"The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it."
Genesis 2:15
After arriving in Tahiti, it seemed that Gauguin had been led astray on his unremitting quest for paradise. Unfortunately, his ideal image of Eden-on-Earth been corrupted by the urbanization of French colonization. After retreating from the capital city of Papeete, however, Gauguin found a less modernized world in which he eventually immersed himself and returned to his painting. As Gauguin represented Eve in Tahiti, he continued to detach her image from the Biblical concept of the “Fall”. For him, there never was a “Fall” in this sense, as he had a positive view of Eve as the source of life and truth, rather than the herald of sin and corruption to mankind. In Gauguin’s piece Delicious Earth 1892, Eve is presented as a Tahitian woman in what appears to be a traditional Temptation painting. Seeming unsure of herself as she looks away from the winged lizard (taking the place of the serpent), Eve is still reminiscent of Gauguin’s earlier Westernized Eves; in fact, she takes on a very similar pose to his Exotic Eve. Instead of the stronger, guiltless Eves that we see in Gauguin’s later Tahitian works, as Ziva Amishai-Maisels writes in her article “Gauguin’s ‘Philosophical Eve’,” in this painting, Gauguin has “superimposed his own inhibitions and guilty conscience on the guiltless sexual freedom of the Tahitians” (Amishai-Maisels 373). This is evidence that Gauguin has not completely broken away from the Western school of thought since his Eve still has a traditional, Western image despite the fact that she is relocated in Tahiti. It is not until he learns to integrate the symbolic image of Eve with Tahitian culture, that her posture continues to straighten, and Gauguin can find his link to this “primitive” world.
Although Gauguin’s Eve in Delicious Earth seems to have similar qualities and features of a Western Eve (despite the fact that she is Tahitian), in Words of the Devil in 1892, Gauguin succeeds in better incorporating her into his new Tahitian surroundings, and as a result she takes on a new more inquisitive pose, showing that perhaps she to take on the role as Gauguin’s guide. As these two paintings were painted in the same year, it is unknown, which came first, however, based on Gauguin’s stylistic development, it seems natural that Words of the Devil proceeded Delicious Earth. In Words of the Devil, Eve is being watched by Tupapau, a Tahitian symbol of death. Turning away from him, Eve does not succumb to his evil, and retains her status as the symbol and source of life rather than just being the original sinner. Despite the fact that she still seems slightly hesitant in this painting, this Eve is fully integrated into Tahitian culture by more than just her skin color. This mixing of religions with respect to the fact that she is joined by a traditional Tahitian image while taking on the symbol of fertility and life, allows Eve to become more of the “Philosophical” or idealistic Eve that Gauguin sought out, rather than a religious one (Amishai-Maisels 381). In her book, Paul Gauguin in Soviet Museums, author Anna Barskaya writes: “this natural, animal grace of the Tahitian Eve, who as [Gauguin] said, can go about naked even after the Fall and not seem shameless, is certainly among the highest achievements in Gauguin’s Polynesian painting” (Barsakaya 34). While his Eves are stunning achievements, it is the fact that Gauguin omits all negative implications of “the Fall” which makes his pieces so revolutionary and important. This rejection of an exclusively Judeo-Christian body of thought is central to Gauguin’s quest to return to a pure world, because it is not until he can rid himself of the concept of sin, that his Eves will truly be free to stand upright and expose him to the paradise of a “primitive” world.