"Then a life filled to the full with happiness began. Happiness and work rose up together with the sun, radiant like it. The gold of Tehura's face flooded the interior of our hut and the landscape round about with joy and light. She no longer studied me, and I no longer studied her. She no longer concealed her love from me, and I no longer spoke to her of my love. We lived, both of us, in perfect simplicity.
How good it was in the monring to seek refreshment in the nearest brook, as did, I imagine, the first man and the first woman in Paradise."
Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa
Eve's status as the first woman makes her the ultimate symbol of the purity and innocence coupled with the 'primitive' culture that Gauguin seeks. While this is displayed in his artwork, it is also directly reflective of his actual life, where he turned to young girls to not only be his lovers, but also as muses for creating his Tahitian Eves. In his first visit to Tahiti, Gauguin took a local girl named Tehura (or Teha’amana) to be his vahine (wife) at her parents’ offer. Deemed to be around thirteen years of age in Tahitian measurements (about eighteen to twenty according to European calculations,) Tehura was Gauguin’s living Eve, and the model for several of his works. Perhaps one of the most famous images of Tehura is in Manao Tupapau (Spirit of the Dead Watching) 1892. Apparently, after returning home one night, Gauguin found his young bride clinging to her bed, frightened that Tupapau (the same spirit in Words of the Devil) was watching her as she slept (Harrison 34). Captivated by this moment, Gauguin painted Tehura in this position, one that would often be seen as unflattering by Western standards. As a reverse image of Olympia, the Eve of this painting is closing her body off and is rejecting the idea of woman as a temptress rather than purposely display it for the world. Instead, Eve is a scared girl in a vulnerable and “primitive” animal-like state.
While Gauguin captured his true-to-life Eve in what he believed to be “primitive” poses, he also literally created her from primitive materials (reminiscent of God creating Adam out of dust) such as wood, his favorite material for sculpting because of the primitive techniques used, and the visibility of the artist’s hand in the final product (Rodolphe). In Gauguin’s wooden sculpture of his wife, Teha’amana 1892, there are two distinct female images. On one side is Tehura’s face, while on the other is an image of a Tahitian Eve. Charles F. Stuckey provides one explanation for this dual representation. He writes: “If we interpret the image of Eve as a side view inside the head of Teha’Amana, she expresses her thoughts as those of the fantasies of a temptress” (Behr 27). While this is a plausible opinion, in following Gauguin’s ideal image of Eve, it is more likely that this representation of her is a symbol of how he felt for Tehura. His ideal Eve was a pure, primitive, untouched soul like his young wife, and as a result, she was extremely tempting to him. Therefore, by having a cultural and sexual relationship with her, she metaphorically and physically became his entryway into a primitive world.