SOURCE: "Othello: Jealousy as Mimetic Contagion," in American Imago, Vol. 44, No. 3, Fall, 1987, pp. 213-33.

In the following essay, Wilson locates Iago as the source of a "contagion of mimetic desire" in Othello.

As a tragedy on the destructive and self-destructive power of male jealousy, Othello could more aptly be entitled Iago, because it is the latter who serves as centering agent (mediator) of the sexual/social envy which he engenders in his outwitted rivals: Roderigo, Cassio, Brabantio, and above all the noble Moor, Othello. For it is devilishly brilliant Iago, not the more physical Othello, who authors the recursive labyrinth of triangles-within-triangles which parodically informs the world of this play. The structural analysis of mimetic desire proposed by René Girard as the motive at the psychic origin of that male violence which informs western literature, allows us to can see that Shakespeare offers through Othello's Iago and...