In Act 4 Scene 3 of Othello, Desdemona and Emilia engage in a lengthy conversation that reveals their private thoughts about women’s power within marriage. At the same time, Desdemona’s recollections of her early life highlight the wider context of what otherwise looks like a thoroughly domestic scene. Preparing for bed after Othello’s violent outburst, Desdemona remembers the mournful song her mother’s maid Barbary sang as she died. With the mention of Barbary, awareness of the outside world—beyond the boundaries of Venetian society as well as beyond the bedroom—creeps into this scene, and the resonances of this global context have registered, even if vaguely, in scholarship since the 1970s. Leslie Fiedler, for example, interrupts a rollicking exploration of the scene as evidence of the play’s desire to prove women “weak and false” to wonder at the presence of “a ghost called ‘Barbarie’—an odd name, really, being not merely a variant form of ‘Barbara’ but also one-half of Iago’s insulting epithet for Othello: ‘your daughter covered with a Barbary horse’.” Fiedler then muses, “‘Barbary’- Berber-barbarian—it is a fascinating series, not so much irrelevant as displaced and to be solved, resolved, like some riddling conjunction in a dream.”