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There are few things that the human mind cannot stand, and one of them is self-contempt. It is one thing to hate another person, but to hate and despise oneself is equivalent to denying one’s existence. Othello, in a fundamentally ethnocentric and racist society, finds himself confronted with the horrible reality of this self-contempt when there is cause to believe that Desdemona, whose loved had been the shield against his self-contempt, now betrays him too. Thus, Shakespeare’s Othello is a psychoanalytic view of a self-loathing man and his doomed attempts to defend himself against a painful reality.

The society and culture in which Othello finds himself is one where racism and ethnocentrism prevailed and prejudices abounded. As Ania Loomba in “Sexuality and Racial Difference�Ecites G.K. Hunter, there was �E‘a powerful and ancient tradition associating black-faced men with wickedness�Ewhich) came right up to Shakespeare’s own day’”(166). She further explains......

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Approximate Word Count: 2442
Approximate Pages: 10 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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