Within the seemingly infinite Matryoshka doll of problematic characters, concepts, and structures within the Ring, perhaps the most bothersome – and also the most elusive, for reasons that are more than obvious – is the question of incest. Both of the Ring’s major couples, Siegmund and Sieglinde and Siegfried and Brünnhilde are openly incestuous, though this is only a point of discourse in the case of the former – as aunt and nephew, the latter mostly ignore the fact altogether, in part because the taboo element is not structurally or philosophically important to their relationship, modeled as it is on the more simple embrace of super-man and predestined-woman. The twins, however, in terms of politics, gender, and, of course, the overtness of their desires are a very different story.
For the viewer, the final line of Act I of Die Walküre: “To your brother / you are bride and sister / so may the Wälsung’s blood thrive!" is definitely among the cycle's most uncomfortable moments. One is never quite sure what to do afterwards except shrug one’s shoulders and let out a deep breath through one’s pursed lips. The frankness of the incestuous act is, along with its obvious taboo, part of why, for the interpreter of the Ring, incest presents a number of different problems. This is true to the extent that one can go so far as to call them traps.
With the exception of Deryck Cooke’s I Saw the World End (which was published in 1979, at the height of major public discourses about incest) most book-length guides to the Ring do not tackle the question of incest in depth, including and especially its explicit sexual nature. Indeed, the problem of incest is often tactfully evaded through a number of different techniques, the most common of which include making the love between Siegmund and Sieglinde into a biographical question (i.e. by maintaining that it was based on Wagner’s illicit love for the wife of one of his benefactors, Mathilde Wesendonck), relegating it to the dustbin of mythology along with Osiris and Oedipus, or by simply claiming that the incestuous sentiment between the twins is downstream of the Volsunga saga from which they were originally derived.
However, each of these explanations is unsatisfying and incomplete in its own way, and all of them eschew the problem of desire altogether by externalizing incest rather than dealing with it as it is actually presented in Die Walküre. The biographical excuse, for example, places far too little emphasis on Wagner’s creative choices regarding the Wälsungs, which were extensive and deliberate and go far beyond simple matter of licit versus illicit love. The idea that the twin-lovers are simply one of many mythological or supernatural pairs ignores the fact that, despite technically being demigods, the lives of the twins and their love for each other are both rooted in their vulnerable status as human beings. It is this humanity which both separates them from the gods in Valhalla politically and structurally and which is ultimately their downfall, for a free humanity, for whom such things as incest are possible, poses too great a threat to the godly order of power.
Finally, as anyone who has studied both texts knows, the original Volsunga saga and Wagner’s reimagining of it in Die Walküre could not be more different from one another, including with regards to the incestuous bond between Sigmund and Signy, which is not at all romantic in nature. In the saga, Signy disguises herself as a witch and seduces her unwitting brother in order to bear a son by him that will be strong enough to avenge her father’s death. Such instrumental thinking is the furthest thing possible from the Wälsung twins’ overt embrace of their passion for one another as both siblings and lovers.[1]
Cooke’s reading, meanwhile, at least attempts to tackle the question of incest head on. In his aside on the topic, which comes off of an extensive comparative analysis of the saga to the music drama, Cooke aims to solve the “incest problem,” so to speak, by drawing upon a mix of literary, primary, and sociological sources. He begins this task as many of his fellow footsoldiers of the 1970s also would: by rejecting from the get-go the touchy-feely psychoanalytical approach to topic, which, at that time, was best articulated in organologist Robert Donington’s Jungian analysis of the cycle, Wagner’s Ring and its Symbols.
To summarize this approach briefly, because it, too is important, Donington maintains that “the purpose of the incest taboo is to prevent our slipping back from our measure of human consciousness an responsibility into an animal state of unconsciousness and irresponsibility…” and that the incestuous bond between brother and sister is merely a pitstop between the Oedipus complex and our desires’ journey outside of the family altogether. The tree Siegmund pulls the sword from, then, is related to the “mother-world of nature” and thus, the act of its extraction is emblematic of his departure from this world into the world of manhood.[2]
Cooke discards this analysis outright on the grounds that such thinking is irrelevant to the case of the twins because, in their case, “the harmful retrogressive tendencies of incest, mentioned above, cannot possibly be present.”[3] This is what I’ll broadly refer to as the exogamy argument, the idea that because Siegmund and Sieglinde were separated at a young age and reunited at an older one, the forces of the family unit from which incest derives its taboo power are absent, and thus play little to no role in the romance that develops between them. To substantiate this argument, Cooke draws on Wagner’s dispersed writings on incest, particularly his analysis of the Oedipus myth in Opera and Drama, where he writes:
(In an aside, Cooke basically also makes the claim that incest is itself perfectly natural, citing the pro-incest psychologist Herbert Maisch in saying that geneticists ‘are generally agreed that incest or inbreeding itself causes no inherited damage in offspring,’ but that’s neither here nor there. It was 1979 and people loved saying that kind of thing back then.)
This framework is far more developed than most other attempts to tackle the subject, including Donington’s, however, it still falls into the trap of exculpating incest outright, both in the social and musico-historical sphere rather than interrogating it as it actually materializes in the opera. To speak briefly on the primary source material, it is worth mentioning that citing Wagner’s writings on incest from Opera and Drama, while obviously still relevant, disguises the fact that, in private, the specifically incestuous bond between twins held clear erotic power for him. One need only look at his prose sketch from 1852 to see that this eroticism was at the forefront of his mind when working on Die Walküre. There Wagner wrote: “Siegmund ([is] beside himself)…Sister and wife — as the twins had clung to each other in their mother’s womb, so the blissful couple are now conjoined.”[5]
Regarding the social element, it is true, as Cooke maintains, that the social and psychological processes of self-formation within the family that would ordinarily take place in a shared household are instead displaced in the twins via physical separation. It is also true that the twins’ estrangement from one another is what allows their erotic bond to be established in the first place and, subsequently, why it develops through the specific and very important dramatic process of mutual identification. Knowing, after all, cannot exist without unknowing. That there is differentiation within this sameness also allows such sensuality room to breathe and develop in a way that is broadly more empathetic than it is taboo.
That being said, the deference to exogamy ignores not only the obvious fact that the twins overtly embrace their own incestuousness, but that the entirety of their political, romantic, and sexual relationship is oriented around sameness – that they suffer the same, that they share the same needs and desires, and, rather crucially, that they look and feel (emotionally, but also to the touch) the same. Thus, it is better for us to say that the relationship between exogamy and endogamy is a dialectical rather than conflicting one.
This matter of sameness is at its simplest if we look at endogamy through a political rather than sociological lens, though it only grows more complex from there. In order to do this, a bit of feminism is in order. We can find it in The Second Sex, where Simone de Beauvoir makes the crucial point that exogamy is essential for the reproduction of man’s patriarchal ownership over woman, writing:
In this respect (and it should be noted here that the Ring itself is based on such primitive sources, sources upon which its own mysticism partially relies) the incestuous bond presents itself in clear opposition to the traditionally exogenous bond between Sieglinde and her husband, Hunding. Siegmund, whose sympathy and general alignment with women manifest in politicized ways, creates through incest with his sister a clever way out of the political problem of otherness itself. But from a critical standpoint even this project, which is, on its face, utopian in nature (in that it is both ideal and cannot exist outside of an artistic or theoretical mode), is itself covertly misogynistic: it demonstrates that Wagner cannot imagine a world in which parity between men and women is truly achievable unless the man and woman in question are literally the same. (Alternatively, if they are not born the same, then some mechanism must make them that way, such as the potion in Tristan which dissolves both Tristan’s masculine power over Isolde and Isolde’s political power over Tristan.)
Psychologically, however, the matter is much more complex, straddling ideas of self, other, differentiation, desire, and control. To borrow (s0mewhat extensively) from an essay I wrote last year about the concept of the mirror self, at the root of this psychological construct is the fact that when we are born, we are fundamentally born separate. We feel this separation at first (and most powerfully) from our mothers, whose bodies carried us, brought us into the world and nourished us when we were weakest. As our lives develop, this base reality of differentiation becomes more intense and more deeply felt, spreads to more and more people in our lives, until, one day, when we are children, it occurs to us all at once that we are alone, doomed forever to become ourselves, and, subsequently, to search, mostly in vain and often amid an unintelligible or hostile landscape, for someone, anyone else.
That someone else, broadly defined as the other, presents itself as a void in one’s life that takes the shape of another human being. That shape may seem so close and so real to us, yet, because the other is always inherently unknowable, it remains a void nevertheless, one that can never be “completed” in the way we want. By necessity, we seek a way out of this trap in any way we can; hence the entire gamut of human behavior: conquest, obsession, revenge, longing, hatred, love, all of these things take root in the soil of difference, try to answer the same question: will this make me whole?
Fundamentally, the fantasy of incest is a derivative of the fantasy, broadly construed, of what we can call the mirror-self, the self-that-is-not-myself. This is a fantasy that also takes many more benign forms, such as that of the imaginary friend, or the wish that one was secretly adopted and that one’s real family is out there looking for them, or, of course, the fantasy of the soul mate. These fantasies form from the wreckage of separation for which they present an impossible solution: the reconciliation between self and other in such a way that the self is left intact while the other is not so distant from us because they are us. In both its incestuous and non-incestuous manifestations, it accepts that one cannot truly be made whole through recognition alone but believes that this similarity, built upon the bedrock of an inherent empathy, can at least make bearable an existential need. The romantic and even the political nature of the Wälsung twins’ relationship is rooted in this longing, in this omnipresent human desire to be loved for who one is and, by way of love, the desire to be completed.
But what separates incest from the other iterations of this fantasy is that incest, as it presents not in fantasy but in the act itself, denies, or, rather, negates the basic human reality of separateness. To quote from a paper on the topic of self and other in incestuous violence by the psychoanalyst Juan Eduardo Tesane: “the incestuous act negates the fact that all human beings are necessarily incomplete. It is a desperate attempt to avoid confronting—something we all must do—ambivalence and loss of the object. Denying that the irreducible existence of the other is per se a source of conflict for the ego, incest seeks to evacuate all conflict through the suppression of all otherness.”[7]
In other words, incest is, in the real world, an act of violence in part because it fundamentally denies the family member’s right to develop into their own subjectivity, infringes on their freedom to be separate. In the parental relationship, this normative divergence is achieved via the Oedipal process, whose disruption through incest can have catastrophic effects on the proper formation of selfhood in the child. In the sibling relationship, which is usually not the focus of psychoanalytical study, this violation is more oblique. However, outside of the literary, sibling incest, too, is predicated on the offending party’s need for total control over the subject, to pull that subject back into themselves and thus deny them their own fate.
The Wälsung twins, in this respect, represent a mixed case. This is because the incestuous relationship between Siegmund and Sieglinde plays dialectically in the waters of not only exogamy and endogamy, but of fantasy and reality. On the one hand, their love speaks to a different mythical taboo, belonging not so much to Oedipus as it does Narcissus. Indeed, Tesane, in his analysis, even cites a medieval retelling of the Narcissus myth (of which Wagner may or may not have been aware) in which Narcissus sees not himself in the treacherous reflecting waters of the pond, but a female version of himself – his twin – thus rendering his desire for himself, and with it, his sensuous discovery and exploration of his own image, also a desire for completion in addition to possession. This figure of the twin-Narcissus serves a different if tangential purpose than that of Oedipus. It denies not only the process of differentiation, but that there was ever a severance between self and other, between man and woman, to begin with.
At the end of his paper, Tesane quotes the French analyst Tobie Nathan here, who writes, quite poetically: “…[Narcissus attempts] to be in one place and in its opposite, to be both emitter and receptor of his own voice, active and passive, man and woman, and yet still himself. To re-find, to love, to join with, or to be merged with his double of the opposite sex (or of the other world) is the taboo that Narcissus violates.”[8] This divergent mythical framework of the incest fantasy helps explain why it is important that Siegmund and Sieglinde are not just brother and sister, but twins. It is only through the lens of spiritual and theoretical twinship that the violence of the incestuous bond can be partially, albeit sentimentally, obviated. The process of differentiation incest so totally disrupts cannot itself be truly completed if, in similar fashion to the problem of political endogamy, the two parties are already the same.
On the other hand, however, when this fantasy is made real, and despite each participant’s willingness to fulfill it, it still breaks under the weight of its own contradictions. The fact of the matter is that for all this mystical brouhaha, Siegmund and Sieglinde are still actually, and in many ways that are important, brother and sister. Their union, at both a cosmic and personal level, remains a destructive force, even if that force is twinned, so to speak, with the creative and generative counterpart it finds in fantasy. This destructiveness is of course externalized via Fricka’s use of the twins’ illicit relationship as a cudgel by which she can punish Wotan’s infidelity, reclaim Siegmund as her property, and thus, by extension, eliminate the emergent stirrings of an independent human freedom. But it is also evident in the breakdown between the twins in their final moments together. As they collapse into each other’s arms from the exhaustion of running from the old, bad world in search of the new, good world that has yet to be completed, Siegmund still pleads with Sieglinde in the tone of a lover, to stop, to rest, to be in his arms. In this, sister is just a name to him, no different than wife.[9]
However, as Sieglinde, in the throes of her traumatic visions, calls out for Siegmund, his role as her lover oscillates violently with his role as her brother. This former role, as the nightmare continues, diminishes and diminishes, until it is reduced into the last words she will ever speak to him: Brother, my brother! Siegmund, ha. Sieglinde's recovery from deep within her consciousness of the terrible memory of her separation from her brother essentially serves as a separation of a different kind, the tragic if inevitable resolution of an internal contradiction that cannot continue. Sieglinde loves Siegmund in all ways, this much is devastatingly clear. However, because of not only the conflict between these diverging roles of sister and lover but also, in the wake of her liberation, of the stark and wretched reality of the sexual violence and humiliation she’s had to endure, psychically she cannot be one with him in the way he wants. From our point of view, Sieglinde’s visions are essentially a form of regression into childhood, one that is not only a shrinking away from the harsh brutality of womanhood, but also a return to the period in her life before the process of familial differentiation was interrupted.
This is an extraordinary pain, one that, as is often the case with Sieglinde, has gone hitherto unacknowledged. However, as we will see in the second part of this pair of essays, which consists of a close reading of the unfolding of the twins' relationship, the consanguineous bond has always held more meaning for her than it has for her brother, in part because she is and has always been its initiator. In fact, it is the one instance in their relationship in which she is the leader and Siegmund the follower. The process of identification that takes place romantically between the twins is propelled forward by Sieglinde’s inquiries, and with them, an undercurrent of incestuous eroticism originating in the sensation rather than the explicit acknowledgement of what one wants, the play of wanting and not wanting, knowing and not knowing, the frisson of the inarticulable, and, formally speaking, the complex tension between metaphor, innuendo, and foreshadowing. This tension, as is always the case in Wagner, is expressed through the often equally contradictory methods of music, speech and action. For now, however, we can end with two passages from Siegmund, shrouded as they are in the music of bliss, that to me are so emblematic of what is both beautiful and difficult about this love between two people whose worlds both begin and end as one:
The Love of the Wälsungs: A Close Reading of Eroticism in Die Walküre
Return to Index[1] For a more detailed overview and disputation of these interpretations, as well as the matter of the historical materialism of 19th century sentimental incest, see an earlier essay I wrote on the subject: “Bride and Brother Be to Your Sister”
[2] Donington, Wagner’s Ring and its Symbols.
[3] Cooke, I Saw the World End, 298–302.
[4] The quotes from Wagner are pulled from Cooke’s selection. They are the translations of W. Ashton Ellis in The Prose Works of Richard Wagner, London, 1892-9.
[5] Quoted by Richard Sabor in Richard Wagner: Der Ring Des Nibelungen, a Companion, 96.
[6] De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 83.
[7] From Giovanna, ed. On Incest: Psychoanalytical Perspectives (58)
[8] Ibid., 63.
[9] Something that has always fascinated me is that Siegmund only says Sieglinde’s name out loud twice. Both instances are in his negotiations with Brünnhilde.