How Desdemona Learned to Die: Failed Resistance in Paula Vogel’s Desdemona

Abstract

Paula Vogel’s dark comedy Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief is similarly probing, examining the isolation of women past and present through her reinvention of the characters in Shakespeare’s Othello. Rather than creating a heroic Desdemona who defies her fate, Vogel chooses to depict an environment in which such a character would be impossible. Instead, Vogel creates a silly, spoiled, and promiscuous Desdemona who attempts to subvert the patriarchy that controls her. Vogel uses displacement to demonstrate the painful limitations of female agency, inviting audiences to see female resistance and oppression through Shakespeare’s women. Her revised Othello does not ‘correct’ the darker plots of Shakespeare’s play by ‘saving’ Desdemona and glorifying the female characters. Desdemona cannot triumph in Vogel’s play, and the hope that the three female characters might rewrite the story in a positive way is futile. Although the women of Vogel’s Desdemona are each doomed to fail at their respective attempts to escape the situations that control them, the text still maintains a feminist perspective. The feminism of Desdemona does not demonstrate empowerment, enlightenment, or equality—these positive elements are replaced with a kind of negative empathy. Referring to her play How I Learned to Drive, Vogel argues that a play is not have to make audiences “feel good” to take a feminist stance—“It can be a view of the world that is so upsetting that when I leave the theatre, I want to say no to that play, I will not allow that to happen in my life” (qtd in Holmberg). Vogel’s Desdemona is not a prescriptive, utopian image of what the world should be like for women. Similarly, the women themselves are not positive, successful heroes. Vogel asks her audiences to say ‘no’ to constraints on female agency and ‘no’ to female complicity and isolation. By not saving Desdemona, Vogel invites her audiences to save themselves.