The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation

By Marion Woodman.

Newsletter, Vol. XI, No. 3, 1985

The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation. By Marion Woodman. (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1985, 204 pages.)

The Pregnant Virgin is the third of Marion Woodman’s books, all published within a time span of five years. The themes are persistent—psyche-soma awareness, the rape of the feminine by men and women alike in a patriarchal society, and the conscious recovery of what has been lost, denied or denigrated.

The voice continues, impassioned, frequently spell-binding, and never at a loss for words to convey psychic truths through their images in dreams, poetry and various forms of aesthetic expression. It is a strong brew which virtually propells the reader through all 190 pages of the text. As to where we have travelled, perhaps the place to begin is the concluding chapter with the author’s account of a visit to India sixteen years ago.

In early mid-life, Marion Woodman became dissatisfied with an existence which in every outward respect seemed successful and rewarding. This led her to embark on a trip to India alone. The effect of exposure to an alien culture was shattering. Although weakened by an almost fatal attack of dysentery, she endeavoured to see and live it through. Not the least of her rewards was participating as a sacrificial victim in a ritual honouring Krishna’s birthday which coincided with her own.

In the intervening years which included analysis with Irish analyst E. A. Bennet, author of What Jung really said, training at the C. G. Institute in Zurich, and the establishment of a very successful practice as a Jungian analyst in Toronto, Marion Woodman has sought to assimilate what India taught her. The fact that she is able to speak openly of it and of herself in this the most personal of her books is an indication of how far she has come.

A further indication of deepened and centred awareness is found in the structure and flow of The Pregnant Virgin which outgrew its intended title, “Chrysalis.” Although two of the chapters, “‘Taking It Like a Man’: Abandonment in the Creative Woman” and “The Kore of Matter: Psyche/Soma Awareness” appeared in the journals Chiron and Quadrant respectively, and two others, including “Chrysalis: Am I Really?” were prepared as lectures, they form an integrated whole. Because there is tension and a honing of perspective, overlapping areas do not seem onerous, nor repetitious.

The use of the word “virgin” in the final title is in the sense intended by Esther Harding in her book Woman’s Mysteries:

The woman who is virgin, one-in-herself, does what she does—not because of any desire to please, not be liked, or to be approved, even by herself; not because of any desire to gain power over another … but because what she does is true.

In describing her virgin as pregnant, Marion Woodman is saying that she should be open to possibilities.

As we begin to explore this image of the pregnant virgin further with the help of the author and her analysands, we discover that finding our own truth, the answer to the question, Who Am I? involves a life time of becoming. The process itself follows natural, organic laws of conception, incubation, birth, death and rebirth, beyond our power to manipulate. In a society accustomed to doing, the long, apparently sterile periods of waiting may be the more difficult.

The pregnant virgin herself is not the spiritualized Virgin Mother, but the Black Madonna, blackened and charred by the fire of transformation, purged of the negative mother complex, matter impregnated by spirit. Just as openness to life’s possibilities involves not a naive innocence, but an innocence born of the conscious sacrifice of ego desires.

Despite the beauty of the vision and the universality of its insights, The Pregnant Virgin seems almost totally devoid of an appreciation of the fabric of everyday life, the world of appearances, where most of us spend our waking hours. There are a number of references to the poetry and art of William Blake, but no “Auguries of Innocence,” with its opening line: “To See a World in a Grain of Sand.”

In their place we have passages to India which involve actual travel halfway around the world, body awareness through movement workshops created for that purpose, and rites of passage requiring physical withdrawal and ritual enactment.

That these facilitate transformation or make it possible is not my question. What I do question is whether the healing of a body/mind split in this fashion may lead to another kind of schism. A schism between the possible and the actual, and ultimately, because all of this costs money, between the haves and the have-nots.

In other words, my Black Madonna would be rooted not only in the body, but in those matters of fact—which are the grist of day-to-day existence.

—Alice Johnston