Virgin Mary

The Virgin Mary occupies a decisive and double-edged place in Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of the myths through which patriarchal society defines women. Christianity makes her the most perfected image of the woman devoted to the Good: a merciful mother who nourishes, heals, protects, and pleads for humanity. Yet this elevation depends on a defeat. Mary is glorified as mother only after sexuality and independent maternal power have been stripped away, and after she accepts her subordinate place. Her sanctity thus dignifies women within a social order that keeps them annexed to men.

The Ideal Mother in Christian Myth

The Virgin Mary stands opposite Eve, the figure associated with humanity’s damnation. Where Eve mediates the Fall, Mary mediates salvation; she crushes the serpent beneath her foot and becomes the radiant face of redeemed womanhood. The contrast does not grant women equal authority. The Church, in Beauvoir’s account, serves a patriarchal civilization in which woman remains man’s docile servant, and Mary’s glory gives sacred form to that assigned role. She reigns over human creatures, but the authority she represents is inseparable from submission.

That submission is enacted through Mary’s relation to her son. In Beauvoir’s reading, the mother kneels before the child and freely recognizes her inferiority. Mary’s own declaration, “I am the handmaiden of the Lord,” condenses the ideal: honor comes through service, not through the restoration of a woman’s power over life and death. The result is a paradoxical rehabilitation. Woman is exalted at the very moment her defeat is completed; she receives the most splendid apotheosis as a vassal, after openly abdicating the position of dominator.

Virginity, Motherhood, and Renounced Power

Mary’s virginity is central to this transformation. Its significance is chiefly negative: she is the mother through whom the flesh is redeemed precisely because she is not carnal, touched, or possessed. The image rejects her as wife in order to exalt her as Woman-Mother. Unlike the ancient Great Mother, who could generate the world and reign over it without submitting to a husband’s service, Mary’s sanctity is built around sexual inviolability and obedience.

This contrast marks a broader change in the meaning of maternity. The ancient goddesses Ishtar, Astarte, and Cybele could embody both life and death, and their power made men subject to them. Under Christianity, life and death belong to God alone. The maternal body no longer confers sovereignty: the soul’s destiny unfolds beyond the mother’s jurisdiction, and baptism renders insignificant older ceremonies involving the burning or drowning of the placenta. Nature, though still associated with woman, is declared originally bad and powerless against grace. To overcome the stain attached to her, woman must bow before God, whose will subordinates her to man. Her inherited associations with nature and maternity remain, but their meanings are recast: what had been calamitous becomes auspicious, and black magic becomes white magic.

Intercessor, Healer, and Guardian

Medieval Christian invocations and images give this obedient mother an expansive role as a source and guardian of life. Litanies address Mary as fertile dew, a fountain of joy, a channel of mercy, and a well whose waters cool the passions; they call her the breast from which God nurses orphans. Other invocations present her healing hands restoring damaged faces and senses, calming passion, reviving the paralyzed, strengthening the weak, and raising the dead. In Beauvoir’s interpretation, these attributes gather older feminine associations with fertility, nourishment, healing, and the hidden vitality of the earth. Mary does not create life independently; she brings into view and sustains what lies concealed.

Her mediation extends between humanity and God. Where woman had been called the devil’s gateway, Mary becomes heaven’s portal: images show her opening a gate or window onto paradise, or raising a ladder from earth to heaven. In scenes of the Last Judgment she pleads beside her Son, sometimes baring her breast in supplication through the authority of her motherhood. She shelters children in the folds of her cloak and follows them through dangers across oceans and battlefields. As one of the Virgins of the Scales, she smiles and tilts the balance toward the Good. Her tenderness does not overturn divine justice; it appeals to it in the name of mercy and charity.

Tenderness Within the Patriarchal Order

The Virgin’s gentleness also embodies a quality Beauvoir sets against masculine ideals of law, reason, and necessity. Men construct systems of destiny and order; Mary represents benevolence, contingency, and favor. Her maternal knowledge encompasses what wounds men, humiliates their will, and exposes the limits they would rather ignore. Though subordinated to spirit, she remains at the carnal border of spirit, softening what Beauvoir describes as masculine architecture: she introduces luxury, grace, and the unforeseen into a world organized by hard edges and useful instruments.

This maternal image is reassuring because it makes nature seem good. The mother is firmly placed within family and society, aligned with custom and law, and therefore appears not as a threat but as a smiling mystery. Men turn toward her as a way of approaching what they have lost or left behind: life, earth, childhood, ancestry, tradition, and roots. In Beauvoir’s account, to worship the mother is also to try to appropriate riches that remain foreign to the male subject. Mary’s tenderness can soften and console, but its cultural function remains ambivalent: the compassionate mother is welcomed precisely because her power has been made compatible with men’s order.

Cultural Reach and Significance

The Virgin’s status as Christianity’s most perfected image of regenerated womanhood is visible, Beauvoir notes, in the fervor of medieval litanies and the recurring language of fountains, healing, shelter, and passage to heaven. The image draws together fertility and purity, bodily nurture and spiritual intercession. It makes maternity sacred while separating it from sexual possession and independent sovereignty, and it presents obedience not as humiliation alone but as the condition of honor.

Mary therefore illustrates how patriarchal myth can praise women without granting them autonomy. Her benevolence is real within the symbolic world Beauvoir describes: she heals, protects, and pleads. But those powers are recoded as service, and her supremacy is bounded by her submission to God and the order that subordinates her to man. The result is not a return of the ancient Mother Goddess, but a new ideal in which a woman may be adored as the source of consolation so long as she renounces rule over the life she embodies.