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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Rethinking Morality
The Superman and the Will to Power
Death of God and Christianity
Eternal Recurrence
Summary
Analysis
One day, an old woman asks Zarathustra to speak to her about women. Zarathustra says that everything about women is a riddle, and that the solution is pregnancy. For women, man is the means to an end—a child. As for man, he wants “danger and play”—and a woman is “the most dangerous plaything.”
Nietzsche did not have an especially high view of women in and of themselves. Here, he sees them as useful for humanity’s progress toward the Superman (and man’s pleasure in the process)— women are ultimately a “plaything” for men as they pursue this ideal.
Themes
Man is a warrior, and woman is for the recreation of the warrior; a woman’s hope should be that she might bear the Superman. Zarathustra describes woman’s nature as “a changeable, stormy film upon shallow waters,” while a man’s nature is a deep “torrent” in underground caves. The old woman thanks Zarathustra for sharing the truth about women. She tells him that if he is going to visit women, “do not forget your whip!”
Zarathustra continues to illustrate his vision of the differences between men and women, with men being by far the deeper, more active, and more consequential, although women have the hope of being able to aid humanity’s progress through procreation. In essence, Zarathustra views women as fundamentally chaotic and men as fundamentally stable. He sees women as properly being dominated by men.
Themes
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