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 incest of the Wälsungs preoccupies most viewers and scholars and because the blood relation between Siegfried and Brünnhilde is never actually elaborated upon by Wagner in either Siegfried or Götterdämmerung, the true nature of their bond is rarely problematized at length. 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 criticism requires us to look at things more closely which reveals that this is not the case.
Indeed, on the surface, the relationship between Siegfried and Brünnhilde may appear the more traditional one, in part because of its more conventional gender roles. Outright, Siegfried is presented in the typically masculine mode and Brünnhilde, now stripped of her Valkyrie powers, in the typically feminine one. This presentation of man-as-powerful and woman-as-weak is deceptive, however. Despite its appearances, the love between the two in fact begins (and ends) with a profoundly unequal power relation, one that only makes it more - rather than less - incestuous.
To recap from the 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. 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 relationship between Siegmund and Sieglinde is also a metaphorical exploration (albeit ultimately failed) of the potential for true parity between men and women as depicted through a love in which both parties are the same. Even though this love is genuine and true, the psychological tension between self-affirmation and self-negation still inevitably resolves in tragedy. Regardless, this love leaves a lasting impact on the rest of the cycle. Beyond the birth of Siegfried himself, the Wälsungs' attempt at freedom through love not only changes the fate of everyone via Wotan's subsequent abnegation of control over the Ring's world-system, it also 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.
The back half of the cycle, however, is very different from the front. 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. To speak in psychoanalytic terms, in addition to the affirmation/negation dichotomy, 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. While this is true of Siegmund and Sieglinde to some extent (they are friends, comrades, siblings, lovers, and, as twins, each other), Brünnhilde's desire for Siegfried fully exemplifies this tendency. This is because it is not enough that she loves Siegfried as a man. She also, by way of creating and facilitating his place in the world, loves him as a mother does her child and, seeing as Siegfried is also a clear replacement for his father, Siegmund, as a sister loves her brother. Sister, Mother, Lover - this is the precise order in which Brünnhilde will come to love Siegfried.
This omnipotence, of course, comes at a price, in that, through it, the libidinal balance between incestuous self-affirmation and incestuous self-annihilation becomes firmly tilted towards the latter. Throughout both Siegfried and Götterdämmerung can see this repeatedly in the two's relationship: in their strange celebration 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. Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that Brünnhilde's love for him is all-encompassing. But, by its very nature, the outcome of this all-encompassing love is disastrous.
Brünnhilde’s desire for Siegfried begins before he is even born. This is because, underlying all of her relations with him is a secondary incestuousness: 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 at least the latter span of his life. We know from her interactions with Wotan that she has already seen him endure terrible hardship, has observed as he's repeatedly defended a woman’s right to life over a man’s honor, has seen the full extent of his deep sensitivity and empathy for others. Most importantly, Brünnhilde has watched Siegmund fall in love with his own sister, thus expanding for her the scope of all possible romantic and sexual experiences far beyond all normal boundaries.
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 only after this moment that Brünnhilde begins negotiating with her father the terms and conditions of her own fate. They settle on a compromise by which many men may find her sleeping on the fell but only one man will be strong enough to break through the ring of fire and awaken her. However, lurking beneath the surface of this desire to be found by Siegfried, is the fact that Brünnhilde goes to extreme lengths to replicate the relationship Siegmund has with Sieglinde: that there is a Wälsung braver than any man who wins for himself a magic sword, that he will use that sword both in the pursuit and the protection of a strong-willed, star-crossed woman, and that this woman will lie in wait for him.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 ultimately works in the service of completing her father’s project (both that of securing the ring and, though she doesn't realize it yet, ending the world) will have tragic consequences for both her and Siegfried. This is because, in essence, Brünnhilde’s banishment of Sieglinde to Neidhöhle, albeit in part because her father is forbidden by his contract with Fafner from going there himself, condemns Siegfried to the world of Das Rheingold, to the world of the curse, the world of the ring.5
Whether intentional or not, this de facto condemnation works narratively to prevent a repetition of the Siegmund problem, wherein Siegmund, being a truly free man, ultimately lives his life for his own purposes, which are completly at odds with the project of obtaining the ring. What is subtly so terrible about Siegfried’s situation, is that, by the time he is born, Wotan has already voluntarily rescinded his control over humanity. In the world Siegfried is born into, he - and every other man - is already free. But because Siegfried 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 alone, immediately occluded.6
By creating these conditions and by adopting this positionality - that of a mother, of the one who brings Siegfried into the world - Brünnhilde de facto ensures that Siegfried will never truly become separated or even separate from her, that he is fundamentally of and from her.7 Here, the axis of her incestuousness shifts from lateral to vertical. 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 elucidates upon the very mechanism of this direct control: her deliberate withholding of knowledge from him.
Siegfried knows nothing about his parentage or about the events responsible for his own existence. Earlier in the opera, he asks Mime at length about his parents, about whom Mime reveals only their names because keeping Siegfried ignorant is also part of his ulterior motive of securing 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 him from ever learning who he really is. This, more than any other choice made by her is most instrumental in severing 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 and 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 to him, that Siegfried understands either the heroic tradition from which he comes, that love itself 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. This brings us to the problem of Brünnhilde as lover.
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 be rendered something she's never been, something she's always had a veiled disdain for: an ordinary woman. The loss of her power is also another point of contention. 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 father and daughter has itself broader and arguably feminist implications by way of Brünnhilde’s rejection of a patriarchal order in which she was previously complicit, albeit at the high, high price of her own bodily autonomy. It also exemplifies the tricky political dichotomy Brünnhilde presents throughout the Ring, that of the anti-patriarchal woman whose fate is ensnared by her desire for the love of a man at all costs. Put concisely, she is a dialectical subject who is simultaneously similar to Siegmund in the goal of freedom she pursues while also being similar to Wotan in how she pursues it. That this has broad implications for Brünnhilde's feelings for Siegfried is obvious in that it creates for Brünnhilde an insecurity around her newfound feminized weakness for which he, too, is partially responsible via the cutting of her mail, as well as a sense of entitlement to Siegfried himself originating in the magnitude of this personal sacrifice.
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. Incredibly, in expressing this fear, he calls out for his own mother to intervene. (Siegfried is a rich Freudian text somehow written three decades before Freud.) This fear is completely understandable, not only because the physical sensation of arousal is entirely new to him and manifests 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.
The degree to which Brünnhilde possesses knowledge and experience Siegfried does not cannot be overstated. From her awareness of and desire for sexual love (despite her fear) to the formation of her superego by way of her father to the strong sense of moral righteousness she learns from her brother, Brünnhilde's subjectivity is developed in a way Siegfried's simply is not.
When it comes to sex, this chasm is even deeper. 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. (About this more will be said in a later essay.)
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 by our mothers, by way of our being born, by way of our being nourished and weaned, by way of deducing, through the lens of social experience, the boundaries of the world writ large. Hence Brünnhilde's line in Act III, Scene 3, where, perhaps as foreshadowing, perhaps as parapraxis, she says to Siegfried: "O Siegfried! / My radiant heir! / Love yourself, / and let me be: / do not destroy who you are!"
Eventually, this social lack of Siegfried's will come to bother Brünnhilde. That Siegfried is not like Siegmund – that he is not a hero with a specific motive, that there are no difficulties to overcome in their relationship together, that he really does need nothing beyond her love because he has no clear organizing motive in his life – this is the impetus behind her drive to send him to the realm of men to do heroic deeds. Eternal bliss in up on the fell - especially in the tense interregnum between her abandonment and the end of the world - 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 so heroic to begin with: a social system, and within it, suffering, for only suffering grants the subject both the fortitude to endure it and the bravery to fight against it. Siegfried’s world has no such suffering because it has no such society. This is 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 also abandoned the earth. This resulting and generally ambient directionlessness renders him both a naive and expressly apolitical subject, and like any such subject, he will soon fill whatever void presents itself to him.
Because Brünnhilde still finds herself unable to reveal to Siegfried what she knows, she believes that simply having him experience hardship will do the work 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 rescinded her own powers via 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 was once all Brünnhilde ever wanted from him, dissatisfaction sours the scene. As a way of diverting this stymieing passion into more productive channels, she then invokes his prior heroism regarding the dragon and the fire he had to pass through. After all, these are the only true battles he’s had to fight despite being acts of bravery for bravery’s sake. Do that, Siegfried, but on earth. As though he is a child, she must reorient him back to the task at hand. Like a mother, she creates that task for him.
Sending him down to the human realm is a fatal error. Siegfried, because he is not inoculated against the wiles of human behavior, immediately succumbs to guile and becomes a victim of objectification and seduction by way of Hagan and Gutrune's amnesiac love potion. Because he has been robbed of his fundamental mental and bodily autonomy, the crime Siegfried commits against Brünnhilde, despite being a terrible act of violence, is never fully or solely his crime. Beyond that, it is only one of many intrusions upon his freedom of movement and desire, the last in a long line of violations. 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, created. So total is her entitlement over him, 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, a fundamentally alienated 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 that these are the existential contours of his life. About himself he knows nor understands very little at all. And so, rather than being viewed as parts of a cohesive life within a broad life-system, things simply happen to him, one after the other, often to his astonishment. What is remarkable about this fact is that it is also true of real victims of incest whose tell-tale symptoms include feeling unable to make decisions for themselves or 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. But Siegfried, from the loveless and instrumentalized upbringing he is given by Mime to his ultimate end, 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 upon 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 fell. 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.