Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is invoked in Simone de Beauvoir’s account of the cultural myths through which men imagine woman as Nature. His poetry gives that ambivalence two striking forms: the elemental, generative union of sea and fire, and the Eternal Feminine as a force that leads humanity upward. Together, these references show how woman can be figured both as material origin and as spiritual ideal.

Goethe and the Maternal Elements

In discussing woman as Mother, Spouse, and Idea, Beauvoir describes nature as both the source of human life and a power that resists human mastery. Patriarchal thought, she argues, assigns active form and creative force to the male principle while casting woman as passive matter. Yet this opposition does not erase the perceived power of the maternal: the earth shelters and nourishes the seed, and fertility goddesses remain associated with harvests, herds, prosperity, and life itself.

Goethe’s Faust, Part Two supplies a compact expression of this elemental doubleness. Its praise of the sea and waves encircled by sacred fire exalts both water and fire, joining the maternal symbol of the sea to the male-coded symbol of fire in what Beauvoir calls a strange adventure. The image complicates any simple hierarchy: water may be represented as receptive, but it is also part of the generative union through which life is imagined.

The Eternal Feminine

At the close of Faust, Part Two, Goethe’s declaration that the Eternal Feminine leads humanity upward becomes the decisive example of a reversal in woman’s symbolic direction. Rather than drawing man back toward earth and material origin, this figure beckons him toward heaven. Beauvoir presents the shift as a transformation of the same broad association between woman and nature: the feminine can signify not only bodily life and maternal depth, but also spiritual elevation.

The image belongs to a wider cultural pattern in which woman is made to carry meanings that exceed any individual woman. In Beauvoir’s account, such idealization does not simply free her from the association with nature; it recasts that association as a route to transcendence. Goethe’s phrase therefore stands beside the maternal imagery rather than canceling it: woman appears at once as the ground from which life rises and as the figure through whom man imagines ascent.

Literary and Thematic Role

Goethe functions here as a literary witness to the double symbolism Beauvoir traces, not as the subject of a biographical narrative. The two references to Faust, Part Two mark contrasting but connected movements: the sea and fire evoke generation through elemental union, while the Eternal Feminine turns the feminine image upward toward the spiritual. Their juxtaposition makes visible how literary language can preserve opposing valuations of woman within a single symbolic tradition.

The contrast also sharpens Beauvoir’s account of patriarchal myth. The maternal figure is indispensable to life but is associated with matter and passivity; the Eternal Feminine is exalted as a guide to spiritual elevation. Both meanings place woman within a symbolic system organized around what she represents for man. Goethe’s poetry helps Beauvoir show the system’s range and instability: the feminine can be earthbound source, sustaining power, and heavenly guide, without thereby being presented as an independent subject in her own right.