SOURCE: Poster, Mark. “What Does Wotan Want?: Ambivalent Feminism in Wagner's Ring.” New German Critique 53 (spring 1991): 131-48.

In the following essay, Poster addresses several sociopolitical interpretations of the Ring and argues that the work should also be viewed in terms of its representation of gender.

In the four operas of the Ring cycle, Wagner presents a world in crisis and undergoing change but a coherent, rule-governed world nonetheless. Using as his raw material the medieval saga of the Nibelungenlied,¹ Wagner works up a presentation of a world in which the central character, Wotan, ruler of this world, attempts to carry out a plan and is unsuccessful in doing so. Such a bare representation of the drama of the Ring is highly misleading because everything about Wotan is problematic: his statement of his plan, his will to carry out the statement, his action in relation to the statement, and...