Gender Studies, Manao Tupapau by Gauguin, Olympia by Manet: A Psychoanalytic Perspective
- Art d'Histoire
- Feb 23
- 5 min read
By applying the lens of psychoanalysis to the works of Paul Gauguin, the Pre-Raphaelites, Édouard Manet, or Gustav Klimt, we discover that the canvas was often a mirror for the male ego's deepest regressions, his need for domination or surrender, and his paralysing sexual anxieties. The history of modern art thus becomes a history of white male trauma or western male suprematism, stretching from the infantile desire to merge with the mother to the adult terror of the independent woman.
Primitivism as the Nostalgia for the Fusion with the Mother
The flight to exotic lands, such as Paul Gauguin's pilgrimage to Tahiti, can be understood through Sigmund Freud’s analysis of an impulse, which he termed the ‘The Oceanic Feeling’. Freud described this sensation as an "indissoluble connection," a feeling of limitlessness where the ego is not yet distinguished from the external world. He argued that this is a "reminiscence" of the infant at the breast. At this early stage, the child does not yet recognise the "outside" as separate; the ego is "uncut, unedged, untemporal", unseparated from the mother's body.
For the modern artist, the "primitive" world represented a regression to this infantile state. As the historian Griselda Pollock argues, the idealised Tahiti was a manifestation of nostalgia for the oceanic—a desperate desire for an undifferentiated world without discontinuity. The artist seeks to recover the "original fusion with Mother Earth" that civilised man has lost. This is not an exploration of a real place, but a psychological retreat to a time before the painful reality of separation and boundaries was established.
The Mirror and the Fetish
However, this projection required the erasure of the indigenous subject. In her analysis of Gauguin's Teha’amana, Griselda Pollock utilises Lacan’s "mirror phase" theory combined with Freud Oedipian complex. Subjectivity is formed through an encounter with an image (the Other); difference is threatening because it disrupts the feeling of unity. To overcome this threat, the male subject employs Colour Fetishism.
Fetishism is a mechanism for disavowing the knowledge of difference (specifically from the Mother). It allows the subject to sustain incompatible ideas: "I know she is different, but I can go on believing that she is not really." By refashioning the brown body of Teha’amana into a triple fetish—as black, as exotic, and as woman—the artist turns her into a "sign of European man." In the racist discourse of the era, the very amount of melanin in the skin functions as a fetish. Teha’amana’s specific identity as an Oceanic woman is erased. She acts as a mirror, reflecting the power of the white male spectator back at him through a cascade of fetishisation of everything he is not.
Men Who Play Dolls
This desire to control the female image extends to the depiction of the passive European woman. Hélène Cixous describes the literary and artistic archetype of the Newly Born Woman as a Sleeping Beauty. She is "intact, eternal, absolutely powerless," waiting in her glass coffin for the prince to animate her.
In this fantasy, "it is men who like to play dolls," a tradition dating back to the myth of Pygmalion. The woman’s trajectory is traced through a cycle of passivity: "Bridebed, childbed, bed of death". She breathes just enough to be alive, but not enough to be a threat. The male fantasy requires her to be "finished" or "not begun," possessing the perfection of an object. When the man leans over her, the tale ends; her sole purpose is to reflect him, to see "only him; him in place of everything."
The Teeth of the Cat
When the woman ceases to be a doll and asserts a presence, the male fantasy collapses into terror. This anxiety manifests in the concept of the Vagina Dentata—the vagina with teeth and claws. Psychoanalyst Charles Odier analysed this fear in the context of marriage, where the presence of a wife threatens the husband's "auto-erotic and passive attitude."
The husband, wishing to be alone to "daydream and stroke himself," perceives the wife's demands as a threat of castration. In art, this fear is symbolised by the aggressive animal.
In Édouard Manet’s Olympia, the black cat is not just a pet, but could also represent Olympia's desires. It is associated with "feelings of terror". In the dreams of anxious men, the female sex is dramatised as a toothed vagina that attacks the 'genito-anal region'. By willingly hiding her sex, Olympia may be concealing her most potent weapon. Academic nudes would either nonchalantly or shamefully cover themselves, but never with such determination.
The Murder of the Father
Underpinning these dynamics of power, exclusion, and sexual terror is the origin of authority itself. In Totem and Taboo, Freud describes the relation between phallus and authority of the "primal horde," where a violent, jealous father keeps all females for himself and drives away the sons. Civilisation began with a criminal act: the expelled brothers joined forces to slew and ate the father.
By devouring him, they accomplished their identification with him and acquired a part of his strength. However, this act created a "psychic situation of subsequent obedience" born of guilt. To resolve this, they established the Totem—a father substitute that could not be killed. The "totem feast" became mankind’s first celebration, a commemoration of the crime that birthed social organisation, moral restrictions, and religion. This psychoanalytic origin story reveals that the "primitive" artistic impulse is often a conflicted desire: a wish to return to the pre-legal state of unbridled possession, while simultaneously being bound by the guilt of the usurped authority.
By covering her genitals, Olympia reclaims her erotic power, asserts her authority and becomes phallic.
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