Emilia knows something is seriously wrong, but Desdemona's mind is preoccupied with the problem of her husband's love. She loves him so much that she cannot tell whether his love is lost or is yet recoverable. She has a vague premonition of death and requests of Emilia, "If I do die before thee, prithee shroud me / In one of those same sheets" (24–25). Desdemona has reacted to this crisis with the passivity of despair and grief, as was the tradition for women abandoned. Othello, on the other hand, thinking he has lost Desdemona's love and fidelity, reacts with aggressive passions of accusations and violence.
Desdemona tells the story of her mother's maid, Barbary, and her sad fate. "She was in love, and he she lov'd prov'd mad, / And did forsake her: she had a song of 'willow,' / An old thing @'twas, but it express'd her fortune, / And she died singing it" (27–30). Barbary is a parallel for Desdemona herself: her mother's maid is something like her mother's daughter, a girl under her mother's care and protection. This is the only time Desdemona mentions her mother, and she speaks of her in the distant past, as if she were dead. Desdemona's mother plays no part in the story of the courtship and marriage to Othello, and Desdemona speaks and acts as a woman alone, who takes full responsibility for her decisions.
Desdemona and Barbary are not only alone in their sorrow but are both associated with strangers. "Barbary," the name, means "foreigner." Desdemona married a foreigner, whom some called a barbarian, that is an uncivilized foreigner. Iago described the marriage as that between "an erring barbarian and a super-subtle Venetian"(I.3, 355–356), an opinion many Venetians would have held and that Desdemona would have been well aware of.
