In conclusion, after seeing the systematic progression of empowerment through exposure that Gauguin created in his Tahitian paintings, Gauguin’s Contes Barbares may appear fairly straight forward and self explanatory. Rather than expressing the sexual appeal and availability of the Polynesian women, the painting shows how the women ignore the unwanted advances of men in favor of their own agenda and desires. Of course the women are unclothed: they are as far from the constraints of French corsets as possible. Of course there is a European man ogling them: he has no conception of the women’s purpose and commanding status in Polynesia. This concept of the misinterpreting French eye appears to be what inspired Gauguin to send the paintings back to Europe, where they could cause commotion and disbelief, exactly as Gauguin wanted them to. He appears to have seen the naked bodies of the Polynesian women he painted as the means by which they were liberated, not solely in sexual terms but in terms of their status as equals in the societies in which they lived. These bodies possessed both physical and spiritual power lacking in the constrained bodies of European women, who were struggling for autonomy during the course of Gauguin’s travels. As his paintings arrived in shipments to France, Gauguin was perhaps delivering a message to these women, an alternative plan for liberation in which he was completely invested. As he finished out his life in the South Seas, his shipments to Europe functioned as a kind of postcard, implying that he wished the French were “there�, not to live as savages, but to become as civilized as their Polynesian counterparts.