Eternal feminine
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The eternal feminine, a concept first introduced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 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. Since the eternal feminine appears without explanation (though not without preparation) only in the last two lines of the 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 certain 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 be taken as referring to the prevailing cultural stereotypes of what constitutes the feminine.
See also
- The Eternal Feminine (1931 film)
- Cult of Domesticity
- Erich Neumann (psychologist)
- Eternity
- Feminine
- Gender role
- Ideal womanhood
- Yamato nadeshiko
- New Woman
- Separate Spheres
- The Angel in the House
- Thealogy
