Note: this essay deals explicitly with the topic of sexual violence.
I have been trying to write this essay for almost two years now. In that time, I have yet to find, despite endless attempts to the contrary, a better way of starting it than by saying this: When I was in my junior year of college, I was raped twice. The first time was by someone I had known well and with whom I had once been intimate. The second time was by a stranger who simply took advantage of me.
Part of the reason I’ve been struggling to write about this subject is because when one confesses something like this, one feels an immense pressure to write beautifully and devastatingly about it in order to seek some kind of absolution from brutality. But this, somewhat to my despair, is not possible. After all, there are infinite possibilities when writing about one’s rape to give the reader the same satisfaction as the rapist, mostly by way of creating a sort of transference through which the imperilment of the victim can be directly felt by someone beyond them.
It is, however, possible to state plainly and clearly what happened: how he was just coming by to pick up some records he’d left at my house, how he thought he was being romantic when he pinned me against the front door; how I did my obligatory saying no at first softly but then firmer the second time; how, to my shock, I realized that “no” wasn’t going to matter; how, faced with the possibility of greater violence, I accepted that my rightful place was on all fours listening to the lowing of the steam heat, watching the film of condensation form between the window and the window pane, hoping it would all be over soon.
The second time was simply violent. A man I’d been on a bad date with asked if he could use my bathroom and when he realized we were alone, he threw me onto the floor and crushed my jaw in his hand until it opened for him and that’s all you’ll get about it from me because to describe it in any more detail risks further pleasure being taken from my suffering simply because it is an unfortunate reality of rhetoric that the language of violence and the language of vulgarity are next door neighbors.
Now I am supposed to describe in passionate, heart-wrenching detail how this fundamental violation made me feel. But this, too, runs the risk of giving the audience the same satisfaction as the rapist. I refuse – and refused it then also, – to grant these events any more power over me than they have already had. This refusal is in part why, both times I was raped, I did not and would not cry.
Instead, I picked myself up off the bed, off the floor, brushed myself off and refused to think about the matter any further. I thought that by doing this I could spare myself the unforgiving anger of having let it happen. So deep was my cowardice that when I was raped it felt inevitable to me, like sundown or a natural disaster. Astonishment, sorrow, rage – all of these took precedence for me over fear, something which only deepened my sense of guilt. Only now do I recognize in myself the internal wisdom that to cry or to struggle would have only made it worse, would have only fed more into the reserves of those men’s power.
Like many other women who have been raped, at some point, I tried to insinuate to my friends the nature of what had happened that night in my apartment. But my friends were friends with the man who raped me, and I soon realized I would get nowhere by telling them. He was cool as a cucumber, and I’d always been a little too melodramatic. About the second rape I told no one at all. Not the police, not my parents, not even my husband after I got married. Ten years would pass until I told someone, the same ten years that passed before I thought in depth about any of it again.
In the interim, #MeToo – and the backlash against #MeToo – came and went. Thousands of women around the world were standing up for themselves, were speaking truth to power, were writing openly about their rapes. Sometimes, even, there were reparations. But at the time, I was still too young to really understand what power meant and regretfully eschewed participation, believing instead that such things were only for people who had tried or wanted to try to seek justice for themselves, which I did not.
The men who raped me were not teachers or filmmakers or senators, people who had broad accountability to others. They were losers, total nobodies. At the same time, because I did not seek to help myself, nobody else could help me either, and this abnegation of redemption was something about which I felt such profound resentment that even retroactive justice seemed beyond my ken.
I only began thinking seriously about my rape – and here I use the singular noun because this is about the act itself, not how many times it happened to me – very recently, at the tail end of 2024 after I became interested in first the Nibelungenlied and later in the work of Richard Wagner, in particular his opera Die Walküre. There is a scene in Act II of this opera in which the heroine Sieglinde tries to communicate to Siegmund, her lover (and twin brother, but that’s neither here nor there) the pain and sorrow of having been repeatedly raped by her husband Hunding, who, when she was scarcely older than a girl, bought her from thieves and took her to wife.
In it, she describes so many of the feelings about rape I found and still find so difficult to articulate: the alienation she feels from her own body and its ability to feel pleasure, how unworthy she believes herself to be of redemptive love; the long-repressed disgust towards the act itself; the shame of acquiescence; the fear that she has been in some way permanently ruined, and the guilt she feels for having brought Siegmund into her life even though he both loves and understands her.
I remember, very distinctly, sitting on the sofa with my husband (who I subjected to the entire Ring cycle over the course of four days) and watching this scene unfold on the tiny television in my living room. While it didn’t trigger some kind of cinematic flashback for me, I do remember feeling very sad. This sadness was voiceless; I could find no words for it. And it was perhaps this very inarticulateness that made me realize I needed to return to that part of my life, not with the dutiful, grim-faced sentiment of having to remember something difficult but with something like compassion.
Often, I ask myself why it was this particular depiction of a woman’s suffering that finally forced me to step out of the shadow of my own repression. I think the simplest answer is that the vast majority of my life has been devoted in some way or another to classical music; it is no small coincidence that I was raped in music school. I also think that music, sentimental as this may sound, has a way of penetrating more acutely into the affective slurry that is our deeper consciousness. And unlike a character from a novel or movie, Sieglinde, being a figment of the stage, can be inhabited by anyone. There have been hundreds of Sieglindes in the last 150 years of the Ring cycle – that I could, in my own way be one of them was not all that far-fetched. (I am, however, probably the world’s worst-sung Sieglinde.)
But, as I wrote in the third and hopefully final version of my essay “Sieglinde as Heroine,” I find Wagner’s depiction of Sieglinde not as a victim but as an arbiter of her own fate – including the terror of realizing what her fate has been up until the moment she tries to change it – to be both compassionate and dignified. Never once does he back down from or equivocate upon the choices she makes, from the drugging of her rapist to her embrace of sexual freedom. His refusal, contra Götterdämmerung to give into the urge to depict Sieglinde’s rape outright also conveys an implicit knowledge that to do so would take away from the even greater tragedy, which is the long afterlife of rape in both the body and the mind.
In Act II, when the sum of Sieglinde’s traumatic sorrow bubbles to the surface all at once, this, to me, is not just another example of opera’s melodramatic bent or a requirement of its compressed storytelling. In fact, I think both the urgency and totality of this revelation is very, very real, in part because I myself experienced something similar. One day, I was fine, just like I’d been fine for the past ten years, and the next, I practically collapsed on the sofa of my psychoanalyst in tears.
It must also be remembered here that Wagner predates Freud and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria by twenty years (a fact that is even more remarkable when we consider the id-palace that is Siegfried) and that while depictions of the ‘mad scene’ are as old as opera itself, the idea that what is essentially a mental breakdown could be caused by the failure to repress our most painful memories and truths is for all intents and purposes a modern one. Even Sieglinde’s sudden slumber, while a tried-and-true operatic trope, speaks metaphorically to the process of repression itself and the way it keeps us from living freely, from being truly with the ones we love. We are sometimes so busy sparing ourselves from the world that we forget how to be in it at all.
Furthermore, while so many stories in opera (including in Wagner) respond to the prompt of rape with the promise of revenge, in Die Walküre, revenge is not the order of the day. The project of the Wälsung twins rejects the dichotomy of honor and shame that so defines rape and continues to impede the progress of women even to this day. Instead, they choose nothing less than new, emergent, ethical life. Sieglinde may have put Hunding under, but neither she nor Siegmund desires to kill him. That the old, bad world catches up with them, that they are forced to reckon with these stakes at the very end of their journey together is one of the Ring’s great tragedies.
Thus, while it is easy to say, “kill your rapist,” it is harder to ask ourselves if there is a way to find reparation for our pain without succumbing to the desire to oppress in kind. To go forth into springtime instead of driving a stake through the heart of malice is a deeply radical answer to the question of how a wronged person should be. The more time passes between now and my rape, the more I think it’s the right one.
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Inevitably, when I began my work on Die Walküre, I also began, if obliquely, to work on myself. The two were concurrent processes that informed one another. This is one of the many reasons I had to write the essay “Sieglinde as Heroine” no fewer than three times. The first, in 2024, was written when the topic hit too close to home. The second, written in February of 2026 went the opposite route and did not mention Sieglinde’s rape at length whatsoever. The third iteration, while still imperfect to me (these are long, self-published essays which come with artistic risks of their own) finally approaches something like a complete treatment of the subject.
This interpenetration of the critical and the personal begs the obvious question of what art does or should do for us. I, of course, identify with Sieglinde. But (with the exception of this essay) the purpose of my work with her is not to substantiate this personal relation but to bring forth that which has gone unacknowledged in the work itself – the Ring – to the attention of the listener.
The interpretive act of repositioning Sieglinde as the heroine and shifting Siegmund to a more receptive role (which is more true in and of itself than most viewers initially realize) was for me also a political one, a way of giving voice to the voiceless, of dredging from the margins all the acts of courage and ways of being that were already there – all one had to do was look.
One of the great crimes of not only the Ring but of the 150 years that have come after it is how little Sieglinde is remarked upon by others. There is no in-depth analysis of Sieglinde in the books of Deryck Cooke, Robert Doninger, George Bernard Shaw, Theodor Adorno, Alex Ross's book on Wagner, the Oxford Guide to the Ring, Rudy Sabor’s four-volume set, or in any of the other major popular texts in English on the Ring cycle.
That Sieglinde could play a lasting role in the Ring’s cosmology beyond the birth of Siegfried is an idea I have never seen expressed before. Even in the opera itself, only Siegmund acknowledges the basic facts of her existence: that she has been wronged, that she is heroic, that she, both as herself but also as a human life, is worth everything. Only he, and he alone, recognizes her as his equal.
The Ring works dialectically, is its own system of narrative and signification. As such, all readings of the Ring that are equally dialectical, closed and systemic are, by their nature, valid. That the Ring could in fact be about rape itself – the rape of the earth by both Alberich and Wotan, the rape of both its heroines (and the threats of rape made against many of its other female characters, such as the Rhinemaidens, Freia, and Erda) but also the obfuscated rapes of its two heroes – Siegmund’s ritual humiliation and his symbolic death via an explicit act of penetration and Siegfried’s disturbing repetition of the theft of his mother’s own bodily autonomy through a magic potion – is as clear as day to me.
But to make this clear to others means more to me than mere analysis, more than the simple righting of a historical wrong, more, even, than reclaiming a male work of art for one’s own purposes. It is, to use Sieglinde’s own words about the gaze she shares with Wälse at her wedding, the seeking of “sorrow and solace at once.” It is the closest approximation to justice I can pursue for myself using the methods – the craft – I have available to me. It is an attempt to make something that is meaningful out of such senseless and silent wretchedness. It does what this essay cannot.
