Gauguin's Postcards: The naked truth about women in Polynesia
Sarah Unger, Princeton Class of 2008
Crouching in the corner of the canvas of one of Gauguin’s last paintings, created in the Marquesan wilderness as the artist was nearing the end of his life, is a man staring at the exposed bodies of two native women with frightening pupil-less eyes. On first impression Contes Barbares or Barbaric Stories (1902) conveys the message that European colonists in the late nineteenth century played the role of sexual voyeurs of Polynesian women. This painting seems to represent the common and even “barbaric” belief that Polynesia was a fantastical white man’s paradise, a land of sexual freedom containing beautiful women ripe for the picking. Contes Barbares’ sparsely clothed women, then, represent only a minute portion of the scenes that the pale-skinned, redheaded peeping tom could view. In his book Paul Gauguin art historian Robert Goldwater wrote, “Gauguin went far to find his Garden of Eden,” a common comparison applied to Gauguin’s travels to Tahiti (Goldwater 152). For Goldwater, Gauguin’s paintings communicate just what the rumors promised: sensual, sparsely clothed women ready to be viewed, or perhaps even more than viewed, by all who came to see.
But is this really true? Actually, the crouched man and lounging women in Gauguin’s Contes Barbares have been misinterpreted by scholars like Goldwater. This work was not, in fact, aimed to advertise the availability of such Polynesian women by stripping them of their clothing. Instead, his paintings depict strong female bodies that are symbolic of the power that women held in Polynesian society. In her essay “Exoticism and Androgyny in Gauguin,” Suzanne Donahue explains the stance of many feminist critics on the subject of Gauguin’s work in Polynesia. She writes that authors such as Abigail Solomon-Godeau and Griselda Pollock “attempted to deconstruct these myths [about Gauguin] and to present the artist as both a chauvinist and a racist” (Donahue 103). Donahue, herself, refutes such an argument and asserts that Gauguin painted bare androgynous figures to convey the Tahitians’ harmony with surrounding nature. What she fails to do, however, is to take this argument further and demonstrate Gauguin’s motive in depicting exposed, even androgynous women: namely, that they possess equal or even greater physical power than men that translates into their enhanced power in the society in which they live. For instance in Contes Barbares, there are two beautiful and strongly built Marquesan women seated in a lush natural setting. They take no notice of the man watching them and eradicate his purpose in the painting. This painting, as well as many others that Gauguin created and shipped back to Europe, is meant to contrast the roles of women in Polynesia with women in France. Over the course of his stays in the South Seas, Gauguin stripped the clothing off of the Polynesian women he painted to reveal muscular, androgynous bodies beneath, bodies that exuded power and contrasted greatly with the restricted and tightly clothed bodies of women in France. Indeed, in sending his Tahitian paintings back to France, Gauguin was indirectly critiquing Europe’s objectification of women, suggesting that the ultra feminine “civilized” women of France did not hold the same kind of civilized power as their “savage” counterparts. While the women in France were sexualized and tightly bound coquettes, the Polynesian women were free and unrestricted, living in ideal circumstances for the equity and autonomy of women.
Tahitian Women: A New Outlook
Return to France
Full Empowerment
Conclusion
Works Cited
About the Author
