Whether you are in the 21st Century in Australia, 1990s in America or even the 16 th Century in the

Elizabethan times, the sense of belonging is one which every human being lives to obtain.
Shakespeares Othello (1603) and nineteenth century French short story writer Guy de Maupassants
story Mademoiselle Pearl, explore a number of essential aspects of belonging through their
respective texts, but most closely deal with the power of language to effect belonging.

Shakespeares Othello depicts its titular character as being an outsider to the predominantly white
community of Venetian society, and appearance and symbolism are used to represent him by other
characters as different and warranting exclusion. Iago refuses to identify Othello by his name, rather
as a moor, emphasising Othellos inability to be accepted or belong within this society. This is
unveiled by Iago though his soliloquy which reveals his intentions to sabotage Othellos position
when Iago overtly announces to the audience during one of his opening soliloquys I hate the moor.
Furthermore, Iago, Brabantio and Roderigo similarly symbolically refer to him variously as A black
ram , A barbary horse, thick lips, the lascivious moor, and sooty bosom, referring to his
practice of arts inhibited and of warrant, in order to highlight his illegitimacy within Venetian
society, despite his good standing as a respected general. Through this general background of
suspicion, Othello is accused of wielding evil powers and practising black magic and through the
zoomorphic imagery is likened to an animal, thus dehumanising and segregating him from the others
and emphasising his lack of belonging through unhealthy relations with other characters. In this way,
Othellos position becomes undermined and his sense of belonging compromised.

This has not always been the case, however. In the opening of the play Othello stands his ground
when he is informed by the duplicitous Iago that he had best make himself scarce as Brabantio is
seeking his banishment for marrying his daughter without permission. However, Othello depicts
himself as the very picture of nobility and self-assurance when he commands the retinue that have
come upon him to Put away your swords. Theyll get rusty in the dew., highlighting his perfect
confidence and sense of belonging to the society at this point. The narrative that follows after
Brabantio challenges him to explain himself is one which eminently proves the validity of his position
within Venetian society and therefore allows him to command a sense of belonging that none of the
other characters in the retinue, including the scheming Iago, is able to take away from him.

Maupassants long short story Mademoiselle Pearl concerns the discovery through a revealed
narrative told to the first person persona, over an evening during the twelfth night of Christmas in
the house of the Chantals that he is visiting in Normandy, that the character of Mademoiselle Pearl
does not really belong within the Chantal household, and, it is revealed, was in fact discovered as an
abandoned child forty years ago in the snow outside the same house in which she now resides. This
sense of an equivocation of her belonging or not is not dissimilar to the position of Othello, who is
not wholly sure of his position within society, and who has no direct family around him. The parents
of Mademoiselle Pearl remain a mystery, and her name is given to her in lieu of her biological
parents. The silent tragedy of this woman, who has now reached middle age and does not know who
she actually is except that she belongs in the house of the family that rescued her, as she helps out
with the chores and duties and is also friends with the Chantal daughters, becomes gradually
revealed during the course of the story through the technique of the embedded narrative that
emerges during a game of billiards. In a sense, while Pearl is a kind of Othello, the narrator is himself
a kind of Iago, as he acts as a go-between for the characters, passing on information between that
otherwise would not have been mediated. However, while Iago is a mediator with ill intentions as he
seeks to undermine Othellos position by creating a sense of jealousy towards Desdemona, the
unknown narrators intentions, although slightly mischievous, are less harmful, as he becomes the
intermediary between Monsieur Chantal and Mademoiselle Pearl. When he senses that Mr. Chantal,
who rescued Miss Pearl as a child fell in love with her as she grew into adulthood, but did not marry
her as this would have been inappropriate for his position, a point strongly reinforced by Mr.
Chantals own mother who is euphemistically described as an orderly woman with a great respect
for class distinctions, the narrator directly challenges Mr. Chantal that he should have married Miss
Pearl. Despite the evident power of this euphemistic tyrant on Mr. Chantal, the narrator suggests to
him that he has missed a great opportunity and that the two of them were in fact made for one
another, demonstrating a manipulative streak in the personas character that is the equivalent of
Iagos genius for manipulating people. The irony of the narrative at this point, as the narrator puts his
point across using metaphorical language of the missed opportunity, prompts an emotional reaction
from Mr. Chantal and he bursts into tears when he realises that he has married the wrong woman
and that his heart had always been with Miss Pearl. In this way, the story deals with the way that
social convention can stifle true belonging, where that belonging is not permitted for the sake of
appearances and tradition.

In Othello however, it is appearances that completely lead the protagonist and eponymic character
astray. Taking on trust Iagos ruse of the handkerchief he is unable to distinguish between the facts
and the story that Iago invents around Michael Cassio, as his language becomes briefer and more
simplistic, and his long cohesive sentences that we witness in the opening scenes become
syntactically truncated clauses and single words, culminating in his exasperated The Handkerchief!
unable to articulate himself any further to his wife. Iago has no misgivings in disrupting Othellos
sense of belonging, however the narrator of Mademoiselle Pearl is more circumspect and conscious
of his power of influence when he asks himself a string of rhetorical questions after he has sent Mr.
Chantal into floods of tears and made Miss Pearl ill with his suggestions that they should have
married, which both characters know to be the truth, asking himself questions such as Did I do
wrong or right?... Will they not be happier now? in his attempt to ascertain whether it was right or
not for him to intervene in their affairs and point out the obvious injustice of the situation,
highlighting the power of language in the realm of belonging.

Thus it is therefore evident that through an analysis of the two texts Othello and Mademoiselle Pearl,
that the notion of belonging can be more deeply explored closely connected with language.