Otelo: perspectivas feministas e pós-coloniais.

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the play Othello (1604), by William Shakespeare (15641616), both from a feminist and postcolonial perspectives, focusing on the debate on gender roles and the construction of the other from the imperialist perspective. For this study, the theoretical support of authors such as Ashcroft at all (2004), Bartels (1990), Mill (1970), Woolf (2019), among others, were used. In the play, the character Othello is a Moor, a vague term that can designate both a black man and a Muslim, inserted in European society, who finds himself caught in a plot by his confidant Iago, who raises doubts about the fidelity of his wife, Desdemona, a white, upperclass woman, supposedly because of his envy for the privileged position that he acquired as a foreigner. The play's tragedy is due to the innocence and jealousy of Othello, at the same time that the construction of his story can be seen as the regression of his true nature from the European perspective. In turn, Desdemona is a character presented as a transgressive woman in defying her father's wishes and marrying a Moor, in addition to demonstrating autonomy in her relationship with Othello, but she soon faces the duality between being a woman and a wife; eventually opting for total submission to her husband. In a period when Europe traveled through the seas for commercial interest, exploration took the form of imperialist ideologies, subjugating other races and implanting the mentality that they themselves should seek a supposed superiority by embracing Eurocentric values. Shakespeare created a work that is a reflection of his time, but that, at the same time, there is space for postcolonialist and feminist questioning due to the complexity of his characters.