Desdemona is a fictional character in the playOthello by William Shakespeare. She is Othello's wife, and the daughter of Senator Brabantonio. She is a lightskinned and innocent and Shakespeare uses her as a symbol of purity to contrast malevolent Iago and his worldly wife, Emilia.
Desdemona's love for her husband lasts to her dying breath and she dies loving and trusting.
Desdemona is a self-sacrificing Christ figure somewhat like Cordelia from Shakespeare's play, King Lear.
"Othello and Desdemona in Venice" by Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856)
Othello is referred to as a "Moor"; for Elizabethan Englishmen, this term could refer to the Arabs of North Africa, or to the people we would now call "fl" (that is, people of sub-Saharan African descent).
Othello's tragic flaw is thus that he is unable to cope with the notion that the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary.
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