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.

Catherine Clément has been an academic, a diplomat, and cultural editor of Le Matin. She has written books on structuralism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism and is the author of Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture and the coauthor, with Hélène Cixous, of The Newly Born Woman.