Michael Dyson, Sea, Mirror, Woman, Love: Some Recurrent Imagery in ‘Opera and Drama’

‘Opera and Drama’ is full of imagery, much of it very striking. Apart from the major framework of sexuality – with male and female, impregnation and birth, and love and marriage as prominent notions – Wagner also uses images of the sea in connection with emotions and music, and of a mirror as a source of self-knowledge, whether for the individual or for society. These ideas are in themselves by no means original and cannot fail to register with any reader of the work. They have also been much discussed, so I will mainly limit my treatment to looking in some detail at the extended pictures that punctuate the narrative and considering Wagner’s use of them in combination as part of the way in which he develops his thesis.