Racial Disgust in Early Modern England: The Case of Othello

The ongoing development of Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS) is perhaps the most exciting intellectual current in early modern studies today.¹ In this essay, I attempt to put the vital insights of this research into conversation with scholarship from another prominent subfield: the interdisciplinary study of emotion.² I do so through a reading of Othello, in which I argue that the circulation of racial meaning in Othello’s Venice is intimately tied to the circulation of affective meaning—and that the inscription of racial identity onto Othello by the inhabitants of Venice is fundamentally an emotional process. More specifically, I will suggest that the affective mode of disgust plays a central role in how Othello is perceived by others in the play. While few would deny that jealousy is the dominant (and most explicitly articulated) emotion in Othello, I argue that racialized disgust is what more precisely animates Iago’s plot to undo his master, serving both as a personal motivator and as an instrument by which he poisons how Othello is perceived by others.

In what follows, I draw on recent work that broadly treats the connection between race and emotion—such as the essays gathered in Carol Mejia LaPerle’s groundbreaking collection Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature—as well as on more specific research that has begun to explore how disgust becomes racialized.³ Mira ‘Assaf Kafantaris, for example, persuasively demonstrates that disgust is a component of how foreign queens are racialized in The Faerie Queene; Gitanjali G. Shahani reveals how disgust toward foreign food marked the European response to other cultures in contemporary travelogues; and Ian Smith has briefly remarked upon the “racial disgust” that Othello’s Black skin elicits in Brabantio.⁴ In this essay, I build on this important scholarship not only by offering a historicized account of early modern understandings of disgust but also by developing a broader model for analyzing disgust that is informed by current research in the modern affective sciences.⁵ I take this approach because modern scientific studies of both race and emotion make one thing clear: disgust is central to how out-group prejudice and racial discrimination function in everyday life. That is, a compelling body of evidence demonstrates that we cannot fully account for the workings of racism without accounting for the role that disgust plays in its operation; the description and analysis of racial formations in early modern England can therefore be valuably informed by considering how the dynamics of disgust feature in the forms of marginalization, discrimination, and violence that we find in the historical and literary record. In Othello, the central character’s status as a racialized subject comes to be underpinned by constructing his status as a disgusting subject. Racial discourses, I suggest, are thus entwined with affective discourses: while jealousy is the mechanism through which Iago first attacks his master, it is disgust that underwrites how Othello is broadly perceived throughout Venice, and it is the circulation of disgust that underwrites the forms of racial violence that are depicted in Othello.⁶

This essay, then, attempts to contribute to both the study of early modern emotion and the study of early modern race. In terms of emotion studies, my contribution is primarily methodological. I hope to demonstrate: (1) the value—and indeed, necessity—of incorporating racial analysis into our treatment of the affective past, and (2) the value of incorporating insights from the contemporary affective sciences into our historicized study of the intersection of racial and emotional discourses in the early modern period.⁷ In terms of early modern race studies, my contribution is thematic: I use the case study of Othello to further demonstrate how the workings of disgust might help elucidate some of the specific forms that early modern racist violence takes.⁸ The terms through which Othello is racially encoded are consistently drawn from the lexicon of disgust—and they importantly anticipate the findings of the modern scientific research tradition, which consistently shows that disgust is a central component of racial discrimination. Finally, it is vital to acknowledge that recent scholarship has crucially underscored the connection between premodern constructions of race and the world we inhabit today; Arthur L. Little, Jr. observes that the study of early modern race is invested in the way that “western modernity is intimately bound to early modern race formations,” while Margo Hendricks notes that PCRS “actively pursues not only the study of race in the premodern … but [also] the way those studies can effect a transformation of the academy and its relationship to our world.”⁹ Because of this, I conclude the essay by suggesting that there is a linkage between the patterns of racial disgust depicted in Othello and the mechanisms of racist violence that still plague our contemporary moment. Viewing the play through this lens, we will see, reveals another striking continuity between the racial and racist formations of the past and the present, and will, I hope, further demonstrate how this model of racial disgust might serve as a valuable tool for analyzing both premodern and modern race.

I. The Workings of Racial Disgust

Shakespeare, it is true, never uses the word disgust, a term that made its first printed appearance during his adult life.¹⁰ But Benedict Robinson notes that “early seventeenth-century England has long been associated with a pervasive disgust,” and recent work has identified the emotion as an important part of the Shakespearean affective catalog, variously locating it in works such as Venus and Adonis, Coriolanus, and the Henriad.¹¹ A cognate of the French desgoust and Italian disgusto, the English word disgust ultimately emerges as a negation of the Latin gustus (taste)—and indeed, the first recorded uses of the term have it as a general synonym of distaste, a word of only slightly earlier origin. This gastric register is suggested by the lexicographer Randle Cotgrave, who, in his English–French dictionary of 1611, refers to “a queasinesse, or disgust of stomacke.”¹² As we know from common usage in modern English, however, the feeling of disgust is not simply about an upset stomach but can entail a broader form of aversion; Cotgrave also renders the French desaimer (literally, “to cease to love”) as to “fall into dislike, or disgust of.”¹³ John Folio’s English–Italian dictionary similarly displays this range of meaning, defining the Italian disgusto/gusto as “disgust, distast, vnkindnes, dislike.”¹⁴ In the currently available Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO TCP) corpus, the first printed appearance of disgust (from 1596) confirms that early modern usage can refer both to visceral, somatic appetite and to more generalized feelings of repulsion: speaking of the sacraments, Thomas Wright argues that the Eucharist contains “[a]ll delight and sweetnes of taste,” because “by nourishing the soule … it shaketh off all the disgusts and griefes which our enemies by sinnes or temtations can impose vppon vs.”¹⁵ A few years later, we note a similar linkage of taste and disgust when Anthony Copley attacks religious prophecy: “So likewise of her Maiesties end how disasterously they haue prophecied, and do expect, I am sure you haue heard and do disgust as much as I. But what talke I of Protestants, seeing that also vpon very religious Catholikes they haue augured no lesse fatally, for being their known or but suspected distasters?”¹⁶ There are many such examples in the period, confirming Robinson’s sense that “at heart early modern usage [of disgust] refuses to draw a line between the most visceral bodily processes and the largest horizons of human action.”¹⁷

This refusal, however, is not simply an early modern English phenomenon: cross-cultural research reveals that understandings of disgust commonly spread across such a spectrum of experience.¹⁸ To understand why, we may usefully turn to the findings of modern affective scientists, who have used a variety of experimental and theoretical approaches to suggest how disgust works as a psychological and social phenomenon.¹⁹ According to the prevailing scientific model, the disgust response originated as a biological system designed to keep organisms from orally ingesting harmful substances; it is thus fundamentally associated with food, the digestive system, and the bodily response of nausea/vomiting. But while disgust began as a regulator of food, during the course of human development it seems to have evolved to guard against any number of potentially noxious threats to the body. Accordingly, scientists have identified numerous categories of experience that typically elicit disgust because they are associated with the potential exposure to dangerous pathogens: they involve things like food, animals, disease, bodily fluids, corpses, and sex. In certain circumstances, stimuli falling into such categories will trigger disgust, an avoidance response designed to encourage distance from the threat. And as human life became increasingly shaped by group dynamics, it is believed that the same biological system that protects us from physical contaminants came to defend social organizations against (perceived) metaphorical “contamination,” by responding to apparent violations of behavioral norms, symbolic purity, and morality. Overall, because of these fundamental regulatory functions, disgust is often known as “the gatekeeper emotion,” “the exclusionary emotion,” or the “body and soul emotion.”²⁰

But while disgust’s gatekeeping functions have undoubtedly helped the human species navigate both its physical and cultural worlds, they also have introduced some very unfortunate side effects: the emotion, scientific findings suggest, is integral to the workings of out-group discrimination, including racism.²¹ Indeed, since 2004, over sixty psychological studies have examined the association between disgust and xenophobia, with results reliably suggesting that “disgust sensitivity [is] a relatively standard predictor of prejudice.”²² In one experiment, for example, having a high disgust sensitivity on interpersonal matters (such as “not wanting to wear clean used clothes or to sit on a warm seat vacated by a stranger”) has been shown to predict “negative attitudes toward immigrants, foreigners, and socially deviant groups.”²³ Furthermore, research suggests that out-group disgust is essentializing—that is, “when a person says ‘group X is disgusting’ s/he conveys a belief that this group possesses a negative inherent essence (as opposed to merely being associated with a negative outcome or behavior, or possessing a negative characteristic that is incidental/fleeting).”²⁴ In this sense, disgust toward out-groups suggests that members of that group, fundamentally, have an “impure essence” that “has a biological basis [that] is immutable and fixed.”²⁵ When out-groups are essentialized as disgusting, it makes them subject to discrimination and violence—and indeed, it has been suggested that those prone to out-group discrimination and hate “may actually see themselves as the immune system of a wider ‘body politic’ which must be defended from dangerous social pathogens.”²⁶ That the object of disgust becomes construed as something like a pathogen is important, because the emotion “appears to have the unique capacity to foster the social-cognitive dehumanization of outgroup members”—and dehumanization, the process of thought and action through which another is construed as not fully human, is a consistent feature of the literature on disgust and prejudice.²⁷ Experimental participants primed with disgust cues are more likely to subsequently dehumanize an arbitrary out-group than those primed with other emotions or neutral stimuli, and subjects who already possess a higher sensitivity to matters of disgust are also more inclined to dehumanize an out-group. Unsurprisingly, dehumanization most often occurs “in relation to ethnicity, race, and related topics such as immigration and genocide”—and in fact, “the inclination to view members of other ethnic groups as not quite human” has been called “a persistent theme in ethnographic and historical literatures that record the dynamics of intergroup relations.”²⁸ Accordingly, when thinking about how the character of Othello is increasingly stripped of his humanity as the play unfolds, we must remember that it is the emotion of disgust that is fueling this dehumanization—disgust, as I’ll argue in the second part of this essay, that is weaponized by Iago, who uses it to infect not only third parties but also Othello himself.

Modern scientific research, then, suggests that disgust plays a central role in how racial out-groups are perceived. We find this mechanism at work in early modern racial discourse as well, as racial outsiders—particularly Black racial outsiders—are regularly associated with disgust elicitors such as dirt and disease.²⁹ According to Sir Thomas Brown, “things become blacke by a sootish and fuliginous matter proceeding from the sulphur of bodies torrified”; hence, it was said that “Aethiopians or Negroes become coal-blacke from fuliginous efflorescences and complexionall tinctures arising from such probabilities.”³⁰ The terms sootish and fuliginous (“covered or blackened with soot”) here are crucial, because they link Black skin—like Othello’s so-called “sooty bosom” (1.2.70)—with dirt, a crucial element in how disgust has been cross-culturally theorized.³¹ In her magisterial Purity and Danger (1966), an important forerunner of modern disgust research, the anthropologist Mary Douglas traces cultural understandings of dirt in terms of both pollution and taboo. She influentially theorized that dirt signifies “matter out of place”—that which threatens order and propriety in a social environment.³² For this reason, dirtiness is associated both with the visceral elicitors of somatic disgust (relating to pathogens, hygiene, and filthiness) and with the social violation of moral and symbolic disgust, insofar as that which is fundamentally dirty becomes marked as that which is not integrated into the social order. We may think, in King Lear, of how Poor Tom becomes dirty in his abjection—and indeed, Benjamin Minor and Ayanna Thompson have shrewdly suggested that Edgar’s begrimed disguise functions as a form of blackface.³³ In early modern England, Black bodies are thus, in their alleged dirtiness, inherently “out of place”; they are always an implicit, and often an explicit, object of disgust. This association between Blackness and dirt is evident in the period’s commonplace proverb about the impossibility of washing the pigment out of Black skin: writers frequently refer to the fact that “Black-moores, will not change their hue, though you wash them with Sope.”³⁴ Indeed, Kim F. Hall notes that “the whitewashed Ethiopian is a ubiquitous image in Renaissance literature, appearing often in emblem books and proverbs as a figure of the impossible.”³⁵

The association of Black skin and disgust is amplified when we consider that the early modern period advanced what Jonathan Gil Harris calls a “quasi-scientific discourse of blackness as an hereditary infection.”³⁶ George Best, contemplating “the Ethiopians great blacknesse,” decides that “this blacknesse proceedeth of some naturall infection of the first inhabitats of that Countrey, and so all the whole progenie of them descended, are still poluted with the same blot of infection.”³⁷ That Blackness is conceptualized as an infection is telling: proximity to disease is one of the fundamental elicitors of disgust, and we saw above that scientists theorize that the human disgust response partly originated as a system of disease and pathogen avoidance. Calling the Ethiopians polluted furthers this association with disease-based disgust, but it also links them to broader matters of symbolic impurity—in other words, the domain of regulatory, moral disgust. For it was said in the period that “the blackness of the Negroes proceeded from the curse upon Cham’s posterity,” providing an apparent biblical justification for linking Black skin to violation and wickedness.³⁸ In Best’s telling of this tale, Cham violated his father Noah’s commandment by engaging in “carnall copulation” with his wife on the ark; as punishment for this transgression, God willed that “a sonne shuld be borne, whose name was Chus, who not only it selfe, but all his posteritie after him, should be so blacke & lothsome, that it might remaine a spectacle of disobedience to all the World.”³⁹ The phrase black & lothsome instantly activates the register of disgust; loathsome functions as a synonym of disgusting, as a word that can refer both to that which triggers visceral nausea and to that which triggers moral offense.⁴⁰ As Sujata Iyengar observes, Best’s account associates Blackness with a “polluted and polluting” sexual violation, ultimately signaling English “fears about sexual commixture, the horrifying fantasy of racial pollution.”⁴¹ Racial disgust is thus very clearly invoked in this fantasy of original Blackness, which entails what Joyce Green MacDonald calls a “sinister moral taint.”⁴²

Finally, the evidence for early modern racial disgust is sometimes quite explicit: as Ian Smith has documented, both literary and nonliterary texts suggest that the sight of Black skin elicited a “general revulsion” in at least some early modern English subjects.⁴³ The most notable example is Dudley Carleton’s reaction to Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (1605), in which courtly ladies were painted black on their faces and arms; Carleton registers his disgust at their appearance in a series of letters, advising his correspondents that it “was a very lothsome sight” and that “you cannot imagine a more ugly Sight, then a Troop of lean-cheek’d Moors.”⁴⁴ Indeed, Carleton’s response has helped shape how modern commentators understand the literary features of the masque; Hardin Aasand, for example, argues that the disguised Queen Anne becomes “a royal grotesquerie” that “presents the grotesque and all its implications,” including susceptibility to “the contagion of physical defilement.”⁴⁵ This is not, of course, to say that Black skin was universally considered repulsive by white English subjects; though the ladies of The Masque of Blackness were offensive to Carleton, scholarship by Mejia LaPerle and Bernadette Andrea suggests that the literary dynamics of that performance may actually explore a more ambivalent, if not positive, association between Blackness and beauty.⁴⁶ But Ian Smith does record that Carleton's adverse response is representative of a more widespread phenomenon (overlapping with fear), which he characterizes as a “propensity for black panic” in the minds of contemporary white English subjects.⁴⁷ Racialized disgust was thus actively experienced in early modern England, and Shakespeare represents a parallel experience in the Venice of Othello.

Critical race theory is concerned not simply with the outlook of individuals but also with how racism is perpetuated by deep legal and social structures, and I will discuss more fully below the systemic relation between disgust and race in Othello’s Venice. But because human psychological architecture helps contribute to the shape of sociocultural systems—and because literary drama has an inevitable investment in the interactions of individual characters—it is also worthwhile to think about how meanings of race are formulated at the level of subjective psychology.⁴⁸ And here, research shows, the emotion of disgust is a central component of how discrimination and racism operate in individuals. I turn now to Othello as a case study in how racial disgust leads to tragic violence: it is disgust, I suggest, that comes to characterize how Othello is perceived by other characters in the play, and it is disgust that determines how he comes to understand himself. By attending to racial disgust, we can freshly analyze both the affective and the racial dynamics of Othello, ultimately seeing how these two discourses are intimately connected.

II. Racial Disgust in Othello

In a recent study of the “process of marking” in Othello, Patricia Akhimie observes that Othello’s Black skin serves as an “immutable somatic mark” that signals not only his difference but also his association with “a set of undesirable behavioral tendencies.”⁴⁹ This process is compounded, I’ll now suggest, by the way that Iago uses the essentializing function of racial disgust to transform Othello into an object of fear and repulsion, conferring on him an identity that then seems to other characters to be inevitable and immutable. In his plot to ruin his master, Iago causes racial disgust to circulate throughout the playworld—and the way that it increasingly defines Othello reveals the extent to which affective and racial discourses are entwined.

The process begins mere minutes into the play, as Iago (aided by Roderigo) successfully works to enflame the racism of Brabantio. The means through which he accomplishes this is crucial, because the association of out-group members with animals is a prominent way that disgust dehumanizes racial outsiders. Researchers agree that “animal metaphors offer a revealing window into human prejudice and social judgment,” and studies indicate that “disgust and revulsion feature prominently in images of animalistically dehumanized others.”⁵⁰ The play stages such animalistic dehumanization in its opening scene, as Iago, using a series of vivid animal metaphors—Othello is “an old black ram […] tupping [his] white ewe” (1.1.87–88), a “Barbary horse” covering his daughter (l. 110), and one with whom she “mak[es] the beast with two backs” (ll. 114–15)—insists that Othello’s coupling with Desdemona is a disgusting violation. “Plague him with flies,” Iago commands Roderigo, as the pair proceeds to infect Brabantio with the same racialized disgust that, we will see, ultimately motivates Iago (l. 70).

Because matters associated with sex are also a reliable category of disgust-elicitors, the revulsion activated by the animalization of Othello is compounded by the terms in which Iago presents it: Iago wants Brabantio to be disgusted by the image of a Black man sexually violating his white daughter, and it seems to work.⁵¹ (Indeed, because “interracial romance has historically been viewed as a moral affront to purity,” it is perhaps unsurprising that modern research suggests that disgust plays “an important role in bias against interracial romance.”⁵²) Iago, I suggest, attempts specifically to elicit a disgust response in Brabantio by using a series of animalistic sex metaphors to suggest the unnaturalness of the union. In this sense, it is not simply Blackness that is portrayed as disgusting at the level of essence; it is also proximity to Blackness, by which the father comes to see his daughter as symbolically tainted. It is vital that Brabantio apparently once “loved [and] oft invited” Othello into the life of his daughter (1.3.129); his hidden bigotry is stoked by Iago, triggered particularly by the apparent sexual corruption of his daughter. But once it is activated, it becomes totalizing, as suggested by Brabantio’s labeling Othello a “foul thief” (1.2.62) and referring to his “foul charms” (l. 73), where the word “foul” carries the meaning of “grossly offensive to the senses; revolting, loathsome; esp. having a disgusting smell or taste; stomach-churning.”⁵³ For Brabantio, Othello is befouled, marked as a revolting object, and Brabantio cannot fathom that his daughter would couple with such a man willingly: he expresses disbelief that “she, in spite of nature / Of years, of country, credit, everything, / [Could] fall in love with that she feared to look on” (1.3.97–99). In a case of obvious projection, Brabantio assumes that the disgust that he feels for Othello’s Black skin must also reside within his daughter. Brabantio’s invocation of nature here—repeated several lines later, in his claim that their match is “[a]gainst all rules of nature”—is crucial, blurring the lines between the domains of visceral and moral disgust; the marriage, which he views as a violation of the social order, is construed as a violation of the natural order as well (l. 102).

I believe that Iago himself is personally sensitive to these supposed violations, because of what we learn, shortly, about how he perceives his own marriage: Iago projects disgust onto Othello and Desdemona’s union because disgust seems to characterize his own sexual jealousy. I’m referring, of course, to his suspicion that “the lusty Moor / Hath leaped into my seat, the thought whereof / Doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards” (2.1.293–95). It’s hard to know what exactly to make of this surprising admission, which is first made in 1.3.386–87 (“it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets / He’s done my office”)—but we know that it is not simply a fleeting thought, as Emilia later reveals that he has charged her with this violation directly (“some such squire […] / [Has] turned your wit the seamy side without / And made you to suspect me with the Moor,” 4.2.147–49). I do think, however, that Iago’s affective relationship to his own suspicion is made salient by his tactics with Brabantio in the opening scene. If Iago understands an interracial union to be particularly offensive, then it seems likely that he is especially aggravated by the notion of being cuckolded by a Black man: the violation to the sanctity of his marriage is compounded by the particularities of who’s doing the violating, which turns the transgression into an object of disgust. As we have seen, Blackness—and particularly, Blackness and sexuality—was associated with revulsion and infection in the early modern mind, and, as Iago tells it to Brabantio, Desdemona is essentially polluted by her union with Othello. Emilia would thus equally be rendered disgusting by her contact with Othello’s offending body: the imagined transgression is not just symbolic for Iago but somatic as well. It is thus impossible to ignore the suggestive difference in how Iago responds to the prospect of Emilia sleeping with Othello and, in the same soliloquy, responds to the thought of her sleeping with Cassio. While he neutrally mentions that “I fear Cassio with my night-cap too” (2.1.305) in a casual remark set off grammatically from his main thought, he is, by his own account, viscerally tormented by imagining Othello with Emilia, which prompts a gnawing pain in his stomach—the core domain of disgust. Given his earlier characterizations of Othello as an object of animalized revulsion, it seems that Iago’s jealousy here may be fueled by a deeper kind of out-group disgust toward the racial Other: this, I think, may actually constitute the hatred that Iago feels for Othello (1.1.6; 1.3.385).

Thinking about an Iago who is disgusted by his adversary also enables us to recontextualize his actions in the play’s first scene: while his agitation of Brabantio’s racism is indeed strategic, it also reveals something of his own orientation toward Othello, and something about the way that both racial and affective meaning operate in the play’s Venice. If my suggestion about Iago’s motivation is granted, then we may see his strategy toward Brabantio as a process by which he activates in another the same affective outlook that he feels himself: this is how disgust circulates in the play. I have argued elsewhere that Shakespeare stages a circuit of disgust in Coriolanus—the emotion is widely transmissible—and I believe that the opening sequence of Othello depicts a similar phenomenon: here, affective meaning becomes mapped onto racial meaning, as Iago induces in Brabantio the disgust that he feels for Othello, just as he will attempt to do with others in the play.⁵⁴ And it is this circulation, I argue, that transforms racism into a structural feature of this Venice: it constitutes the very fabric of social interaction.

When speaking to the heartbroken Roderigo, Iago consistently characterizes Desdemona’s love for Othello in gastric terms. He first notes that a wife’s “eye must be fed” by the appearance of her husband—and incredulously wonders “what delight shall she have to look on the devil?” (2.1.223, 224). Iago’s strategy here closely resembles the one he used with Brabantio: he convinces Roderigo that Desdemona could not genuinely be attracted to a Black man and, consequently, that she will ultimately discard her infatuation and come to see her husband as he does, as an object of disgust. He similarly declares that there is nothing in Othello to give Desdemona a “fresh appetite”; again recalling the earlier reservation of her father, Iago implies there is an offensive unnaturalness in their union, owing to the lack of “sympathy in years, manners and beauties” (ll. 226–27). But the invocation of disgust becomes most explicit when he concludes his thought: “[N]ow for want of these required conveniences,” Iago predicts, “her delicate tenderness will find itself abused, begin to heave the gorge, disrelish and abhor the Moor” (ll. 229–31). In Iago’s metaphoric fantasy, Desdemona will eventually come to vomit at the thought of her husband, finding herself disgusted by that which she once desired. Ben Saunders—whose work on anality and purgation in Othello touches briefly on disgust—argues that Iago, “expressing disgust at what he portrays as Desdemona’s excessive desire, … also betrays his own excess—excessive disgust at her desire—by rendering its object abject.”⁵⁵ I very much agree, but would suggest that Iago’s disgust at Desdemona’s desire must be seen as a consequence of his fundamental disgust for Othello himself: he is disturbed that Desdemona could be attracted to what he perceives as a repulsive object, so he once again projects his own disgust onto another, by assuming that she too will inevitably come to feel what he feels. In a perceptive reading of Iago’s psychology, Paul Cefalu speaks of the character’s “exaggerated mind reading [that] often misleads and disconcerts him”—and we can certainly see that in this sequence, insofar as it is “one thing to assume that Desdemona might long for a younger man, but another to posit that she will eventually abhor Othello and cuckold him.”⁵⁶ It is Iago’s disgust for Othello, I think, that underwrites this cognitive error, as the intensity of his own feeling overloads his capacity to read Desdemona’s mind, and makes him misattribute his emotion to her. But while he may fail with Desdemona, we have seen that Iago is able to make disgust circulate in Venice: through a process of association, he induces in Brabantio a revulsion similar to his own, and this quality will ultimately be responsible for his undoing of Othello.

When describing the plan to destroy his master, Iago vows to “pour […] pestilence into his ear,” and thus to infect Othello with the same jealousy that eats at his own innards (2.3.351); as Cristina León Alfar observes, “Iago tells the same story about Othello that he imagines is being told about himself,” and thus “forces his enemy and rival to experience identical and equivalent anxiety, pain, and anger.”⁵⁷ But this is not the only matter of emotional circulation at play here: in a much larger sense, the activation of this jealousy is contingent upon convincing Othello to see himself as a disgusting object, just as Iago sees him. To realize this plan, Iago first intimates that his suspicions of Desdemona are too disgusting to reveal—they are “foul things” and “uncleanly apprehensions” (3.3.140, 142). This, of course, only provokes Othello further, starting a sequence that culminates in Iago’s declaration that jealousy is a “green-eyed monster, which doth mock / The meat it feeds on” (ll. 168–69). We have seen earlier how Iago links his own jealous feelings to matters of the stomach, so it’s no accident that his metaphor includes a gastric tag; insofar as jealousy, like envy, feeds upon itself, the image of self-consumption is also apt given that Othello will soon come to see himself in the same terms of disgust that Iago strategically invokes throughout the sequence. Iago is repulsed by the thought of being cuckolded by a racial outsider and he leads Othello to believe that his wife’s alleged infidelity is a consequence of his disgusting outsider status.

“In Othello,” Dennis Austin Britton writes, “Shakespeare positions pity as the emotion that inspires the love between a Venetian woman and a Moor”; I suggest that, as the play unfolds, it is actually the emotion of disgust, not jealousy, that inspires the dissolution of that love.⁵⁸ Having primed Othello with thoughts of jealousy, Iago next works to poison the very foundation of the match with Desdemona, by portraying her interest in her husband as a disgusting perversion of nature:

Othello has already heard this rhetoric from Brabantio and the audience has heard it in Iago’s conversation with Roderigo—but here, in such an intimate setting, coming from such a trusted source, it is particularly pernicious. Iago reminds Othello of the social conditions that preceded his elopement with Desdemona: she turned down many proposals from men to whom (it is said) she would naturally be suited, in favor of the unnatural one with a Black man. But in emphasizing the unnaturalness of the union, Iago also insists that Desdemona’s desire for Othello is viscerally repulsive, as the image of a rank smell suggests the essential rottenness of their marriage. There’s no doubt that Iago’s choice of words recalls the nauseous feeling of bodily disgust; in contemporary usage, there are many examples indicating the linkage between a rank smell and disgust, as in comments on the “stinke and ranke smell of the arme-pits,” or a “smell as rank as a Carkass.”⁵⁹ And to confirm the point, he continues by again invoking the term foul, which has been reliably associated with disgust throughout the play. The logic of this argument clearly resonates with Othello, who has been already made vulnerable by Iago’s chilling manipulation at the beginning of the scene; he dismisses his ensign immediately after this speech, and in a soliloquy decries that “[s]he’s gone, I am abused, and my relief / Must be to loathe her” (ll. 271–72). Othello, of course, will ultimately require further proof, but he seems to accept Iago’s suggestion that there is something disgusting about Desdemona’s love for him—and he, in turn, must loathe her for it. By entertaining this premise, I suggest, Othello equally seems to accept what it implies about his own identity: if Desdemona’s love for him is disgusting, it is because he, at his core, is disgusting.

The concept of internalized racism is familiar in discussions of Othello, but this process could also be more specifically called one of internalized disgust—Iago, himself repulsed by the idea of being cuckolded, spends the play convincing others that Othello is an object of disgust, and Othello eventually adopts that viewpoint himself. Othello’s internalization of disgust is most apparent later in the scene, when he declares that Desdemona’s “name, that was as fresh / As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black / As mine own face” (ll. 389–91). Recalling Brabantio’s earlier emphasis on soot, the notion of Othello’s begrimed face is one that presents Blackness as an uncleanliness, a filth, a stain—in other words, as an object of disgust. The fact that Othello is begrimed physically and Desdemona is begrimed morally suggests the different registers, variously of material and of symbolic purity, in which disgust operates. If Desdemona’s disgusting infidelity has rendered her Black, then Blackness itself must inherently be raw material for disgust. As Ambereen Dadabhoy notes, “Iago attacks Othello precisely on the points where natural and cultural identities collide and compete—his body.”⁶⁰ I think that the alleged disgustingness of that body is one of the (ostensibly) natural and cultural identities that Iago leverages, an identity that, once activated, begins to infect how Othello understands his own relationship to others. In this way, Othello comes to see himself as somatically “marked,” just as he is perceived by other characters in the play.

Commenting on his own villainy earlier in the scene, Iago cheekily deploys the explicit language of early modern disgust: his manipulation, he says, is “scarce found to distaste / But with a little art upon the blood / Burn[s] like the mines of sulphur” (ll. 330–32). But while Othello may not taste it going down, it certainly has a crucial effect, as Iago’s command of disgust shapes how other characters see him, how he sees himself, and how he ultimately sees Desdemona. When further goading Othello, Iago continues to paint Desdemona’s actions as fundamentally repulsive:

For this reason, he demands that Desdemona be strangled in “the bed she hath contaminated” (l. 205)—a remark that anticipates the relevance of disgust to the play’s terrible final scene.

As Michael Neill has argued, revulsion is a key component of Othello’s conclusion: drawing on Lodovico’s remark that the bloody spectacle “poisons sight,” as well as Samuel Johnson’s horrified critical response to it, Neill notes that “the tableau on the bed announces a kind of plague, one that taints the sight as the deadly effluvia of pestilence poison the nostrils.”⁶¹ After Iago’s horrific suggestion of strangulation is realized, Othello first adopts the language of disgust when justifying the murder: “O,” he tells Emilia, “she was foul” (5.2.198). Emilia’s response to the shocking crime also demonstrates how the discourse of disgust and the discourse of race are perilously entwined in the play. Discovering the scene, Emilia rails against Desdemona’s murderer, denouncing Othello as a “blacker devil” (l. 129); according to Edward Berry, this “startling” explosion of “suppressed racial hatred” reveals that Emilia had “apparently masked a revulsion against Othello’s blackness.”⁶² I think that Berry is quite right to emphasize her revulsion—for in their subsequent encounter, Emilia attacks Othello using several images from the lexicon of disgust, calling him both “ignorant as dirt” (l. 160) and Desdemona’s “most filthy bargain” (l. 153). Though her horror at Othello’s action is quite understandable, her sudden deployment of this imagery is a telling example of how the circulation of disgust operates on the stage: the language of racial disgust that Iago introduces into the playworld is here adopted in this moment of crisis, the activation of a potentiality that was always latent in Othello’s Otherness. This process demonstrates my basic understanding of the play: Iago, repulsed at the thought of being cuckolded by Othello, spreads his own disgust throughout Shakespeare’s Venice, eventually infecting even those whom he does not explicitly influence. We cannot, it seems to me, fully account for the tragedy of Othello without acknowledging the role that disgust plays in his undoing: this emotion comes to define the character’s identity, and it fuels the racist action that comes to destroy him.

In his reading of Othello, Saunders argues that “the primary rhetorical means by which Iago (and others) force Othello back to his ‘true’ marginalized ‘black’ position involves an emphasis on filth, dirt, and excrement”—a statement, it should be clear, with which I largely agree.⁶³ But while Saunders focuses on cleanliness and anality, I suggest that this list (to which disease, animalization, and sexuality must be added) should be more broadly understood as harnessing the affective power of disgust in general—a power that accounts not only for the insistent bodiliness of the play’s rhetoric but also for the symbolic system through which Othered, racialized subjects like Othello are policed within and ultimately expelled from the social order. The success of Iago’s plotting is founded on a mastery of disgust; he is able to harness the disgust that he feels toward his master and induce it in other characters, including, most importantly, Othello himself.

In the final analysis, this process both defines and is enabled by the racial structure that governs Venice more broadly. As scholars of the early modern period increasingly come to engage critical race theory, there is a growing sensitivity to how racial meaning and racism do not simply emerge from the will of individuals but are instead built into larger structures and institutions; Mary Janell Metzger, for example, emphasizes “the construction of whiteness as a form of social power” in her teaching of The Merchant of Venice, while Ruben Espinosa draws on the methods of critical race theory and ethnic studies to interrogate the “power structures that define Shakespeare [and that] also define and often oppress Chicanxs.”⁶⁴ I think that we see such institutional work at play in how easily the citizens of Venice adopt the disgust-based outlook of a racial outsider—that is to say, the ease with which disgust circulates in Shakespeare’s playworld. To be sure, this process originates in Iago’s individual malice; but as he slowly passes his racial disgust on to other characters, there emerges a sense in which Venice itself comes to construct Othello as the disgusting Other, “matter out of place” in the social order. In this way, racial meaning is partly created by affective meaning, and its consequences define not only relations between individual characters but the identity of the entire social community.

III. Racial Disgust, Past and Present

Though the connection between racism and disgust was first explicitly articulated by twentieth-century affective scientists, it is clearly anticipated by imaginative works like Othello, which show how the workings of disgust become weaponized in the service of racial animus. One of the many ongoing achievements of PCRS is demonstrating how the racial (and racist) logics of the past inform our present moment; indeed, Ian Smith and Justin Shaw have recently begun essays on Othello with a discussion of American police killing unarmed Black men.⁶⁵ Attending to the operation of racialized disgust similarly provides linkage between the past and present by showing continuity in how the human disgust system contributes to forms of out-group discrimination like racism: in Othello, Shakespeare depicts an emotional phenomenon that affective scientists have independently found to be active today, and the play thus reflects cultural and political forces that have created and continue to create situations in which this emotional phenomenon does racist work. In her discussion of The Faerie Queene, ‘Assaf Kafantaris argues that Spenser’s engagement with racial disgust “contributes to a nascent white supremacist discourse” by “foreground[ing] the kind of dehumanizing ideological work that justifies the expulsion of non-white people, and later on, their enslavement as means of production only”; it is hard not to suspect that a similar process is operating in Othello, especially in the sense that Shakespeare showcases the logic of racial disgust in a form that is endlessly replicated in subsequent readings and performances.⁶⁶ While cultural understandings of disgust are indeed shaped by specific historical circumstances, the persistence of certain social structures enables us to talk about broad continuities in how some aspects of emotion operate—and in terms of revulsion and prejudice, the racialized disgust depicted in Othello is still, unfortunately, very much with us today. To stay with Smith's and Shaw’s example: in a recent experiment, a computer program that simulates how police officers respond to ostensibly threatening situations has shown that white participants with a higher general disgust sensitivity are more likely to fire their hypothetical weapon at the image of an unarmed Black person than they are at the image of an unarmed white person.⁶⁷ While more work is needed in this area, these tentative results suggest that racial disgust may play a factor in the epidemic of modern police violence against Black Americans—just as an analogous process of racial disgust, portrayed by Shakespeare in literary form, plays a prominent role in the undoing of Othello.

Othello, of course, is just one case study that vividly illustrates how the violence of racial disgust manifests. Other instances immediately come to mind: as a racial outsider in Shakespeare’s most relentlessly disgusting play, Aaron of Titus Andronicus is unsurprisingly associated with the emotion, while in The Merchant of Venice the racist invective hurled against Shylock is equally taken from the lexicon of disgust. As I hope to have shown in this essay, disgust is broadly central to the workings of out-group prejudice, so it seems wise to further interrogate this affective mechanism in our analysis of early modern race and racism. As PCRS continues to find points of contact between the past and present—and as it continues to forge collaborations with emotion and affect studies—it may prove especially fruitful to put historicist and presentist literary work in conversation with research on both race and emotion from across the sciences.

This article emerged from a conversation about Othello with Cristina León Alfar; I am very grateful for her insights and inspiration. I also owe thanks to Mira ‘Assaf Kafantaris, Carol Mejia LaPerle, and Ian Smith, who provided me access to their important work, and to Ayanna Thompson, Jeremy Lopez, and several anonymous referees, who offered invaluable feedback on the essay.

Footnotes