SOURCE: Little, Arthur L., Jr. “‘An essence that's not seen’: The Primal Scene of Racism in Othello.” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (fall 1993): 304-24.

In the following essay, Little studies the way in which the audience and the other characters in Othello react to Othello's blackness in a metaphorical rather than a literal sense.

Shortly after Iago convinces Othello that evidence of Desdemona's guilt needs only ocular proof, Iago tells Othello that a woman's honor is “an essence that's not seen” (4.1.16).¹ From this point on, Othello attempts to see this unseen essence, zealously searching for the origins of Desdemona's honor, i.e., the original symbolic intactness of her hymeneal or undivided body. His psychological and discursive examination of this unseen body simulates the play's interrogations of Othello's own metaphorical black body, unseen and missing despite his literal black presence. The Duke offers the official reading of Othello's body when he proclaims...