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Bianca is Cassio’s mistress, and although she only appears in a few scenes, her character works to complicate perceptions of women’s sexuality and loyalty throughout the play. While Desdemona takes on the role of the ideal, loyal, and pure woman, Bianca initially seems to function as her foil. Many characters, including Cassio, are quick to characterize her as unfaithful, degraded, and wild due to her occupation as a prostitute. Bianca may not be a typical Shakespearean woman, her bold attitude emphasizing her refusal to behave submissively, but her actions suggest that she does not wholly embody the role of a whore either. Bianca’s conversations with Cassio, for example, reveal that she genuinely cares for him and wants a deeper relationship than what they currently have. She also agrees to copy the pattern of Desdemona’s handkerchief for him, despite having suspicions that he is seeing another woman. These two actions, both of which occur in Act III, Scene 4, reflect her commitment to Cassio and challenge her identity as an undeniably promiscuous woman. Even Bianca’s name, which means “white” in Italian, suggests that she possesses a degree of purity.
Despite her desire to change her position, the men around her ensure that she is powerless to do so. Cassio, who is married to a woman that never appears on stage, taunts Bianca with promises of marriage with no intention of following through. She cannot escape her role as his mistress if he refuses to see her as anything more than that. Even more importantly, Iago uses Bianca as an unsuspecting pawn in his plot to destroy Othello. He takes advantage of her promiscuous reputation and leads Othello to believe that Cassio is talking about Desdemona rather than Bianca, a twisting of the truth that convinces him of his wife’s infidelity. The fact that Iago is capable of using Bianca to convince Othello that pure, devoted Desdemona is having an affair is ironic in and of itself. No matter what they do or say, all of the women in the play endure accusations of unfaithfulness, and this trend calls attention to the power that the male characters have to project their own insecurities onto them. When Bianca does attempt to use her voice to defend herself in Act V, defiantly proclaiming “I am no strumpet,” the rest of the characters ignore her. Their cruel treatment of her reinforces just how powerless she truly is to define her identity on her own terms.
