Subversion of patriarchy in four women playwrights’ adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello
Subversion of patriarchy in four women playwrights’ adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello

Summary/Abstract: Feminism, in all its forms, shares at least one goal, that is, the subversion of patriarchy. Men, despite their class, race, or ethnicity, occupy a place in the hierarchy of patriarchy and seem to work in solidarity to keep their dominance over women, by excluding them, for instance, from the economy and literature. The way women are defined is socially constructed. This paper tackles women’s attempts to undermine these long-rooted constructed ideologies, for example, by explaining how patriarchy works and reacting against it. In this paper, we focus on a variety of techniques employed by some women playwrights to give voice to female characters, who have been deprived of the space to speak up in Shakespeare’s Othello. A feminist reading of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), Paula Vogel’s Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief, Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet, and Toni Morrison’s Desdemona can be constructed by analysing females’ presence and males’ absence in order to unfold male-constructed ideologies that hinder women’s advancement and occupy spaces that would allow women to act freely away from males’ territory, as well as, to identify the diversity of approaches these women playwrights combine in their plays to subvert and overcome them.

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