committed relationships had more intense responses to the prospect of their partners engaging in infidelity. (Guadagno & Sargarin para 26 ) This scientific study shows how people committed to another person as Emelia was to her husband would react more negatively to the prospect that her husband may be cheating on her and in turn she felt justified to cheat on him however she chose to as well so he could feel the same way she did. Emelia understand that this jealousy by itself will get her nowhere but she also indicates she knows that these jealous tendencies will turn herself and whoever else lets them consume them into a monster: “ But jealous souls will not be answered so; / They are not ever jealous for the cause, / But jealous for they’re jealous. It is a monster / Begot upon itself, born of itself” (Ⅲ.ⅳ. 158.