Pregnant Virgin

The pregnant virgin is Marion Woodman’s name for the structural image at the center of feminine-individuation. The phrase names “the part of us who is outcast, the part who comes to consciousness through mining our leaden darkness until we bring her silver out” (Woodman 1985, quoted in Woodman 1993, p. 106). She is one-in-herself, “forever open to new life, new possibilities” — the inner woman whose receptivity is not deficiency but vocation.

The image is structurally alchemical: the virgin is “pregnant” because her openness to the spirit produces the divine child that is the opus’s issue. She is paired in Woodman’s vocabulary with the black-madonna — “the dark earthy virgin” who “is nature impregnated by spirit, accepting her own body as the chalice of the spirit” (Woodman 1993, p. 82) — and is therefore not the disembodied virgin of patriarchal Christianity but a figure of the redemption of matter.

Woodman attaches the image to the metamorphosis of caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. The pregnant virgin is the inhabitant of the chrysalis stage, the moment in which “life as we have known it is over and we are, for all practical purposes, alone… No longer who we were, we know not who we may become” (Woodman 1985). The image is therefore not a stage attained but a structural moment recurrently re-entered — the via passiva of midlife-as-pupation in feminine register.

The concept does not belong to women alone. “Both men and women are searching for their pregnant virgin,” Woodman writes (1985); the feminine the term names is structural rather than gendered.

Relationships

Primary sources

The Pregnant Virgin (Woodman 1985), quoted in woodman-conscious-femininity-interviews (Woodman 1993, pp. 105–106)