Othello's easy transformation from a loving partner to a murderous husband is not caused wholly by Iago's manipulation but also by being in "a society which sees Othello and Desdemona as gross and dis-natured. At the tragic centre of the play is not Iago, but the lovers' own perspective ". (footnote 1).
This "perspective " carries the potential of becoming the tragic centre because of it being very different for the man and the woman. Desdemona's love is divorced from the societal implications of class, gender and race as "there is oneness and indivisibility in Desdemona's love which form its tragic greatness and its weakness. " (F1) Her "insulation from the socio-sexual world of Venice and her wrong assumption of equivalent insulation on Othello's part " (F1) demarcates the tragic difference in their perspective. Venice, the state and the woman become one in Brabantio says that the "brothers of the state " would "feel this wrong as t'were their own. " [1.3.97] The man looks at the woman as a possession and this objectification strips her of having any agency. The preoccupation with purity creates two extremities of the Angel and the whore, leaving no middle space which the woman could occupy. Desdemona's double transgression, of racial and patriarchal norms when related to in Iago's vividly perverse language and concealed countenance, underlines the significance of racial otherness and patriarchal control of the woman's sexuality. Even though Desdemona is attributed angelic qualities by all male characters, Iago swings this verdict to the other extreme, which is of the whore, by manipulating on her transgression. .
The characters of Bianca and Emilia give a holistic view of the spaces occupied by women in Venice at this point of time. Bianca, being engaged in the prostitution prevalent in ˜promiscuous' Venice, is an example of women who were outside the respectable social domain due to their image as a "wanton.
