The concept of the "eternal feminine" (German: das Ewig-Weibliche) was introduced by Goethe in the "Chorus Mysticus" at the end of Faust, Part Two (1832): Everything transient Is but a symbol; The insufficient Here finds fulfilment; The indescribable Here becomes deed; The eternal-feminine Draws us on high.
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.
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.
"[11] In Goethe's mature thought (he was eighty when Faust, Part Two was published), encompassing the range of human experience requires transcending the traditional stuff of patriarchy, as it tends to efface the feminine.
In her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), feminist Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller praised Goethe's portrayal of women in his writings: "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.
[19] Fuller's tragically premature death means that for a considered reflection on the eternal feminine from a feminist Transcendentalist perspective we must go to Ednah Dow Cheney, who in 1885 gave a lecture at the Concord School of Philosophy on "Das Ewig-Weibliche".
Goethe's lines on the eternal feminine, she noted, come at the very end of his last and greatest work: "We may almost say that they are the last important utterance of his mind, the climax of all his thought, all his experience.
"[28] She observes that "the idea of womanhood always suggests that of relation, symbolizing as she does the attractive forces of existence, beauty winning to union,...in one all-comprehensive word, love.
[34] The "one simple thought" that runs all through Faust is expressed "in the last grand verse", where is revealed "that which enters into every faith, which underlies the beautiful in art, the ideal in philosophy, the essence of morality, the meaning of life.
Sex, as it has evolved from its earliest beginnings "to its beautiful outcome in the highest human relation,... is a shadowing forth of a... duality", a "double strand"—the masculine and the feminine.
"[38] We "may as well divide the rainbow by arbitrary lines"[39] as seek to separate characteristics so "unstable and interchangeable", so "constantly blended in manifestation... and in the highest natures the most perfectly".
[40] Earlier in the lecture, she had spoken of how impossible it is to trace the distinction of sex in mental life: "In externals, in the realm of form, it is easy enough to make divisions, but in any finer sense it can only be felt, no analysis has ever been keen enough to detect it.
[42] Their wide acceptance had led the Transcendentalist writer Theodore Parker to argue that "in a semi-barbarous civilization, such as ours still is," men take any suggestion that sexual difference extends to the mind as "the pretext for a claim of sovereignty, and a power of oppression" over women.
[38] Typically, in a society in which the masculine dominates, man has "largely taken the material aggressive part of the life of the world, and... woman, in so far truly his worst enemy, has yielded to his exactions and fostered his pride of authority and self-love.
Indeed, for Cheney, the world's most fearful evil "is the wrong against woman,... which seems to be rooted in the ages, and to-day casts its poisonous slime over all countries, and all societies".
[47] What is required, therefore, is radical reform—the loftiest goal, Fuller had said, of the fully realized soul[48]—so that "evident wrongs are eliminated and both sexes will develop in freedom and finally into perfect harmony".
As Carol Diethe notes, on the one hand he mocked the self-righteous Wilhelmine women who fancied themselves its embodiment in relation to their husbands when actually they were (in Nietzsche's opinion) morally and spiritually bankrupt.
[50] On the other hand, his respect for Goethe meant he could not reject the notion outright, and for a time he even seems to have hoped that Lou Andreas-Salomé—a woman who also fascinated Rilke and Freud—would be to him a kind of spiritualized manifestation of the eternal feminine as helpmeet or muse.
Referring to its appearance at the end of Faust, for instance, she writes, "This mode of the eternal feminine reproduces the social injunction on the two-sex model to be wives, mothers, and moral guardians of men, and of their families.
[57] For an anti-democrat like Nietzsche, Christianity, idealism and feminism were all part of the general levelling down of Western modernity to a mediocre 'herd' which was destroying its capacity to produce the exceptional individuals necessary to survival and growth.
"[61] In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche says that his views on women depend on something unteachable deep down—that what we call our "convictions" about the sexes are mere "signposts to the problem which we are—or, better, the great stupidity which we are".
Young cites the example of Meta von Salis, who wrote that "a man of Nietzsche's breadth of vision and sureness of instinct has the right to get things wrong in one instance".
"[66] In the second sentence he is clearly referring to his feminist friends; in the first not so much, since, as the comment by Meta von Salis just cited indicates, their conception of the eternal feminine was rather different from his (as he was well aware).
In "A Cross Line", the first story in Keynotes (1893), Egerton's first collection, the female protagonist laughs softly to herself at "the denseness of man", musing that "the wisest of them can only say we are enigmas.
As Gilman is at pains to show in Women and Economics and her other writings, to be "over-feminine" (or "over-masculine") has decidedly negative effects both on the individuals concerned and on society.
'"[86] That Gilman is being ironic is clear from her later characterization of the "parasite wife" as a "dainty domestic vampire" with "insatiable demands" which the deluded husband "pours forth his life's service to meet.
"[96] A century later, May, too, brings up the unfulfilling and at times exploitative nature of Goethe's liaisons with women, and wonders whether he wrote Faust partly "to relieve his own guilt.
'"[100] In a much-quoted passage from Zora Neale Hurston's autobiographical essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928), the eternal feminine, including its cosmic aspect, contributes significantly to her secure sense of self-worth as a black American woman: At certain times I have no race.
When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance....
[104] Among those virtues variously regarded as essentially feminine are "modesty, gracefulness, purity, delicacy, civility, compliancy, reticence, chastity, affability, [and] politeness".