The ‘Wonder’ in the Handkerchief

Bruce, Susan

Abstract

I read Othello’s handkerchief in the light of Ian Smith’s contention that white critical histories have inhibited interpretative possibilities about the play and J Lorand Matory’s critique of the Western deployment of the idea of the fetish. Exposing parallels between literary understandings of the handkerchief and anthropological understandings of the fetish I show how in Othello, and in literary criticism (even in those rare critical occasions where similarities between handkerchief and fetish are acknowledged) privileging of European ‘rationalism’ over what is figured as African ‘superstition’ is manifest in and intertwined with preference for metaphorical over literal readings of objects and language. Such associations, I argue, fundamentally replay value judgments intrinsic to the concept of the fetish in the Western imagination. In this exploration I show for the first time that the handkerchief, far from being incidental to Othello’s concerns with race, itself functions as the key racial fulcrum of the play.

Citation

Bruce, S. (2025). The ‘Wonder’ in the Handkerchief. Textual Practice, https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2025.2500986

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 26, 2025
• Online Publication Date: Jul 4, 2025
• Publication Date: Jul 4, 2025
• Deposit Date: Feb 27, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 4, 2025
• Journal: Textual Practice
• Print ISSN: 0950-236X
• Electronic ISSN: 1470-1308
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2025.2500986
• Public URL: https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/1079906
• Publisher URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0950236X.2025.2500986?src=