Given Augustine's strong opinions about sexuality, it is not surprising that his view of women is similarly complex and sometimes contradictory. The Confessions features a prominent female character in Augustine's mother Monica. Monica is an engaging character, strong, energetic, and completely devoted to Augustine, but she is also something of a stereotype. She is all mother. When Augustine praises her qualities in telling her life story, he praises typically feminine virtues: patience, mildness, obedience, selfless service of others, temperance, piety, and even an aversion to gossip, that stereotypical feminine vice. Monica would be the perfect mother, but for the fact that some of her attachment to Augustine is selfish. Augustine refers to the fact that she has the inheritance of Eve, the first woman, who was punished for her sins by bearing children with pain and suffering. She is a near perfect model of faith, as well — quietly converting her pagan husband to Christianity, steadfastly praying for the salvation of her wandering son — but here again, one flaw damages her perfection, namely her desire to see Augustine achieve worldly success. This misplaced desire motivates her to postpone baptizing Augustine, provide him an empty education, and arrange an advantageous marriage for him.
Monica's portrait is highly stylized. She is the Church, steadfast in devotion to God; she is Eve, the chastened sinner; she is Dido, the selfish lover; she the embodiment of simple, uneducated faith, untainted by the kind of intellectual striving that so plagues Augustine. Augustine wanders around the Mediterranean like the epic heroes Aeneas or Odysseus, but so, too, does Monica, for whom there is no epic female model. Modern critics have been fond of applying Freudian interpretations to Augustine's relationship with Monica, attempting to find psychoanalytic explanations for his personality based on his distant father and overbearing mother. With so much stylized and symbolic freight attached to her, it is almost surprising how vivid her character seems, and when Augustine describes his pain at her death, it feels like the very real grief of a loving son for a remarkable mother.
