[In the following essay, Morris-Keitel, Larson-Thorisch, and Dundzila offer a feminist examination of gender in Wagner's operas, concentrating on the traditionally bourgeois-capitalist gender roles of Wagner's characters.]

I

“Our existing opera is a culinary opera. It was a means of pleasure long before it turned into merchandise.”¹ Bertolt Brecht's remarks concerning opera, here in regard to his Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1929), seem to repeat the obvious: namely, that opera is as much an experience as a pleasure. As such, opera is a source of sensual gratification, which is not only a result of its form but also of its content. At the same time, Brecht maintained that the character of opera as merchandise prevented the formation of any critical stance with respect to its content. This situation may only be altered through the introduction of innovations at the base of which is the intention to provoke.

Similar suggestions for change, which led Brecht to his theory of epic theater, had been proposed earlier by Wagner. After all, Wagner, in his essays Die Kunst und die Revolution (1849) and Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1850), criticized the commercialized character of music and professed his devotion to an art for all people on a level bound to much higher communal ideals.² With such concepts of a “people's opera” (Volksoper), Wagner attacked the traditional aristocratic content of opera by emphasizing bourgeois notions of emancipation, not unlike similar attempts by Mozart and Beethoven.

In earlier centuries, the primary function of opera was the confirmation and affirmation of the supremacy of the court. The rise of the middle classes, however, changed this function considerably. Since the end of the 18th century, the purpose of opera has no longer been to glorify absolutism, but rather to serve as a means of bourgeois emancipation. In contrast to these ideological changes, the staging of operas in the 19th century was still largely dependent on the court. The emerging presence of a bourgeois mentality was tolerated by the aristocracy, especially in the second half of the 19th century, when the economic and social changes in Germany led to a convergence of the aristocracy and the upper middle classes.

The rise of the bourgeoisie also led to a change in and a polarization of gender roles. The striving of the preceding era for romantic and Young German ideals of emancipation were now replaced by a new ideological activism centered around and dominated by the masculine.³ Art became an expression of self-assertion, and bourgeois artists conceived of themselves as geniuses; indeed, composers such as Franz Liszt referred to themselves as “Priests of Art.”⁴ Such models of masculinity dominated the art, the music, the philosophy, and the literature of the time. Prevalent were encounters with the heroic man, who embodied physical power, lust for hunting, readiness for battle, and a defiance of law and order. Within this context, a strong appeal to feelings of nationalism was made quite often, thereby presenting the great individual as the masculine role model.

This cult of the masculine inevitably led to new forms of repression regarding bourgeois women. If man, in general, constituted the outgoing, energetic, and active hunter, woman could only be understood as a naturally passive creature and, ultimately, as man's victim. Friedrich Nietzsche reduced such stereotypes even further in characterizing man by his wartime abilities and woman by her fertility:

Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy. …

Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.⁵

Such a polarization imposed moral and sexual inhibitions on bourgeois women which functioned much more effectively than any external restraints. Nevertheless, these inhibitions must be viewed in light of the shaping of new values among the emerging middle classes invoking a redefinition of the female role. This led to the dogma of the “natural determination” of woman, whose niche was away from the active center of cultural development. In addition, the typification of male and female stereotypes had devastating effects on the morality of the bourgeoisie.

Their moral conduct, with its attempts, at least on the surface, at maintaining the guise of socially respectable behavior, soon led to prudery surrounding erotic questions. In the case of young men, there was greater denial of any time spent in brothels or with mistresses. Young women, on the other hand, were often left in a state of complete ignorance regarding erotic questions until their wedding day. Men were rarely able to marry before the age of 35 due to their careers. The marriages they then entered were seldom based on love, but rather on status and financial gain. This resulted in the complete economic, cultural, and sexual dependency of women.

In reaction to this oppression, middle-class “women's rights activists” soon demanded a reform of marriage and professional practices—without, however, setting any clear political goals. At first, they merely chose intellectual freedom over economic independence. Such attempts at emancipation were restricted to the liberating powers of the mind and increased access to education, which in turn were to secure women equal positions in society, as individuals. These intentions however, did nothing to alter society's perception that women should remain the guardians of tradition and morality.

The obvious result of the rise of the bourgeoisie was the collapse of their traditional order of home and morality, which had long separated them from the aristocracy. The reason for this was the spread of capitalism: the middle class was convinced that by abandoning the existent order, optimal conditions could be established for a free market system.⁶ Inevitably, this economic development also affected a breakdown and thus a change of the family structure. To what extent this had already occurred by the middle of the last century is illustrated by Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl's analysis of Die Familie (1855). In this context, Riehl's book needs to be understood as a conservative stance against the destructive powers of industry and capitalism, recommending a return to an idealized traditional family.

Wagner's operas reflect social reality by problematizing sexuality and morality. Very few married couples can be found in his works, and where they do exist, their situation is atypical. Elsa and Lohengrin separate already on their wedding night, Marke has been cheated on before he is married to Isolde, and Fricka and Wotan continuously argue about the state of their marriage. Only in the case of Stolzing and Eva does there seem to exist a possibility for a more positive future. Undoubtedly, Wagner's operas would not have had the resonance they still enjoy, if his reworking of medieval mythologies had not had some actual political, social, and erotic impetus, confirming and at the same time placing into question the moral roles of his time.

It is from this perspective that Wagner's use of medieval mythological sources and his goals must be understood. In the familiarity of the audience with this material, Wagner recognized a basis for reanalyzing history. In addition, these myths had been important in the search for a German national identity since the beginning of the 19th century, and Wagner wanted to contribute to this search. At the same time, however, he restricted his use of the medieval sources to the formative elements, which gave him room to establish a contemporary relevance. For the audience of the 19th century, Wagner's thematization of sexuality, which exposed the hypocrisy of bourgeois morality, was, without a doubt, shocking.

In order to portray this hypocrisy, Wagner used examples of various bourgeois stereotypes which contradicted the common conception the middle classes had of themselves and their moral and sexual behavior. If man was seen, in general, as active and unsurpassable in his striving for exemplary greatness, Wagner usually depicts him as a sinful seducer and patriarch. Woman becomes the goal of all male fantasies and is thereby, in contrast to reality, elevated onto a pedestal. This is achieved in most cases through subtly psychologizing well-known figures from German mythology. On the other hand, the result of this technique is a modernization which, in regard to gender roles, parallels those found in bourgeois realism. Thus, Wagner's operas can be viewed in the same context as novels such as Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), Tolstoi's Anna Karenina (1873-76), and Fontane's Effi Briest (1895).

The absence of parents and families in Wagner's works implies, therefore, a criticism of the bourgeois conventions of marriage and love. Concepts for the improvement of this state of affairs are not, however, presented; on the contrary, at best, Wagner vaguely hints at such abstract ideas as humanity and true love. Consequently, the stereotypical roles of men and women still serve as figures of identification for the audience and cannot function as critical alternatives. Thus, Wagner is bound to this bourgeois-elitist audience, and his earlier plans for a grand opera for the people remain utopian.

To what extent gender roles were redefined by this approach, or remained untouched within the confines of bourgeois patriarchal thinking, is the central issue here. We begin by focusing on the role of men and their social responsibilities within a patriarchal society, and, in part two, by investigating the role of women in terms of three operas. Our position is a feminist one, in which it is argued that the survival of partriarchal order requires sexual subordination of women as well as their participation in their own oppression. If women try to leave the sphere of the loving wife and mother, thereby challenging male authority, severe punishment awaits them. Thus, within Wagner's operas, women seem to be condemned to the role of cultural remnants. This view is continued in part three, where we focus on the interplay between women and men, as well as between men and men, in Tristan und Isolde (1859). In this case, it will be shown that Wagner's portrayal of bourgeois sexuality and morality occasionally reaches beyond those stereotypes analyzed in the previous sections.

The major male roles in Wagner's operas for the most part follow a similar pattern with regard to manliness and action. Each seems to mirror bourgeois expectations either by succeeding in his goals and achieving greatness, or by failing and becoming even greater. Following this pattern, two stereotypical male roles can be differentiated. In the first category, the men—due to their social responsibilities and sense of social commitment—are able to overcome the traditional notions and demonstrate possibilities for a new era in gender relations. In the second, quantitatively greater category, such a redefinition proves not possible.

Exemplifying the latter situation are the Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Tristan. These men are united not only through their own deaths and the deaths of their respective female counterparts, but also through their intentions towards love. Their escape into absolute love is destroyed by a conformist society and its principles of power and order.⁷

All three works are rooted in the romantic tradition. This can be seen most clearly in Tristan's mysticism of death and glorification of the night, which strongly reminds one of Novalis's Hymnen an die Nacht (1800). Wagner's reworking of the Fliegender Holländer (1843) significantly surpasses Heine's story of the Dutchman as the “incarnation of a damned person.”⁸ In Wagner, the motivation for the Dutchman's death wish lies in his despair of the state of humanity and his disgust with capitalist society. The lust motif in Tannhäuser (1845) is evidence of the influence of the Junges Deutschland and Heine and, moreover, reflects Wagner's anticapitalism, which was influenced by the theories of Proudhon and Feuerbach. The Dutchman, Tristan, and Tannhäuser fail because of their radicality in a patriarchal society that leaves no room for change.

Such a possibility for changes appears to exist for Lohengrin and Siegfried. At the beginning of the operas, both are committed to reforming society and accepting responsibility for it. This attitude is gradually reversed as they become increasingly entangled in the existing patriarchal power structures. Superficially, Lohengrin's marriage to Elsa fails because of a lack of understanding for one another and because of society's inability to accept their relationship. Lohengrin demands faithfulness and trust of Elsa in a society which claims to uphold these values, but which in reality has replaced them with a rationale of materialism. Wagner uses Lohengrin's retreat, already present in the medieval source, to make the audience aware of the sterility of their own society. Moreover, the reference to the Grail utopia in Lohengrin (1850) intimates that such values must be present in order to achieve a society which allows for humanism and an equal partnership between man and woman.

In contrast to this, there is Siegfried's physical power in Der Ring des Nibelungen (1849-76), which remains controversial to this day.⁹ In Siegfried, the revolutionary and anarchist can be easily recognized. He is the personification of a free human being, free of fear, rules, and tradition, and is therefore capable of love. In short, he possesses the necessary qualities to change society. Thus, the battle with the dragon can be seen as Siegfried's introduction to his responsibilities; it also represents the beginning of his battle for power, which, in the end, will be his demise. Consequently, he heads straight into the trap that was laid for him, by offering his power to those against whom he should be fighting. In this way, Wagner demonstrates the susceptibility of idealists to fall prey to the hidden goals of those wishing to maintain the status quo. Such individuals are either absorbed into the realm of the powerful classes or destroyed.

A more positive development in gender relations can be found in Rienzi (1842), Parsifal (1882) and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868). The determining factor for Rienzi, Parsifal, and Hans Sachs is their idealistic espousal of their social responsibilities. At the same time, their actions are determined by asceticism, suppression of sexuality, and authoritarian attitudes, characteristics widespread among male bourgeois in 19th-century capitalist society.¹⁰

Their commitment to save the people or found a new state has various results. Rienzi fails because of the masses which have been incited against him, as well as because of his own search for power. Parsifal is the first figure who can distance himself from his own individual goals. His conduct towards the powers of the existing state proves successful, even if Wagner, by coupling Parsifal's actions with the myth of the Grail, presents this in terms of a vision. The obvious condemnation of the killing of animals in Parsifal shows the influence of evolutionary theories on Wagner, who argues in favor of a utopian society, determined by vegetarianism, animal rights, and moderation. It can be concluded that such a positively defined new order of society would inevitably effect gender relations as well.

The male role in Wagner's works that most closely mirrors reality is that of Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. This work—free of medieval myth—is defined by practical politics, the goal of which is classless love. Even though Hans Sachs, in contrast to this poetic model, seems to appear here as “Plüsch-Sachs,” as Hanns Eisler once derisively remarked,¹¹ the success of the practical politics is not solely made possible by his personal modesty and renunciation. The reason for success lies in the challenging of the rules and laws of the existing bourgeois society. The fulfillment of love between Stolzing and Eva plays a role here as well, and in the end helps to overcome bourgeois conventions. Through the cheerful ending, Wagner shows a new and different society and thereby demonstrates a human possibility which could minimize the social and economic inequality between man and woman.¹²

II

Opera's culturally laden messages, ritualized consumption, blatant conventions, and inevitable plots disquiet French philosopher and literary critic Catherine Clément. While she “loves” the magnificent female characters who dominate the opera stage, she is disturbed by the high price these women pay for their presence. According to Clément, opera consistently undoes its women:

Women are [opera's] jewels. … No prima donna, no opera. But the role of jewel, a decorative object, is not the deciding role; and on the opera stage women perpetually sing their eternal undoing. … Look at these heroines. With their voices they flap their wings, their arms writhe, and then there they are, dead, on the ground.¹³

We may adapt Clément's observations regarding “jewels” to raise, with respect to Wagner's heroines, the following initial questions. Can we interpret these women as autonomous, self-creating beings? Can we embrace them as models, or should we hesitate, and consider Clément's perception of an operatic double message for at least a moment? Surely, the fact that all of Wagner's principal female characters but Eva, the “jewel” of a comedy, are dead by the end of the libretto means something. Do not the closed narratives within which Wagner's heroines struggle, captivate, frighten, and forewarn—narratives which, like history, would not exist without women—inform us that these beings are restricted by more than nature? Finally, does historian Gerda Lerner's identification of a fundamental tension “between women's centrality and active role in creating society and their marginality in the meaning-giving process of interpretation and explanation” elucidate Clément's ambivalent response to opera's traditions?¹⁴

In general, the creation of works of art is part of the “meaning-giving process” in which women have long had a marginal presence. Certainly, this is true of 19th-century opera. And yet, one can hardly imagine an operatic work whose plot is not centered on one or sometimes two female characters. By coupling Clément's study of how opera “defeats” women with Lerner's assessment of the reasons women have participated in their own subordination for centuries, it may be possible to develop a critical understanding of the women Wagner represents, an understanding which neither accepts them as universal proof of “how women are” nor tiresomely identifies them as victims, but which instead views them as cultural artifacts of a male-oriented system.

The survival of patriarchal order requires women's sexual subordination as well as their participation in their own oppression. According to Lerner, “force, economic dependency …, class privileges …, and the artificially created division of women” into respected and scorned groups are some of the means through which women's cooperation has been secured.¹⁵ Works of art are another. Opera offers a particularly good example of art in the service of patriarchal ideology in that its heroines inevitably succumb to male authority.¹⁶

In the world of Wagnerian opera, women's submission takes four general forms: willing participation in the partriarchal order by a character who may or may not die (Eva, Sieglinde); a type of socially insignificant self-murder inspired by identification with a single male lover (Isolde, Elsa, Senta, Elizabeth); or both participation and death, in which case participation is secured through punishment, and death has a broader meaning than the romantic “Liebestod” (Kundry, Brunhilde). A final category moves the female to an abstract level, where a single male god rules over or replaces the multiple gods and goddesses of pre-Christian days (Venus, Ortrud, Erda, Fricka). Common to these libretti is a plot which ultimately affirms the continuation of male authority.

Once we recognize women's unfreedom as a precondition of patriarchal art, Clément's argument becomes a useful position from which to examine the affirmation of traditional gender roles inherent in Wagner's works. According to Clément, operatic heroines “end up punished—fallen, abandoned, or dead,” either because in exercising their wills they “leave their familiar and ornamental function,” that is, they challenge male authority; or because they fill supporting rather than “deciding” roles and are eventually expendable.¹⁷ In the context of Wagnerian opera, the fates of three female characters, namely Brunhilde, Sieglinde, and Kundry, illustrate this thesis particularly well.

Let us begin with Brunhilde, the daughter Wotan loves almost as much as he loves himself, the daughter who desires no separate will (“What am I, if I am not your will?”), whose identity is so indistinguishable from his own that to confess his deepest fears to her is only to confess them to himself (“Myself I speak to, speaking to you”).¹⁸ Let us begin then with Brunhilde, her crime and her punishment.

Pledged to obey Wotan's command and about to claim Siegmund for Valhalla, Brunhilde is engaged in a fairly routine mission, one she has diligently completed many times before. And yet, this time she falters. As she listens to Siegmund's refusal to abandon Sieglinde, Brunhilde experiences her first moment of psychological independence. When she then acts in the lovers' favor, she directly and openly defies the highest of male authorities. The consequences of her decision make it dramatically clear that the idea of self-governance Wotan carefully nurtured in his son Siegmund (“Boldly, I brought him up to flaunt the laws of the gods”) are utterly unacceptable in a daughter's behavior.¹⁹

Dreading her father's wrath, and not strong enough to prevent Siegmund's death, Brunhilde flees. She seeks support from her sisters, but they are passive, obedient females who fear their father/master too much for a “linkage of sisterhood” to occur. Wotan finds her. His ego raging, his authority challenged, he declares himself Brunhilde's sole creator and proprietor; she has neither autonomy nor a mother (“my will alone woke you to life”). A ruler protecting his turf, a father asserting his supremacy, Wotan prepares to punish his daughter. He will punish her into mortality. He will punish her into sex. He will punish her into marriage. In short, he will pass her from his own authority to that of another man.²⁰

As she fights for her integrity, Brunhilde knows her only hope lies in being discovered and taken by a hero, a man she can respect, a man she can love. A kiss on each eyelid, and this magnificent woman warrior is asleep, a dormant, passive, waiting female. A kiss on the lips, and she wakes. As a wife she is tame. She has been punished and now she cooperates. Once she served her father; now she serves her husband. And when Siegfried, a man, a hero, becomes restless with their narrow life and sets out in search of adventure, she accepts her inadequacy.

The wounding marks of Brunhilde's fall into womanhood are her jealousy and injured vanity. Finding herself replaced by another woman, she immediately becomes a murderous traitor and plots Siegfried's death with Hagen. However, as the family saga of The Ring finally draws to an end, she is reinstated, for she has one more task to perform. Accompanied by tongues of fire and a flood, Brunhilde restores order. She restores nature. She returns the ring. And because she was good, death reunites her with the authority figures in her life: her husband and her father.

As Brunhilde, representing “the eternal feminine,” is engulfed by flames, her self-sacrifice is underscored by Sieglinde's melodic presence. Together, these half sisters share the feminine resolution of the cycle, enacting what Clément calls that “good old tradition that has woman neatening everything up at home.”²¹ Nor is this the first time they have collaborated. In the confrontation with Wotan, it is Brunhilde's courage and Sieglinde's tenacity which ensure the future. Although one would like to think they will change the course of history by interfering in the godhead's plan, it is difficult to believe Wotan was not anticipating the birth of yet another hero all along. If not, why did he separate and then reunite Siegmund and Sieglinde so strategically?

Sieglinde, the new hero's mother, is a model daughter and wife. For years, she has patiently awaited the man her father promised would come to claim Nothung, the sword which must be the central fixture of her home. Then one night he is there: Siegmund, her lost brother, Siegmund, her liberator, Siegmund, her heart's desire. The sword in his hand tells her to flee with him; nature tells her to love him. Then, after barely twenty-four hours of drama, passion, and bliss, Siegmund is dying and she is expecting a son. While her love for Siegmund is great, she is not allowed to die with him, for only Siegfried's birth can complete her supporting role. As she is delivered of her son, she expires.

Sieglinde is Wotan's good daughter. Metaphorically, her fate illustrates not only woman's vulnerability in male society but also the attitude that women who are “exchanged”²² through violent rather than peaceful means should respond to their experience in terms of self-hatred rather than rebelliousness, anger, or suicidal despair. Sieglinde does not curse Hunding for abusing her; she curses herself for once obeying “a man she loved not at all.” How can she forget that she was kidnapped and then raped into marriage? She does not curse the father who visited her on her wedding day, advising patience and endurance, and leaving behind a weapon intended for yet another man; she pours loathing upon herself. “Away! Away!” she tells Siegmund, “Flee the profaned one! Unholy … disgraced, dishonored. … Flee this body, let it alone!”²³ While titillating his audience by romanticizing adultery and incest, Wagner does not miss the opportunity to enforce the notion that sexually abused women have only themselves to blame. How easy to obscure Wotan's part in Sieglinde's misery!

As unsatisfying as it is to find heroines like Brunhilde and Sieglinde forever caught in supporting roles, Wagner's oeuvre does contain a worse alternative for women: in the opera he called his “Weltabschiedswerk,” his swansong, salvation hinges not on keeping women in their place, or some sort of final redemption brought on by female self-sacrifice, but instead on overcoming woman altogether. Let us look, then, at Parsifal, Wagner's “final reckoning.”

Gone is the young man's critique of the destructive effects of 19th-century capitalism. Gone is the usual Wagnerian reverence for private, heterosexual love, as well as the much broader conception of love which informs The Ring. Edward Downes, for example, holds that Alberich renounces “not only romantic love but [also] love of one's fellow man, and love as a symbol of all beneficent creative activity,” to gain the Rheingold. In the “conflict between love and the lust for power” which takes place in The Ring, human rights are abused and disregarded.²⁴

In Parsifal, Wagner withdraws such broadly defined love from at least half of humanity and replaces the richness of The Ring with hollow religious asceticism: the lust for gold, a lust to which both men and women fall prey, is replaced by man's lust for woman's sinful flesh; and if one work views the renunciation of love as the beginning of evil human activity, the other views the renunciation of woman as the source of a new and beneficent social order.

While it is hardly surprising that Otto Weininger and others of his misogynist ilk hail Kundry as ‘the most profound conception of woman in all literature,”²⁵ it is disturbing that contemporary scholarship is little inclined to acknowledge the work's relentless gender system. In discussing Kundry, Michael von Soden, for example, offers only obscurities, calling her “Wagner's most multifaceted stage figure,” a “seemingly schizophrenic woman, who, now lust, now humility, wanders through the world for centuries.”²⁶ He prefers philosophical reflection on the briefest of lines—“time changes here to space”—to the direct admission that Kundry's tormented presence is more animal than human.

Listen to Kundry: she groans, she moans, she shrieks, she screams. She speaks hardly a sentence that is complete. Then she coos, disarms, seduces. She begs for sex and curses the man who rejects her. Finally, she looses her voice altogether, to become that most desirable of things, a silent, humble, hard-working female. Early in scene three, she utters one word: “to serve … to serve” (dienen … dienen). And until her life expires she will speak no more.²⁷

Look at Kundry: a disheveled, unkempt hag whose eyes roll, burn, go blank. Her body tense, she crouches close to the ground, tosses her wild dark hair, and clenches her fists. She sleeps outside, under thorny bushes. Transformed, she is devilishly beautiful, transparently clothed, surrounded by gentle flowers. Finally, she is plain, neat, penitent; a servant with long, soft hair and eyes that beg for death.

Of course, Kundry is not a real woman but a compilation of male fears and desires, an oxymoronic fantasy figure made to satisfy and appall the male gaze. Like Brunhilde, she is punished for transgressing against male authority. Though her sin would seem minor (she once saw Christ “—and—laughed”), her punishment is so severe that she must be tremendously evil. Perhaps we are to associate her with Lilith, Adam's sexually independent first wife, whom celibate monks feared and who was said to laugh “every time a pious Christian had a wet dream.”²⁸ We are certainly meant to associate her with the medieval Christian notion of witchcraft, for one of the names her “master” Klingsor heaps upon her is “Herodias,” a synonym for Hecate, Queen of Witches.²⁹ Unlike Senta, Elizabeth, Brunhilde, and Sieglinde, Kundry is not allowed a final redemptive role. On the contrary, she must thrice be redeemed by male figures. Only a man, a physical complete male virgin, can free her from Klingsor's curse. Only a man can effect her entrance into the fold, baptizing her in the name of Christ, and thus granting her tormented being the peace of death. Only Christ, uninfluenced by a female saint, awaits her in heaven.

How different from the resolution of Tannhäuser, the opera in which Wagner first represented the “antagonism between sensuality and asceticism,” and in which women play significant roles!³⁰ Elizabeth, the chaste lover who will die upon his breast, prays for the soul of Tannhäuser, a man so sinful the Pope himself has refused him absolution. She prays to Maria, whom people in the Middle Ages persisted in viewing “as their defender” while they saw God “as their persecutor.”³¹ The journey from Tannhäuser to Parsifal can be seen as a journey from the Hebrew to the Christian Scriptures. The god who once was wrathful, but who would listen to a female mediator, has been replaced by his gentle son who reigns alone. On earth, it is now only celibate men, the elite members of a spiritual brotherhood, who perform good works. Woman, if she is humble enough, may be forgiven her sins, but however devoutly she may wish to participate in the existing social order, she can be no more than a servant to man. And since she has no place at all in the projected social order, a silent death will be her fate.

Susan McClary's introduction to Clément's study suggests two crucial reasons for applying a feminist reading to opera. Firstly, opera is not merely a phenomenon of the past; today, at the end of the 20th century, canonic operas exert “extraordinary,” even archetypal, “prestige and influence” on Western culture. Secondly,

opera was one of the principal media through which the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie developed and disseminated its new moral codes, values, and normative behaviour. …³²

Consequently, opera is an important “source of information” for scholars interested in tracking the evolution of “European middle-class constructions of gender.”³³

III

The first part of this study considered the kinds of roles typically played by men in Wagner's operas, while the second part interpreted Wagner's patriarchal iconography of women from a feminist perspective. As we have seen, most of the men and women in Wagner's operas reflect ideological positions typical of the bourgeois capitalistic society of his time. In the case of the male characters, however, there is an attempt at reforming the socioeconomic patterns by means of utopian thought, which results in the breakdown of class barriers. Wagner's affirmation of traditional gender roles, on the other hand, perpetuates male authority, which women may challenge, but are never allowed to overcome. In this final section, we shall further expand the analysis of gender roles by examining both the reduction of woman to an object of exchange, and male homoeroticism in Tristan und Isolde (1859).

Invoking 19th-century middle-class gender stereotypes and male fantasies about women and at the same time eliciting the complexity of his medieval source,³⁴ Wagner subtly portrays Isolde as both a seductress seeking the ruin of men and as a commodity guaranteeing the stability of male society. As the feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin has noted, patriarchal society is based on the ritual exchange of women by men as gift objects in order to establish kinship ties.³⁵ Wagner relegates Isolde to the status of an exchange object, describing her as a “Schatz,” a “schmucke Irin,” or, in other words, mere “Zins,” to be paid to King Marke in a marriage that will establish permanent kinship and political ties.³⁶ One woman pays the price of uniting two kingdoms in order to maintain the supreme world order of men. Patriarchal rule, be it feudal, capitalist, or socialist, “civilizes” the world at the expense of women (and sometimes, at least in Wagner's case, at the expense also of Jews).

Wagner tendentiously meddles with medieval myth: by having Isolde provide the fateful love potion, he blithely ignores Tristan's amorous predisposition toward her. Wagner also makes Isolde responsible for Tristan's death and death wish by having her suggest Liebestod while ignoring Tristan's rapturous desire for death in his lover's arms. Isolde heals Tristan because, as she says in her own words: “Seines Elends jammerte mich.”³⁷ But Wagner perverts her gift of compassionate healing by depicting the strong, powerful healer as a weak, frail woman. Moreover, he depicts Isolde as an unstable character. Love makes Isolde take leave of her senses, as her closest companion, Brangäne, cautions: “der Minne tückischer Trank [wird] des Sinnes Licht dir verlöschen.”³⁸ Wagner even has Isolde blame a woman (albeit a goddess) for her infatuation with Tristan: “Frau Minne hat meiner Macht es entwandt.”³⁹ A sailor apostrophizes Isolde as “mein Kind! Irische Maid, du wilde, minnige Maid,”⁴⁰ and Clément emphasizes that “Isolde's wildness” becomes the source of all misfortune for Tristan.⁴¹ By her very presence, Isolde intervenes in the male transaction that has made her into a mere object, thus disrupting the patriarchal order. Wagner does not blame Isolde for her deeds and potions alone: he blames her for her existence.

Finally, Wagner damns Isolde for being a woman, and destroys her to reproach all women and to vanquish all men. Nevertheless, the men continue to circle around Isolde even after her obscure disappearance halfway through the opera. The feminist theorist Luce Irigaray has noted that “the circulation of women among men is what establishes the operations of society, at least of patriarchal society.”⁴² In other words, Isolde's presence binds the men together for the duration of the opera, and, consequentially, her meaningless death reveals the destructiveness of male desires and male lust. A woman cannot exist without a male counterpart—owner, protector, husband, or father—even though she serves as an important strategic object in patriarchal society.

The love affair and death wish of Tristan and Isolde transgress patriarchal norms. The mythologist Joseph Campbell points out that by falling in personal love (amor) and in rapturous love (eros), Tristan and Isolde reject the compassionate love (agape) of the patriarchal marriage system, which requires neither the consent nor the love of the contracted parties.⁴³ Tristan and Isolde seek that which patriarchy prohibits. Violating the cultural taboo of forbidden love can lead only to death, which Isolde suggests and Tristan welcomes. In fact, Isolde describes her love with an echo of love and death: “Leben und Tod … Lust und Leid.”⁴⁴ The Marxist Freudian Herbert Marcuse interprets eros and the death instinct as representations of a single drive since both “strive for a gratification which culture cannot grant.”⁴⁵ Tristan and Isolde choose death because they cannot satisfy their amorous desires.

Actually, it is Tristan, and not Isolde, who violates the patriarchal norms of culture, though Wagner conveniently ignores this. Whereas Isolde remains in the stereotypical female realm, Tristan crosses defined gender (not sexual) boundaries. Rubin untangles sex from gender: nature determines biological sex, termed male or female, whereas patriarchy arbitrarily defines the gender roles of man or woman.⁴⁶ By accepting Tristan's sword and by killing him with it, Isolde would have the opportunity to cross gender boundaries, but she rejects this. Instead, she intends to offer Tristan a chalice of poison. The feminist historian Riane Eisler defines the sword as a historically and culturally male symbol and the chalice as the female one.⁴⁷ By shunning the stereotypical male sword in favor of the stereotypical female chalice, Isolde remains consistent with the gender role patriarchy has assigned her.

Tristan differs. Initially, he embodies his gender perfectly by fighting and defeating Morold. Tristan's flesh wound and damaged sword, besides indicating a personal loss for him, eventually symbolize his transformation. Through the wound, Tristan initially submits to Isolde's healing power, i.e., the wound makes Tristan surrender to a woman. Although Isolde cures his wound, love prevents its complete healing, and her love potion reopens the wound. Tristan, by drinking from Isolde's chalice, not only accepts the device of his wounding, but also receives communion with the opposite gender, thus migrating across established gender boundaries. Furthermore, the wounded Tristan emotionally expresses passionate love, which contradicts the male suppression of emotion and denial of love (other than lust). He eventually dies from the selfsame wound that symbolizes his femininity.

The sword also indicates Tristan's gender, and the chip on Tristan's sword parallels his wound. Initially, after his battle with Morold, Tristan's public symbol of male power—irreparably damaged—symbolically questions Tristan's manhood. Later, when Isolde wants to kill Tristan, he patronizes her by offering her his own sword, thus relinquishing his symbol of power. He repeats the same relinquishment when Melot challenges him. In fact, the sequence of events in Melot's challenge perfectly repeats the sequence in Isolde's challenge. By paralleling Tristan's initial struggle with Isolde, this duel stresses Tristan's passion for Melot. Enthralled by his friend and comrade Melot, Tristan resigns his sword to him, making himself vulnerable. Tristan actually fosters his gender transmutation during the encounter with Melot when he deliberately falls on Melot's sword, but lands on his old wound, again emphasizing his new gender role. From the patriarchal perspective of Wagner's time, Tristan loses his manly virtue by abandoning his sword and by refusing to defend himself.

Besides Tristan's illegitimate affair with Isolde and his transgression of gender, Tristan engages in homoerotic friendships with both Melot and Marke. Tristan's illegitimate affair with Isolde legitimizes and displaces the violated sexual norms of these enigmatic relationships. Wagner exposes the public, superficial nature of heterosexual relationships in order to redeem the vulnerable, confused, androgynous men who engage in veiled, sincere homoerotic friendships. In a double entendre which merges the Greek homo (“same”) with the French homme (“male”), Irigaray calls the combined homosocial and homosexual interaction between men “hom(m)o-sexual,” which “is played out through the bodies of women.”⁴⁸ The same-sexed interaction among men expedites the manipulation of Isolde.

Wagner's characters with homosexual leanings appeared at a time of intense repression of homosexuality in Germany.⁴⁹ At best, Tristan, Melot, and Marke illustrate a pre-homosexual or a homoerotic sensibility, even though the patriarchy, which Tristan, Melot, and Marke do indeed epitomize, creates a new category of social, economic, and political exclusion with the term “homosexual.” According to the cultural philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, the term incorporates all “peripheral sexualities” and “perversions,” which includes all unlabeled categories of sexual expression.⁵⁰ As such, the term does not apply to Tristan, Melot, and Marke. Furthermore, the cultural critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick demonstrates that the binary operation of the artificial terminological pair “homo/heterosexual” perfectly parallels the patriarchally defined gender roles of “woman/man.”⁵¹ In other words, patriarchy denigrates the “homosexual” much in the same way it denigrates woman. Again, the term does not apply to Tristan, Melot, and Marke. Calling Wagner's characters homosexual or homoerotic poses an irresolute problem, because the term does not describe them appropriately, and an adequate term does not exist.

Brangäne reveals the first homoerotic index between Tristan and Melot when she notes that Melot had stolen secret passionate glances “mit böslicher List, lauerndem Blick” at Tristan.⁵² Isolde only confirms Brangäne's suspicions: “Muß mein Trauter mich meiden, dann weilt er bei Melot allein.”⁵³ Tristan's time with either Isolde or Melot infers a parallel relationship between Tristan and either Isolde or Melot. Finally, Melot's death reaffirms Melot's and Tristan's clandestine relationship when Melot dies with Tristan's name on his lips: “Weh' mir! Tristan!”⁵⁴

Melot challenges Tristan because Tristan's love for Isolde threatens his friendship with Tristan. He acts jealously, indicating the unusual nature of his relationship to Tristan, when he interprets Tristan's tie to Isolde as a rival relationship. Melot's patriarchal dualism surmises that Tristan can engage in only one romantic pursuit: either with Isolde or with Melot.

The second, even more foreboding, aspect of the homoerotic entanglement pertains to Tristan and Marke. When Marke discovers Tristan and Isolde in each other's arms, he chastises Tristan alone. As Robert Gutman explains, Marke's tirade “is directed to Tristan alone, his references to the lady being, in fact, rather gallant.”⁵⁵ Wagner's prose drafts confirm a friendship between Marke and Tristan that goes beyond emotional male-bonding.⁵⁶

Tristan angers Marke, in addition to Melot. Instead of challenging him, Marke censures Tristan out of jealousy, ignoring the fact that Tristan seriously abrogated the medieval code of honor. Marke blames the man, the friend, the comrade-in-arms of disloyalty, and not his bride-to-be of premarital infidelity. Tristan's love for Isolde undermines Marke: Tristan loves Isolde, whereas Marke only intends to love her for the sake of spectacle.

Tristan's love for Isolde exposes the insecurity of the men at Marke's court. Tristan personally threatens both Melot and Marke on an emotional level. Melot assumes that Tristan has abandoned him, while Marke feels Tristan has betrayed him. The misogynistic explanation that Isolde's love potion made Tristan do what he did eventually corrects the strained situation, erasing Tristan's emotional impropriety. Subsequently, Marke forgives Tristan, thus reestablishing patriarchal order and culture. Tristan's Liebestod, in spite of the pardon, underscores the invalidity of the patriarchal mechanization that publicly restores honor and condemns Isolde.

Ultimately, woman serves male society by disguising authentic homoerotic relationships in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, although she also disturbs society. Patriarchy has no defense against woman's meddling except through her death, which easily reestablishes order. Wagner documents the Marcusian interpretation of the Freudian dictum that society imposes two acts of repression concurrently: it represses the individuals in order to make them acceptable elements of society, and it represses social structure in order to maintain its own definition of social acceptability.⁵⁷

In conclusion, most of the men and women in Wagner's operas reflect the bourgeois capitalistic society of the time. However, at least for the males, there is an attempt at restructuring socioeconomic patterns by means of utopian thought and a breaking down of class barriers. The affirmation of traditional gender roles ensures the preservation of male authority. Women may challenge this authority, but they are not allowed to overcome it. Furthermore, women are used and manipulated in order to mask male transgressions of gender roles and moral codes through veiled homoerotic relationships.

Notes

1. Bertolt Brecht, Schriften zum Theater (Frankfurt, 1957), 16.

2. Cf. Jost Hermand, “Avantgarde, Moderne, Postmoderne: Die Musik, die (fast) niemand hören will,” in Kunst und Politik der Avantgarde, ed. syndicat anonym (Frankfurt, 1989), 13-30. For Wagner's relationship to socialism, cf. Frank Trommler, Sozialistische Literatur in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1976), 136ff.

3. Cf. Richard Hamann and Jost Hermand, Gründerzeit (Munich, 1971), 88ff.

4. Eva Rieger, “Feministische Ansätze in der Musikwissenschaft,” in Feminismus: Inspektion der Herrenkultur, ed. Luise F. Pusch (Frankfurt, 1983), 109.

5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich, 1988), 84f.

6. Cf. Eckart Pankoke, Soziale Bewegung—Soziale Frage—Soziale Politik (Stuttgart, 1970), 13.

7. Cf. Jochanaan Christoph Trilse, “Antikapitalismus bei Heinrich Heine und bei Richard Wagner: Über Säkular-Gleiches und Säkular-Verschiedenes,” in Heinrich Heine und das neunzehnte Jahrhundert: Signaturen, ed. Rolf Hosfeld (Berlin, 1986), 170.

8. Hans Mayer, Richard Wagner (Hamburg, 1959), 24.

9. Cf. Peter Morris-Keitel, “Siegfried as Idol? The Role of the Hero in Recent West German Adaptations of the Nibelungenlied,” in “Was sider da geschah”: American-German Studies on the Nibelungenlied, ed. Ulrich Müller and Werner Wunderlich (Göppingen, 1991).

10. Wilfried Gottschalch, Vatermutterkind (Berlin, 1979), 85.

11. Hanns Eisler, Gesammelte Werke. Musik und Politik: Schriften 1948-1962, ed. Stephanie Eisler and Manfred Grabs, series 3, vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1982), 239.

12. Cf. Trilse.

13. Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Susan McClary (Minneapolis, 1988), 5.

14. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford, 1986), 5.

15. Ibid., 9.

16. See Clément.

17. Ibid., 7.

18. Richard Wagner, The Ring of the Nibelung, trans. Stewart Robb (New York, 1960), 107.

19. Ibid., 111.

20. Ibid., 142.

21. Clément, 162-69.

22. See Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic of Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York, 1975), 157-210.

23. Wagner, Ring, 116.

24. Ibid., xii-xiv.

25. Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (New York, 1975), vii.

26. Richard Wagner, Parsifal, ed. Michael von Soden (Frankfurt, 1983), 9, 21.

27. Except for the reference to childbirth, Kundry's submission recalls I Timothy 2, 8-15: “I desire … that women should adorn themselves modestly and sensibly in seemly apparel … by good deeds, as befits women who profess religion. Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet woman will be saved through bearing children if she continues in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.”

28. Barbara G. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (New York, 1983), 542.

29. Ibid., 399.

30. Wagner, Parsifal, 9.

31. Walker, 604.

32. Clément, xviii.

33. Ibid., xi.

34. For an appraisal of the relationship between the medieval Tristan und Isolde and Wagner's version, see Dagmar Ingenshay-Goch, Richard Wagners neu erfundener Mythos: Zur Rezeption und Reproduktion des germanischen Mythos in seinen Operntexten (Bonn, 1982); and Arthur Groos, “Appropriation in Wagner's Tristan Libretto,” in Reading Opera, ed. Arthur Groos and Roger Parker (Princeton, 1988), 12-33. Groos successfully demonstrates that Wagner used Gottfried von Straßburg's unfinished poem as an inspirational source, and that he did not feel obligated to maintain the integrity of the original plot. Nevertheless, the famous plot of the original myth echoes in the minds of Wagner's audiences, creating a secondary text that contrasts and critiques Wagner's libretto.

35. Rubin, 173.

36. Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, ed. Nicholas John (London/New York, 1981), 52-53.

37. Ibid., 52.

38. Ibid., 66.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid., 47.

41. Clément, 34.

42. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, 1985), 184.

43. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, ed. Bill Moyers (New York, 1988), 189.

44. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, 66.

45. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, 1955), 11. See also Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1978), 218. Barthes discusses the unity of love and death in Liebestod at great length, cleverly noting that suicide for lovers is but a trifle. Such a suicide does, however, provide an escape from an otherwise impossible situation.

46. Rubin, 178.

47. Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (San Francisco, 1987), xviii.

48. Irigaray, 172.

49. For an analysis chronicling the first stages of a public homosexual sensibility, see James D. Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany (New York, 1975), 1-19. Manfred Herzer, Bibliographie zur Homosexualität: Verzeichnis des deutschsprachigen, nichtbelletristischen Schrifttums zur weiblichen und männlichen Homosexualität aus den Jahren 1466 bis 1975 in chronologischer Reihenfolge (Berlin, 1982) provides an exhaustive list of publications that broach the subject of homosexuality.

50. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1980), 42-43.

51. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990), 8-9.

52. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, 64-65.

53. Ibid., 65.

54. Ibid., 90.

55. Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music (New York, 1968), 251. Gutman diverges from established Wagnerian analysis in that he critically investigates the locus of homosexuality in Wagner's texts, and not in his life alone. Hanns Fuchs, Richard Wagner und die Homosexualität: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der sexuellen Anomalien seiner Gestalten (Berlin, 1903) furthered the biographical approach to homosexuality in Wagner with his exhaustive catalogue of Wagner's homosexual acquaintances and friends. However, Wagner's characters suspected of homosexuality came under public moral scrutiny, as in Oskar Panizza, “Bayreuth und die Homosexualität,” Die Gesellschaft 11.1 (1885): 88-92.

56. Ibid., 250.

57. Marcuse, 20, 55-77.