Sunday, October 28, 2007

The Nibelungenlied as a Feminist Text

In preparing to finish up the Nibelungenlied, I picked up a book called Brides and Doom by Jerold Frakes which has a really interesting take on the true focus of the a few different German epics. Of the Nibelungenlied, Frakes says that he attempts to "address issues of sexual politics as represented by the Nibelungenlied" through the analysis of the property and power exercised by both Kriemhild and Brunhild. (5) He says that the Nibelungenlied poet is "consciously [confronting] the problems of gender which were generated by the social changes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries." (177) He even goes so far as the call the situations inflicted upon Brunhild and Kriemhild exactly what they are in modern terms - rape, wife beating, theft, oppression and so on.

I see the point; I actually appreciate the point. When we look at the storyline in purely narrative terms, we have two men who trick and rape one woman, beat another one when she threatens to expose them, and kill a man who is a threat to exposing the whole thing. The men then steal, sink, or leave behind all the property the women own so they are totally dependent on their husbands and are completely perplexed when one of the women decides she got the short end of the deal and takes matters into her own hands.

But in order for the work to be consciously feminist, the poem needs to present the events in those terms or comment upon the events and it does neither. The only person to be presented as "robbed" of something is Kriemhild, and even then she is only robbed of her husband, instead of, say, her treasure, her autonomy, her vengeance and her selfhood. When she tries to enact her vengeance, she is literally demonized and killed for her trouble.

I would be more likely to suggest that the gender and property relations in the play are problematic, but I don't know if I could go so far as to say they are consciously problematized.

1 comment:

Janel said...

I suppose it's not consciously feminist, but who can really identify with and look up to Hagan or Siegfried? In a sense, the poem is identifying issues of gender and politics, although not really commenting all that negatively on the despicable behavior of the "heroes." I know as a modern reader, I find all of Siegfried and Hagan's actions as violent, repulsive, and malicious, but the only reason I recognize that Siegfried and Hagan are wrong in their mistreatment of women is because of my distance and my education. I feel like you're right in stating that the relationships in the poem are not consciously problemitized and therefore cannot be considered a feminist text in the Middle Ages, but I also think in reading The Nibelungenlied we are forced to recognize how cultures, including our own, can justify ridiculously violent acts against women.