Cheat+Sheet+6+-+Karen+Newman+II

 - The early American proverb of “and what the Ethiop white” features in the title. This is essentially the idea of being able to change a person’s nature, in this instance by washing a black Ethiopian white.  - // It would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. (Coleridge [1960], I, 42) //  - Much of the disgust that Coleridge portrays comes not from the fact of Othello’s individual blackness, but from the // relation //of that blackness to Desdemona’s fair purity.  - In Othello, the black Moor and the fair Desdemona are united in a marriage which all the other characters view as unthinkable.  - Shakespeare uses their assumption to generate the plot itself – Iago’s ploy to string Roderigo along is his assurance that Desdemona could not, contrary to nature, long love a black man.  - Even his manipulation of Othello depends on the Moor’s own prejudices against his blackness and belief that the fair Desdemona would prefer the white Cassio. // Oliver Neville and Jack Giddey //
 * Newman – “And wash the Ethiop white”: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello **