Opera; or, The Undoing of Women [Paperback]

Catherine Clement (Author), Betsy Wing (Translator), Susan McClary (Foreword)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The title makes it clear: this is a book with an emphatic point of view. Clément, a French feminist philosopher, has written an intensely subjective meditation on the unhappy fate of women in opera. The result is often infuriating, sometimes enlightening.

Clément is an enthusiast whose passion for opera struggles with revulsion at much of its content. Critics are dry, remote--and male. She prefers a poetic, Freudian approach that leaves out something crucial to her argument: cultural context. The grim choices historically available to women haven't been peculiar to opera: murder, suicide, disease, and madness have also been their lot in drama and the novel. Perhaps it's Western civilization that has been the undoing of women.

Clément finds the experience of the opera house almost too powerful. Here she examines texts with an awareness not "dimmed by beauty and the sublime," an exercise that has a cumulative effect. She highlights the social framework of plots otherwise exalted by music: in La Bohème, a bitter tale of freezing poverty; in Tosca, a heroine who acts against a police state; in The Magic Flute, a battle of the sexes told by the winning side (i.e., male). But La Fanciulla del West, with a victorious central character, has never been as popular: "Opera lovers do not like this antiheroine. She is made for tomorrow."

By the lengthy final chapter, on the Ring cycle, the author has relaxed her argument. She casts an eye on both male and female, on the themes of love, incest, and the triumph of human over god. Her ecstatic response to the cycle's music--not to mention the gender-indiscriminate "undoing"--lays her conflict with opera to rest. She is, as she says elsewhere, "silenced by emotion."

Clément's writing, in Betsy Wing's deft translation, is amusing and unacademic. Her readings entertain without always persuading--or even involving--the reader. In that way, the book evokes Wayne Koestenbaum's The Queen's Throat, another case of a sensibility run rampant. Like that book, The Undoing of Women can inspire fruitful thoughts despite its own perverseness. --David Olivenbaum

From Publishers Weekly

Writing with brio and bravura that a novelist might envy, French literary critic Clement, coauthor of The Newly Born Woman, initiates a feminist critique of music with what many will perceive as a highly selective, naive and obvious analysis of the political agenda of opera, examining its origins, artists and especially its plots. Clement, clearly a lover of opera, points out that "Reading the texts . . . I found to my fear and horror, words that killed, words that told every time of women's undoing." Woman attains her "glorious moment" only in singing of her own destructiona sung death toward which, almost invariably, the entire plot progresses. Butterfly kills herself. Carmen is murdered. Mimi the invalid is preparing for her death almost from the beginning of La Boheme but her lover "sees nothing." Lucia di Lammermoor is only the most memorable of an archetypal woman driven to madness. Women who refuse the roles assigned to them by men are plunged into suffering and death. That this misogynist creed is virtually ignored in favor of attending "only" to the exquisite music that promotes it renders the effects all the more insidious, claims Clement. She does concede the existence of male victims, but notes that they are "madmen, Negroes, and jesters" who do not figure as "real men" in the cosmology of opera.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press; 1st edition (June 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816635269
• ISBN-13: 978-0816635269
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,159,742 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Veritably a rethinking of women's demise in opera, 7 stars, June 18, 1999

By 

Rachel Abbinanti ([e-mail]) (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Opera; or, The Undoing of Women (Paperback)

What has Opera done to Women? is the focus of Clement's thougths, short essays on the oppressive emotive cauldron Divas inhabit. The world of Opera scholarship is only (within the last ten years) has seen the vigours of social and political perspectives discussed. Writers like Susan McClary, Linda Hutcheon,Tom Sutchliffe,and Anthony Arblaster have deeply thought works scouring the social dimensions of Opera left unattended since its inception. Clement brings a wealth of intellectual sensibilities as well, a Lacanian, feminist who traverses inside the singers mind while she is singing it seems. And saying, "this is not a nice place to sing." And what does Opera grant it's women always fated for death and domesitication,or prison . Clement's readings traverse the traditional operatic repertoire giving you the opera's narrative as she comments and reflects. The section "Tetralogy of the Ring" incites the chauvinistic world of Wagner,how all gods have power, but the Man-Gods can strip the Woman-Gods of their power when they choose to rebel, as Wotan does to Brunnhilde in Wagner's "Die Walkure" in the "Ring". Songs of Lunatics is what women in opera potray as in Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" Girls who leap into space, Tosca and Melisande. Or in Bizet's "Carmen" who has no fixed place, her lightness is always in darkness away from lechery and exploitation. You will feel Clement's compassion for Opera's oppressed cadre,and her wrath in speaking of opera's deeply prejudiced phallocentricism. Indeed this has been the most profound book on opera. It makes you rethink all you have ever known, or didn't know on this most cloistered self-preserved realm of music drama. I had wished Clement had ventured into this century for there are profound examples of positive even rebellious roles of women, as in Alexander Goehr's "Behold The Sun" set in Anabaptist Germany of the 1500's, or Luigi Nono's "Like a Burgeoning Light of Love" with a text by Louise Michel ,where three women visit the war fields of this century and comment.

1 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hey!.., October 9, 2005

By 

Cihuacoatl "Plumed Serpent" (I live inside of you) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Opera; or, The Undoing of Women (Paperback)

I have trouble liking this because I (never been a fanof Dworkin and MacKinnon writin together or I just don't get 'em..)Opera? I've never never been a fan of Opera So much, but yEs it's reflective of the times it's written in perhaps. Maria Callas, a vision sO lovely, singing "Laksme'" is not so easy to imagine in terms of sexism.. Dido dying in "Dido and Aeneas" in "Thy Hand Belinda"..Is this not gay almost? (Or "Homoerotic" for you scholarly types..) That is by Henry Purcell. Surely,though, the themes are from the times, and so I say..Hey! what can we do but see that historical context? Well, I'm going to go away and go and meet Othello at my tape player now. I got to meet Kiri Te Kanawa and I hope I get to meet her again one day again in ("When I am lain in earth"..) person..