Gauguin’s sabbatical in France allowed him to get a final glimpse of the incongruous French society before his return to the South Seas. It was during this return, the move that would be his last, that Gauguin reached the archetype of his clear depictions of the power possessed by Polynesian women. More than ever he painted their bodies as tall and strapping, and placed them less often in the confines of clothing, sending out a message of both female independence and empowerment through the strong presence of their naked bodies. For instance, Te rerioa or The Dream (1897) depicts two seated women, the more prominent of whom is free of virtually all clothing and whose body is strikingly chiseled and facing directly front. There is a sleeping child in the foreground, which allows Gauguin to play with the native language in his title, making it unclear whose dream he is referring to- the women’s or the child’s. In Gauguin’s Skirt, Stephen Eisenman portrays this scene as a simple illustration of maternal love in which “the women dream of their own future and that of their child; the child dreams contentedly of its mothers� (Eisenman 135). Here, Eisenman shows the sentimental side of the painting but fails to place any significance on the two mothers or the obviously masculine body of the woman in front. The women are independent because they represent the family unit, without any men. In so presenting them, Gauguin shows the underlying strength that supports this independence in the symbolic flexing of the main woman’s muscles, evident in both her tensed arms and legs. Fully removing the clothing of the woman allowed Gauguin to emphasize his point: the power in her body reflects the power in her spirit, and in her society.
Indeed, the most striking example of this kind of independence and empowerment can be seen in Gauguin’s masterpiece Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (1897-98) where androgynous naked women dominate an important historical narrative within the painting. This massive canvas details the Biblical story of creation and appears to “read� from right to left beginning with a baby on the right side and ending with an old woman on the left. Inserted throughout are figures that represent other religious aspects and, interestingly, all of these figures are bare and androgynous appearing women. The mere presence of the bare bodies makes nude women appear as the foundation of humankind, that their strength was what fostered the progression of life spelled out in the painting. This is an incredibly significant statement considering that the majority of prominent figures in the Bible are virtually all men. Stephen Eisenman writes that Where do we come from “highlights the existence in fin de siècle Tahiti of a multitude of gender positions beyond the two that predominated in Europe and North America, and suggests that Gauguin sought to position himself on the uncertain border between France and Polynesia� (Eisenman 92). With these words Eisenman correctly identifies Gauguin’s play on gender but he only brushes the surface of the statement that he makes about the significance of women and the great power that they hold. Gauguin certainly addresses the border between gender positions in France and Polynesia as Eisenman notes, but instead of positioning himself in the middle, he firmly positions himself on the side of the androgynous women of Polynesia. By depicting such a crucial aspect of Judeo-Christianity solely in terms of the empowered nude women of Polynesia, he secures his firm belief in the Polynesian policy that women can do anything that men can. Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? is an affirmation to women, an answer to the questions that the title poses, in that the power of women is the basis of humankind’s past, present, and hope for the future.