Opera, or the Undoing of Women

An incisive and impassioned examination of women’s treatment in opera.

Catherine Clément analyzes the plots of over thirty prominent operas-Otello and Siegfried to Madame Butterfly and The Magic Flute-through the lenses of feminism and literary theory to unveil the negative messages about women in stories familiar to every opera listener.

“Is any book about opera more startling and acute than Catherine Clement’s Opera, or the Undoing of Women? Clement’s bitter, uncomfortable insights into ‘this spectacle thought up to adore, and also to kill, the feminine character’ are only now, nearly 25 years after their initial publication in France, beginning to gain currency within the relentlessly male world of music scholarship and criticism. Clement’s impassioned, densely argued study makes the case for a single, obvious, repressed truth: that opera, as Susan McClary argues in the introductory essay, is ‘an art form that demands the submission or death of the female character for the sake of narrative closure,’ a genre in which women who deviate from traditional gender roles-powerful, angry, or sexual women-are abused and destroyed to the accompaniment of irresistibly seductive music.”

— Women’s Review of Books