Desdemona and Othello's love is a love of impossible dreams, killed by impossible dreams.

Othello is a play where individuals are incapable of communicating as 'real' people -- everyone, one could say, is an artist, but a bad one. Cassio becomes drunk and sings, losing his true morality and true self, and losing himself in Iago's plot. Rather than confronting her husband, Desdemona sings her "Willow Song," of a dead maid to explain her sorrow and confusion over the fact she has lost her husband's love, apparently for no reason. These characters tilt at windmills of their imagination -- whether windmills of adultery like Othello, or windmills of perceived injustice like Iago.

No fiction leads to any positive ends throughout Shakespeare's tragedy. Othello first sees Desdemona as a kind of Dulcinea, an utterly pure and chaste being. Although she is no peasant girl like Quixote's Aldonza, she cannot live up...
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