Additionally, many feminist critics encourage readers to resist the urge to defend or sanctify them [the female characters in Othello], [so that] we can read these women more realistically: Bianca is a passionate woman who is hopelessly in love with a man who exploits her; Emilia is a woman co-opted into patriarchy who will betray her beloved mistress to please her husband and jump at the chance to demean a lower- class woman; and Desdemona is a sensual, desiring woman who enjoys an occasional flirtatious badinage.
Rulon-Miller However, despite more recent feminist readings of the play, the fates of these characters continue to highlight the premium placed upon chastity by English society and the vulnerability faced by women who either failed or appeared to fail to maintain their chastity.
Shakespeare uses prostitution to comment on the darker side of humanity in another tragedy that features prostitutes, Timon of Athens. In this play, which Bevington Timon eventually dies alone, still in exile, but Alcibiades eulogizes him as an admirable man. After Timon has found the hidden gold in the forest shortly after arriving in exile, he sits and contemplates the greed and other vices of many of his fellow citizens.
The soldier Alcibiades then appears accompanied by two prostitutes, Phrynia and Timandra, prompting Timon to make a passionate speech on the nature of lust. It is worth pointing out that these are the only two female characters in the entire play, and their status as prostitutes could be interpreted as a pessimistic statement on both womankind and the nature of greed since these two women sell their affections for money, implying that nothing in life remains sacred or untouched by greed.
Timon clearly conflates the avarice that has driven him from society with the lust that motivates prostitution, resulting in a single source of all of the evil in the world, which is In his diatribe against Phrynia and Timandra, Timon curses humankind, and his speech is replete with references to destruction, rot, and disease. They love thee not that use thee. Timon stresses to the women that the men who use their services do not love them, which reminds the women of the sadness resulting from their acts of loveless sex, a relatively new concept related to the Puritan concept of married love Haselkorn By this point in the play, Timon desires to see society collapse, as he also urges Alcibiades to slaughter every living soul in Athens, and Timon recognizes that such an opportunity exists because of the weakness of male lust since prostitution offers the chance for more citizens to be destroyed through disease, reinforcing his jaundiced view of the world.
