In order to understand Gauguin’s message, we must first understand the “civilized� culture that held women to such high standards in France. Fin de siècle society was burgeoning with new waves of artistic and political thought, including the controversial women’s rights movement. Socialist uproars and general political instability created enough of a social platform that women were able to voice their concerns to the public for the first time, and include gender as one of their issues (Eichner). Gauguin was certainly aware of the “Women Problem� stewing in France as he expressed his opinion about it in his autobiographical journal Noa Noa (1893). In it he explained that
Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman… Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages (Gauguin 46).
In this passage he particularly stressed the physical restraint on the French women’s bodies as symbolic of the restraint on women in general, as though their restrictive clothing pulled them further away from equitable treatment. In other words, French women were being socially separated from the men because their clothing separated them physically. The highly feminized presentation of French women, a direct result of their clothing, bothered Gauguin because of its purpose to separate them from men and create an untraversable divide that was experienced through “cinctures and corsets.�
In keeping with the theme of gender division through bodies, Gauguin wrote a letter in 1888 to Madeleine Bernard in which he advises her on how to achieve equal treatment. He wrote, “If… you want to be someone, to find happiness solely in your independence and your conscience… you must regard yourself as Androgyne, without sex� (qtd. Eisenman 116). Thus, even before his travels to Polynesia he had proposed the ideal of the “androgen� as his exaggerated solution to the sexual dimorphism problem that was causing such commotion in Europe at the time. By considering oneself an androgen, you must let go of the concept of your body defining your gender. For Gauguin bodies caused an unnecessary mental restriction where people limited themselves to the gender that corresponded to their body. The theoretical androgen solution allowed Gauguin to envision a world that would forgo bodily restrictions and would instead embrace a more spiritual and equitable understanding of the self.