The eternal feminine (), a concept first introduced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at the end of his play Faust (1832), is a transcendental ideality of the feminine or womanly abstracted from the attributes, traits and behaviors of a large number of women and female figures. In Faust, these include historical, fictional, and mythological women, goddesses, and even female personifications of abstract qualities such as wisdom. As an ideal, the eternal feminine has an ethical component, which means that not all women contribute to it. Those who, for example, spread malicious gossip about other women or even just conform slavishly to their society's conventions are by definition non-contributors. If there is no element, however slight, of transcendence, of moral beauty or worth, nothing that "draws us on high" (zieht uns hinan — the last line of Faust), there is no eternal feminine. Since the eternal feminine appears without explanation (though not without preparation) only in the last two lines of the 12,111-line play, it is left to the reader to work out which traits and behaviors it involves and which of the various women and female figures in the play contribute them. On these matters Goethe scholars have achieved a fair degree of consensus. The eternal feminine also has societal, cosmic and metaphysical dimensions.
Since Goethe's time the concept of the eternal feminine has been used by a number of philosophers, psychologists, psychoanalysts, theologians, feminists, poets and novelists. By some it has been employed or developed in ways congruent with Goethe's original conception, but by others in ways that depart from it considerably in one or more respects, not always felicitously. A complicating factor is that when the expression "eternal feminine" passed into popular usage, it tended (except among the knowledgeable) to lose any connection with Goethe's original idea and to be taken as referring to the prevailing cultural stereotypes of what constitutes the feminine.
Goethe The concept of the "eternal feminine" was introduced by Goethe in the "Chorus Mysticus" at the end of Faust, Part Two (1832):
Although Goethe does not introduce the eternal feminine until the last two lines of the play, he prepared for its appearance at the outset. "Equally pertinent in this regard", writes J. M. van der Laan, "are Gretchen and Helen, who alternate with each other from start to finish and ultimately combine with others to constitute the Eternal-Feminine"J. M. van der Laan, "The Enigmatic Eternal-Feminine", in Goethe's Faust and Cultural Memory: Comparatist Interfaces, edited by Lorna Fitzsimmons (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: Lehigh University Press, 2012), p. 37. At the beginning of Part I, Act IV, Faust glimpses in the passing clouds "a godlike female form" in which he discerns Juno, Leda, Aurora, Helen and Gretchen. This "lovely form" does not dissolve, but rises into the aether, drawing, Faust says, "the best of my soul forth with itself"—rather as the eternal feminine does in the last line of the play. Also embodiments of the eternal feminine are four other women who appear with the redeemed Gretchen at the end of Part II, Act V: Magna Peccatrix (the "great sinner" who anointed Jesus), Mulier Samaritana (the Samaritan woman at the well), Maria Aegyptiaca (Mary of Egypt), and Mater Gloriosa (Mary, mother of Jesus). Then there are Galatea, who appears in Part II, Act II as a surrogate for Aphrodite; the Graces Aglaia (representing beauty), Hegemone (representing creativity), and Euphrosyne (representing joy), who feature briefly in Part II, Act I; and even the uncanny Mothers, whom Faust visits in Part II, Act I to conjure up Helen.van der Laan, "The Enigmatic Eternal-Feminine", pp. 37–40. Sophia, the biblical personification of divine wisdom, does not appear per se in Faust, but she is subtly present in Helen, not to mention the other women; her attributes (Wisdom 7:23–26) recall those of the female figures manifested in the clouds; and she is alluded to in Goethe's repeated references to eternal light (cf. Wisdom 7:26).van der Laan, "The Enigmatic Eternal-Feminine", pp. 40–43. Significantly, the women who contribute to the eternal feminine often appear in groups, and at times one of them calls up the image of another. In Helen there are hints of Gretchen (in the cloud scene) and Sophia; Galatea appears as an Aphrodite figure. The eternal feminine is a communal affair, a sisterhood.
However, not all the female figures who appear in the play contribute to the eternal feminine. As van der Laan notes, "Lieschen, who gossips about the misfortunes of Barbara, pregnant out of wedlock, does not possess the qualities later to be associated with the Eternal-Feminine. These qualities are also lacking in the witches of the Walpurgis Night. Only a select number of the play's many feminine figures contribute something of themselves to the construction of the ideality Goethe finally reveals at the end of the play."van der Laan, "The Enigmatic Eternal-Feminine", p. 39.
The subversive side of Goethe's eternal feminine is highlighted by Nietzsche scholar Carol Diethe, who observes that Goethe, like Nietzsche in a different way later, used the concept to challenge the "blinkered bourgeois morality" of nineteenth-century Germany: "In Goethe's case, that morality ought to have put the child murderess Gretchen beyond the pale: at the end of Faust I (1808), she is not just a fallen woman but a felon, which is precisely why Goethe places her in the redemptive role, forcing his wealthy Weimar theater audience to show tolerance, willy-nilly."Carol Diethe, "Eternal Feminine/Womanly", Historical Dictionary of Nietzscheanism, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2007), p. 80.
A host of female figures—van der Laan mentions at least fifteen, not counting the Mothers—contribute something of themselves and their various symbolic possibilities to the eternal feminine. The range of connotations is extraordinarily diverse. While the eternal feminine symbolizes such qualities as beauty, truth, love, mercy, and grace, it "also personifies the transcendent realm of ultimate being, of divine wisdom and creative power which forever exceeds human reach, but at the same time ever draws us into itself."van der Laan, "The Enigmatic Eternal-Feminine", p. 43. Goethe's "Eternal Feminine," writes the Korean-American philosopher T. K. Seung, "is the supreme cosmic power for the governance of the world."T. K. Seung, Goethe, Nietzsche, and Wagner: Their Spinozan Epics of Love and Power (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2006), p. 124. The "feminine principle", which "operates in every human heart", is "a cosmic principle."Seung, Goethe, Nietzsche, and Wagner, p. 146. Seung sees a parallel to the Taoist descriptions of Yin and Yang, observing that in Chinese philosophy "Yin is the feminine principle; Yang is the masculine principle.... But Yin is the mother of all things. The primacy of Yin over Yang is expressed by the phrase 'Yin and Yang.' The Chinese never say 'Yang and Yin.' The ancient Chinese belief [is] that Yin is stronger than Yang."Seung, Goethe, Nietzsche, and Wagner, p. 129. Citing the opinion of Goethe scholar Hans Arens that "the Eternal-Feminine is not simply to be equated with love. Rather, it is the eternal or divine which reveals itself in the feminine," van der Laan concludes: "As the symbolic representation of divine wisdom and creative power, the Eternal-Feminine can never be grasped or possessed. Beyond all human reach and comprehension, the eternal and divine always draws Faust and humanity onward toward itself."van der Laan, "The Enigmatic Eternal-Feminine", p. 44.
The Goethean concept of the eternal feminine is an ideal for both men and women, to the same degree, if not in the same way. This is shown in the use of common-gendered terms like "us" (Goethe's uns), "humanity" or "people" to refer to those whom it draws upward and on. As Lawrence Kramer notes, "the 'Chorus Mysticus' of Goethe's Faust is deliberately left ungendered at the conclusion of a slowly evolving antiphony of male and female voices. Goethe's chorus removes sexual difference from the sphere of persons to the sphere of principles: the eternal feminine is precisely that which beckons, leads onward, an 'us' that is both male and female."Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 130. In Goethe's mature thought (he finished writing Faust, Part Two shortly before his death at the age of eighty-two), encompassing the range of human experience requires transcending the traditional stuff of patriarchy, as it tends to efface the feminine.Adrian Del Caro, "Margarete-Ariadne: Faust's Labyrinth", in Goethe Yearbook, Vol. XVIII, ed. Daniel Purdy (Rochester, NY: Camden Press, 2011), p. 236. His introduction in his magnum opus of the eternal feminine is an attempt to redress this imbalance and achieve a more comprehensive vision. In T. K. Seung's words, "the noble forms of the Eternal Feminine"—symbolized in the play by the "godlike female form" in the clouds in which Faust discerns Juno, Leda, Aurora, Helen and Gretchen—"are Goethe's transcendent forms, which stand above all positive norms and which enable us to transcend the narrow perspective of our individual self. This power of transcendence is provided by the Eternal Feminine."Seung, Goethe, Nietzsche, and Wagner, pp. 158–159.
Feminist Transcendentalism Margaret Fuller The right to pursue self-culture (Bildung) regardless of sex, race, or social position was at the heart of the project of nineteenth-century New England Transcendentalism.Tiffany K. Wayne, Woman Thinking: Feminism and Transcendentalism in Nineteenth-Century America (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2005), pp. 3, 46. "Self-culture," declared Transcendentalist lecturer John Albee in 1885, "must be held up and measured on the Goethean plan."John Albee, "Goethe's Self-Culture", in The Life and Genius of Goethe, edited by F. B. Sanborn (Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1886), p. 39. He was the husband of Harriet Ryan Albee, the founder of Channing Home.
"Goethe always represents the highest principle on the feminine form," wrote feminist Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller in her essay "Goethe" (1841)Margaret Fuller, "Goethe", in The Dial, Vol. II, no. I (July 1841), p. 26. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), she wrote that Goethe, "educating the age to a clearer consciousness" of what humanity can be, "elevating the human being, in the most imperfect states of society, by continual efforts of self-culture," takes "as good care of women as of men."Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1845), p. 112. "He aims at a pure self-subsistence, and free development of any powers with which they may be gifted by nature as much for them as for men. They are units [individuals] addressed as souls. Accordingly, the meeting between man and woman, as represented by him, is equal and noble."Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, p. 115. His major female characters are "very individual, yet arouse an infinite expectation. ... Their different characters have free play, ... for nothing is enforced or conventional."Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, p. 116. They anticipate "an era of freedom" in which "New individualities shall be developed in the actual world."Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, p. 117.