There is, of course, no such thing as frictionless love in the Ring. That being said, if we take the romance between Siegfried and Brünnhilde at anything but face value, the questions involved become more than a little uncomfortable. (Or, as Anna Russell put it in her famous parody of the Ring: "May I remind you that she's his aunt?") Probably because the romanticized consanguineaity of the Wälsungs takes up all the air in the incest room and because the blood relation between Siegfried and Brünnhilde is never actually elaborated upon by Wagner in either Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, the situation is rarely dealt with at face value. In all fairness to the work itself, because this relationship is so grossly problematic, it genuinely remains in the best interest of the viewer to simply see the pair as star-crossed lovers -- as man and woman in lateral, rather than vertical, relations with one another. Unfortunately, the project of true criticism requires us to look at things more closely and reveals that this is not the case.
It is not particularly fun to return to the question of incest after spending so much time answering it in Die Walküre. However, the discussion must be had at least in brief because it contains so many of the key points about Siegfried himself as a dialectical subject -- a man who, in the true Hegelian bind of the tragic hero, is simultaneously guilty and innocent. With regards to his relationship with Brünnhilde, which is, in truth, fraught long before the ring is wrested from her, Siegfried is, undeniably the latter. We can even say that, in this bond he less a willing participant than he is a victim and it is this victimization which leads, in turn, to all others.
As discussed in our prior essays about the Wälsung twins, the fundamental organizing quality of all incestuous relations is that they are simultaneously self-affirming – they involve the narcissistic desire for the one who is like oneself – and self-annihilating in that by loving the one who is like or who is even a part of oneself, one denies that person the right to their own self-differentiation; in other words, the ability, through one’s separation from those that made or were made with them to become oneself.
To bring the person who is like oneself into the bond of sexual love is by definition deleterious – it destroys both parties and leaves very little left, because both forms of love – familial and romantic – become, in their entanglement unrecoverable. That being said, there is a major difference – both emotionally and politically – between Wagner’s two consanguineous bonds. In Die Walküre, the sentimentally incestuous bond between Siegmund and Sieglinde is also a philosophical exploration (albeit ultimately failed) of the potential for true parity between men and women as rendered through a love in which both parties are the same. Their love is utopian in scope and its foundation is the bond of solidarity: I suffer as you suffer.
However, even though this love is genuine and true, the tension between self-affirmation and self-negation still inevitably resolves in tragedy. Sieglinde, in the throes of her crisis, is unable to reconcile Siegmund her brother with Siegmund her lover. In his attempt to take both their lives during his negotiations with Brünnhilde while Sieglinde is sleeping, Siegmund denies, in classical incestuous presentation, Sieglinde the opportunity to choose her own fate. Despite this, the twins still tried their best to make things work, and, as we will see, this trying to resolve the contradiction of incest, which manifests narratively as a tragic pursuit of free love, has a life-altering psychosexual impact on the woman, Brünnhilde, who bears witness to every second of it firsthand and who intervenes on its behalf.
Along with its rejection of a broader philosophy in lieu of almost pure sentimentality, the love between Brünnhilde and Siegfried diverges from that of the twins in its manifestation of incestuous desire. The perpetrator of incest more often than not desires to be for the other party all things at once, the summation of all human relations -- in short, they wish to be omnipotent. Brünnhilde's case actually exemplifies this tendency. It is not enough that Brünnhilde loves Siegfried as a man. She also, through her orchestration of his life since childhood, loves him as a mother does her child and as a sister loves her brother, for Siegfried is also a clear replacement for his father, Siegmund. Sister, Mother, Lover -- this is the order in which she loves him.
On the surface, the relationship between Siegfried and Brünnhilde may appear the more traditional one, in part because of the veiled nature of the incest and in part because of its more traditional gender roles. Outright Siegfried is presented in the typically masculine mode and Brünnhilde, now stripped of her Valkyrie powers, in the typically feminine one. Unlike with the twins, the two do not make any equivocations between men and women and neither gives much care to the gendered experiences of the other.
This presentation of man-as-powerful and woman-as-weak is deceptive, however. Despite what appears to be conventional, the love between the two actually begins and ends with a profoundly unequal power relation, one in which Brünnhilde, having orchestrated Siegfried’s entire fate – from his finding her on the rock to his untimely end – has the upper hand. As a result of this control, the incestuous balance between self-affirmation and self-annihilation is firmly tilted towards the latter. We can see this across the board – in the pair's similar celebration as Siegmund’s of love-in-death, in the knowledge Brünnhilde deliberately withholds from her lover, and, most tragically, in Brünnhilde's entitlement over Siegfried's right to life. It is, in this way, traditionally rather than sentimentally incestuous. Its outcome is disastrous.
Brünnhilde’s desire for Siegfried begins before he is even born. This is because, underlying all of her relations with him are her previous ambiguously romantic feelings for her half-brother Siegmund. Wagner does not elaborate on this mechanism in full, but presumably Brünnhilde has been watching Siegmund from the fortress of Valhalla for quite some time. We know she has already watched him endure terrible hardship, has watched as he has repeatedly defended a woman’s right to life over that of a man’s honor, has seen the full brunt of his deep sensitivity and empathy for others. She has also, most importantly, watched Siegmund fall in love with his own sister.
This love so moves Brünnhilde, she is willing to risk her own life on behalf of it. Her choice to protect Siegmund against the will of her father is subsequently punished by Wotan in the form of explicit patriarchal violence: he threatens to strip his daughter of her powers, put her to sleep, and leave her at the mercy of whatever man may come her way. This fight between them has broader and arguably feminist implications through Brünnhilde’s rejection of a patriarchy in which she was previously complicit at the cost of her own bodily autonomy, though this is not the place for further discussion of them. (Suffice it to say, she is, more than any other character, a political mixed bag.)
In the last act of Die Walküre we can see in Brünnhilde’s defense of her own actions the undercurrent of Siegmund’s erotic hold on her. When Wotan (albeit for the wrong reasons, i.e. to juxtapose the pain of killing his son with Brünnhilde’s seemingly frivolous defense of the latter’s romance) accuses his daughter of “…gaily extract[ing] / from the fountain of love / the wanton frenzy / of erotic feeling”1 he’s not entirely wrong. Just a few lines earlier Brünnhilde speaks of Siegmund thusly:
Wotan later responds by saying: “You joyfully pursued / the allure of love; /so follow him [Siegmund] / if love him you must!”3
It is after this moment that Brünnhilde negotiates with her father the terms and conditions of her own fate. Many men may find her on the fell but only one man will be strong enough to break through the ring of fire and awaken her. Lurking beneath the surface of this desire to be found by Siegfried, is the fact that Brünnhilde goes to extreme lengths to replicate the relations Siegmund has with Sieglinde – that there is a Wälsung braver than any man, that he wins for himself a magic sword, that he uses that sword in the protection and pursuit of a woman.4
There is, of course, an irony at play here, which is that despite her ostensible quest for freedom through love, Brünnhilde is far more involved in the fate of another than Wotan ever was with Siegmund. This over-involvement which is, in reality, in service to the true completion of her father’s project (both of securing the ring and, though she doesn't realize it yet, ending the world) has tragic consequences for both lovers. This is because Brünnhilde’s banishment of Sieglinde to Neidhöhle, albeit in part because her father is forbidden by his contract with Fafner from going there himself, essentially condemns Siegfried to the world of Das Rheingold, to the world of the curse.5
This is done to prevent a repetition of the Siegmund problem in which, as a free man, Siegmund directs his life towards his own ends which have nothing to do with the project of the ring. What is so terrible about Siegfried’s situation is that Wotan has already, through his killing of Siegmund, voluntarily rescinded his control over humanity. In the world Siegfried is born into, man is already free. But because he is born into the realm of the curse and is brought into its story through his contact with Mime, this universal freedom is for him immediately occluded.6
Thus, in her pursuit of Siegfried, Brünnhilde is doubly incestuous, not only because beneath all this is, of course, the feeling that if Brünnhilde can’t have Siegmund, his son will suffice, but in that, by engineering the entire course of his life so precisely it could only ever lead directly to her, Brünnhilde is fundamentally denying Siegfried his right to free subjectivity, his right to become wholly himself.
This incestuous drive is remarkably vertical. By adopting what is effectively the positionality of Siegfried’s mother through making the decisions of how he will grow up to be, Brünnhilde ensures that Siegfried will never truly become separated or even separate from her.7 In Act III of Siegfried, she essentially tells him all of this herself in the crucial passage spanning lines 2456-2474:
The great tragedy of this lies in how Siegfried responds to this and how Brünnhilde responds to him in kind:
This is not only an unambiguous depiction of vertical incestuousness – to control another’s fate because they are, as she says, one’s own very being, (and that's not including the overt allusion in the stage directions to Brünnhilde’s motherly role) – it also demonstrates a further element of this direct control: her deliberate withholding of knowledge from him.
Siegfried knows nothing of his parentage or of the world responsible for his own coming into being. Earlier in the opera, he asks Mime at length about his parents, about whom Mime reveals only their names because keeping Siegfried ignorant is part of his ulterior motive vis a vis the plot to recapture the ring. In fact, keeping Siegfried ignorant seems to be the goal of every single person he comes in contact with.
What is astonishing however, is that Brünnhilde, who purports to love him more than anything and who knows everything imaginable about him, also keeps this knowledge from him. This, more than any other choice made by her is most instrumental in keeping Siegfried from his right to self-actualization. Why Brünnhilde is “hesitant” is obvious: should Siegfried figure out who she is, that she’s related to him, that she had a hand in his parents’ deaths, perhaps he wouldn’t be so easy to seduce. There is no evidence from the third act of Siegfried onward that this information is ever truly revealed, that Siegfried understands the heroic tradition he actually comes from, that love has deeper roots than just pleasure, or that the point of his strength is for it to be used to noble ends rooted in some, any, kind of pro-social contract.
The result of this ignorance is that, throughout his entire existence in the Ring, Siegfried is essentially a child. Even in the above excerpt where he is supposed to be on the cusp of consummating his manhood, Brünnhilde addresses him as a child. This makes her seduction of him (for this viewer at least) extremely uncomfortable. All this despite the fact that Wagner, by keeping Brünnhilde young and vulnerable tries to create some degree of parity within the bond of seduction. In fairness to her, Brünnhilde's vulnerability is also understandable – her back and forth about making love to Siegfried is predicated on the fact that should he take her, she would lose what little magical power she has left, would be rendered something she's never been, something she's always had a veiled disdain for: an ordinary woman. Brünnhilde, too, may be a virgin, but in no way does that make her and her lover equally as innocent.
Siegfried, when confronted with the first stirrings of sexual feeling, is expressly frightened by them. It is, in fact, the only time he "learns" fear, which is something I've always found profound. Incredibly, in expressing this fear, he calls out for his own mother to intervene. (Siegfried is a rich Freudian text somehow written forty years before Freud.) This fear is completely understandable, not only because the physical sensation of arousal is entirely new to him and manifests in him as something alarming, directionless and painful, but also because Siegfried is, unlike Brünnhilde, completely unsocialized and has no idea how to go about anything involving another human being whatsoever. He genuinely doesn't know what these feelings of his mean.
Making love to a woman -it's something he doesn't have the even slightest clue about. We can recall from Act I Siegfried’s questioning of the mating of the animals in the forest and whether or not such a thing is how he himself was begotten. Prior to reaching the woman on the rock, he has had no contact at all with mankind, let alone womankind, has no knowledge of interpersonal norms, is ignorant, even, of the existence of romance itself, along with friendship, solidarity, or any sense of justice.
What is actually radical (in terms of narrative form) about Siegfried's character is that his drives are more or less completely unarticulated. From beginning to end, he is is a kind of free, empirical subject who learns only by what he senses, is an empty vessel given its substance by others. This is best evidenced by the fact that, up until he is confronted with erotic possibility, Siegfried is incapable of feeling fear. Even if we accept that his fearlessness is a mythological trait, there is a reason this fear transpires now rather than earlier. Brünnhilde, being the second person in a prior world of one so frightens Siegfried because she introduces him to the very concept of the other, the one outside oneself with whom one wishes to be close, and yet, who is by definition separate and unknowable. This initial cleavage between self and other is a task originally fulfilled for most of us by our parents. Thus it is doubly sad that this feeling, this moment of reveal, is not nor ever could be shared in full between both parties.
Eventually, this social lack of Siegfried's will come to bother Brünnhilde, someone who has experienced the full brunt of all social relations, as well. That Siegfried is not like Siegmund – that he is not a hero with a specific motive, that there is no difficulty to overcome in their relationship together, that he really does need nothing beyond her because he has no clear organizing motive in his life – this is the impetus behind her drive to send him to earth to do heroic deeds. Eternal bliss up on the fell didn't quite turn out the way she had expected. This has made her both anxious and bored.
In her prior coordination of Siegfried’s fate, Brünnhilde had forgotten what made Siegmund Siegmund to begin with: a social system – a deeply inequitable one. It was a world requiring that which does so much to shape the personal development of human beings: suffering, and by extension, both the fortitude to endure it and the bravery to fight against it. Siegfried’s world has no such society, not only because, as mentioned above, he grows up in the isolation of the forest but because the gods, the shapers of that society, have abandoned the earth. This directionlessness renders him both a naive and expressly apolitical subject.
Because Brünnhilde seemingly still cannot reveal to Siegfried what she knows about him, she believes that simply having him experience hardship will do the work for her of turning him into what she wants. There is also in her words to him in Götterdämmerung a profound insecurity about what she has to offer Siegfried now that she’s abnegated her own powers through her enjoinment with him (“do not despise / this poor creature…who just wants to give / but can give you no more.”) (Despite these womanly agonies, the truth is that both of them have simply run out of their own story.)
Siegfried, maybe even to her horror, answers her with “Yet one thing I do know and cherish / that Brünnhilde lives for me; / that lesson I easily learnt / to think of Brünnhilde!” Even though this kind of speech is all Brünnhilde ever wanted from him, the dissatisfaction remains. As a way of diverting this stymieing passion into more productive channels, she invokes his prior heroism regarding the dragon and the fire he had to pass through. After all, it’s the only strife he’s had to endure even if it is only bravery for bravery’s sake. Do that, Siegfried, but on earth. Like a child she must reorient him back to the task at hand. Like a mother, she creates that task for him.
This sending Siegfried down to the human realm is a fatal error on Brünnhilde’s part. Siegfried, because he is not inoculated against the wiles of human beings, immediately succumbs to guile and becomes a victim of objectification and seduction by way of Hagan and Gutrune's giving him the love potion. The crime he commits against Brünnhilde, despite being a terrible act of gendered violence, is never fully his crime. Before he can come to and realize what has happened and, hopefully, make amends, Brünnhilde takes Siegfried’s fate into her own hands and ends the life she herself, for all intents and purposes, began. She does this because it is what she's always done.
Having only ever been a pawn in other people’s desires, namely those related to the ring, but also the sexual desires of both Brünnhilde and Gutrune, Siegfried is, like his father, an alienated and abjected subject who, despite his manly strength and total freedom, will incur tremendous violence at the hands of the unfree. But unlike his father, the tragedy of Siegfried is that he does not know nor understand this about himself. About himself he knows nor understands nothing at all. And so, rather than being viewed as parts of a cohesive whole of life within a broad life-system, things simply happen to him, one after the other. What is astonishing about this is that it is true of real victims of incestuous violence who show up on the couches of psychoanalysts around the world feeling unable to make decisions for themselves, believing always that there is some outside force driving every aspect of their lives.
All in all, when Siegmund and Sieglinde succumb to their desire for one another, it is, despite its incestuousness, a victimless crime. (In truth, they are both made victims by the one who brought them into the world to begin with.) Siegfried, however, is a victim in the most traditional understanding of what that means. He is a victim of desire and control before he becomes a victim of the atavistic world against which he was supposed to sharpen the blade of his own heroism. Without one form of victimhood there would not have been the other. What could have happened in its stead is unknowable, but it probably wouldn’t have involved the woman on the rock. In the end, what this reveals about Brünnhilde is exactly the same thing Siegmund reveals about her father: that when it comes to those below, those above, despite their protestations to the contrary, view freedom as something conditional, something that can be created at will and destroyed by force. We can call this a lot of things, but we can’t call it love.