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Racism, Misogyny, and the "Othello" Myth: Inter-Racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee. By CELIA R. DAILEADER. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Illus. Pp. x + 256. $70.00 cloth, $25.99 paper.
Reviewed by AYANNA THOMPSON
Although it has long been argued that discussions of race and racism are incomplete without discussions of gender and misogyny (and vice versa), until Racism, Misogyny, and the "Othello" Myth, no one has demonstrated so convincingly just how interrelated these discourses are. In her fascinating book, Daileader argues that a "fear of female sexual autonomy regularly shades into fear of miscegenation" (46). Proving her point, Daileader asks, "Is the man who beats his daughter for sleeping with a black man (as in Jungle Fever) a sexist or a racist?" (218). At the heart of this paradox, Daileader locates the continued popularity and cultural capital of Shakespeare's Othello, arguing that "Shakespeare's audiences" find in the play aesthetic aspects to support their ideological views (44). The book is ambitious not only in argumentation but also in scope, devoting chapters to early modern constructions of blackness, Restoration rewritings, Gothic novels, abolitionist texts, romance novels, and modern American fiction. Racism, Misogyny, and the "Othello" Myth is an energizing and challenging read through five hundred years of literature.
The six chapters of Daileader's book are organized chronologically in order to establish how Othello's narrative supremacy has held sway even when authors have attempted to subvert the "masculinist-racist discourse" or the "racist-masculinist hegemony" (22, 53). In the first chapter, Daileader provides readings of Titus Andronicus, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, The White Devil, The Knight of Malta, and All's Lost by Lust to argue that (1) not all Renaissance narratives of interracial relationships were the same and (2) many of these texts suppress narratives of black women seduced or raped by white men. Othello, she argues, endures because it reproduces a conservative ideology that suggests, both implicitly and explicitly, that the...