“Can anyone point to something contemporary about sexual jealousy that I can contrast with Othello?” a fellow Shakespearean recently asked on social media. “My students this past semester did not understand sexual jealousy, what it is,” she went on. “When I asked the class to describe jealousy in a relationship, one student said, ‘It’s like when your partner has something you want, like the latest iPhone.’” “That,” replied another colleague on the thread, “is weirdly awesome.”
Sexual jealousy is an emotion that was once thought to be so universal, such a commonplace experience of a person in love, that no one would think it needed explaining. A theater review of Othello from an anonymous critic in 1819 reads, “Othello is a faithful portrait of the life with which we are daily and hourly conversant; love and jealousy are passions which all men, with few exceptions, have at some time felt; the imitation of them, therefore, finds an immediate sympathy in every mind; Othello has no feelings that we should not ourselves have in his situation.”11xMichael Neill, “Introduction,” Othello, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2006), 7. See the prefatory “Remarks” in Othello “As it is performed at the Theatre Royal” (1819). It seems as though our pre-Victorian reviewer did not anticipate a world in which jealousy within a relationship would evolve into something that could be analogized to consumer rivalry.
Yet it’s possible I am being needlessly snide about these students, who may, after all, simply be too young and innocent to know the fervor of sexual love and the all-consuming desire for another person, to have them and possess them. In that case, it is the response of the adult colleague who thought the lack of sexual jealousy, to the point that students couldn’t even conceive of it, to be “weirdly awesome” that should trouble us most. Jealousy is an ugly emotion. So one can see the appeal. He seemed to be applauding a kind of sexual egalitarianism in which sexual partners might circulate in common, each for her or his own pleasure, without any feelings of exclusivity, possessiveness, or proprietorial concern.
But this “weirdly awesome” sexual commons seems also to be one bereft of emotional investment, void of the existential risk involved with loving madly and recklessly, and evacuated of the all-consuming passion of erotic love. Rather than share in the applause for these students who were being celebrated for their weirdly awesome triumph over sexual jealousy, I felt a great sadness for them. Sexual jealousy in Othello, continues the nineteenth-century theater critic, “‘resembles a thunderstorm, which awes by its magnificence of terror; in fact it is grand beyond loveliness.’”22xIbid., 8. It strikes me as a great loss that students today do not share in the great sublimity of their own humanity. But that they cannot even imagine what it is makes my blood run cold, because it seems that theirs does, and they are commended for it.