SOURCE: Friedman, Sharon. “Revisioning the Woman's Part: Paula Vogel's ‘Desdemona’.” NTQ 15, no. 58 (May 1999): 131-41.

In the following essay, Friedman contends that Vogel's Desdemona signals a significant shift in feminist critical perspective in drama.

In his introduction to Othello, Alvin Kernan asserts that Shakespeare's vision of human nature dramatizes ‘ancient terrors and primal drives—fear of the unknown, pride, greed, lust, underlying smooth, civilized surfaces’, and that there is a marked ‘contrast between surface manner and inner nature. … In Desdemona alone do the heart and the hand go together: she is what she seems to be.’¹

This characterization is reversed in Paula Vogel's revision of Othello as Desdemona.² In this play, we have a Desdemona who is not what she seems, ‘of spirit so still and quiet’. Rather, she is Othello's worst nightmare, the transformation of Iago's pretence into reality. Though still naive, Desdemona is no longer the innocent...