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Chapters 17–42
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Moon and Sixpence, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Art and Beauty
Society vs. Authenticity
Women vs. Men
Morality
Mind vs. Body
Summary
Analysis
Chapter 43. The narrator comments that his account of Strickland seems “unsatisfactory” because he doesn’t understand Strickland’s motives, especially his motive for becoming a painter. If he were fictionalizing Strickland’s story, he would have invented a backstory: Strickland had always longed to be a painter but had his early ambition crushed by economic necessity, or perhaps Strickland turned to art due to Mrs. Strickland’s artistic friends or due to the unhappiness of his marriage. The narrator imagines Strickland influenced by an older painter who forsook true art for commerce and encourages Strickland not to repeat his mistakes. In fact, however, Strickland’s life prior to his painting career was boring and conventional.
Though based on French painter Paul Gauguin, Strickland is a fictional character. The novel could have given Strickland any of the motives the narrator discusses in this paragraph. By having the narrator suggest more easily understandable but “false” backstories for Strickland, the novel suggests by contrast that Strickland’s “unsatisfactory” story is somehow “truer”—and thus associates itself with true, authentic art like Strickland’s. Thus, the metafictional move of discussing and discarding other “false” ways of telling the story associates the narrator and the novel more closely with Strickland and his commitment to “truthful,” authentic art.
Themes
The narrator knows nothing of the years Strickland was working on his art in Paris prior to the narrator’s arrival, though he suspects the “romantic” “glamour” of Paris affected Strickland not at all. Thus he cannot make Strickland appealing to the reader by describing his difficulties. The narrator knows nothing about the three months Strickland cohabited with Blanche, though he imagines a desperate Blanche trying to “ensnare” an indifferent Strickland with material “comfort.” He’s only written about Strickland’s romantic relationships because they were “obvious,” though they meant nothing to Strickland in comparison to his art. The narrator believes it’s a flaw in literature that it accords such weight to romance: even men in love spend most of their day doing other things, though women “can love all day long.”
The narrator’s commentary on Strickland and Blanche reveals his misogyny and gender essentialism. Though he doesn’t know what Strickland and Blanche’s relationship was like, he assumes the woman tries to “ensnare” the man with sexuality and bodily comfort while the indifferent man attempts to do something independent and intellectual. The narrator doubles down on this gender-essentialist view by suggesting that women “can love all day long” (i.e., are obsessively focused on their relationships with men) whereas men are generally also occupied with other, implicitly more important things. His claim that an excessive focus on romance constitutes a flaw in literature, meanwhile, emphasizes that truthfulness is one of his main criteria for artistic quality.
Themes
Literary Devices
The narrator concludes that Strickland had occasional bursts of sexual desire but that sexuality was fundamentally unimportant to him. After sex, he probably hated the women he had sex with. The narrator speculates that artists sublimate their sexual instincts into their art, and so Strickland loathed sex because it was so much cruder than art. He concludes that Strickland was a “great idealist” and—not caring about money, fame, or comfort—a “great” man, even if also a hateful one.
Here the narrator makes explicit what the novel earlier implied about Strickland’s sexuality with the nude painting of Blanche: Strickland prefers to channel his sexual energy into his artwork, so that he sees actual sex (and women) as a drain on his ambitions. By characterizing this dynamic as the behavior of a “great idealist,” the narrator associates sexual sublimation, the mind, and art while contrasting them with actual sex, the body, and artlessness. When the narrator calls Strickland a great man though a bad one, he is essentially stating that artistic considerations matter more to determining a man’s “greatness” than moral ones.
Themes
Chapter 44. The narrator comments that people are usually interested in painters’ views on other painters, but unfortunately Strickland’s were ordinary. The narrator never heard Strickland speak about his closest analogues, Cézanne and Van Gogh; he thought the Impressionists had excellent “technique” but a “commonplace” perspective on the world. And he had a conventional appreciation for the old masters. His one interesting enthusiasm was for Brueghel the Elder—the narrator suspects Strickland admired Brueghel because Brueghel too was “striving to express in one medium feelings more appropriate to expression in another.”
French painter Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) are both associated with the post-Impressionist avant-garde. By comparing Strickland to them, the narrator underscores that Strickland was ahead of his time and misunderstood during his life due to his individualistic artistic vision. Strickland’s criticism of the Impressionists for having a “commonplace” perspective despite their excellent “technique” again highlights that Strickland views honesty and authenticity of vision above technical skill in art. Finally, the narrator’s claim that Strickland’s art was trying to express something that could have been better expressed outside of painting again hints that the novel is an attempt to express Strickland’s worldview through the written word.
Themes
Literary Devices
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Chapter 45. In a flashback, the narrator travels to Tahiti 15 years after he last saw Strickland and 9 years after Strickland died in Tahiti, where Strickland painted his most famous pictures and was best able to convey his vision in painting. The narrator compares Tahiti both to a mournful comedian and a beautiful woman; he suggests that Tahiti suggests the “immemorial.”
Earlier in the novel, the narrator had translated some of Strickland’s inarticulate comments into a speech about wanting to live on a deserted island so that he could accomplish his vision. Obviously, Tahiti is not deserted, but the word “immemorial,” which suggests a land beyond the reach of time or history, problematically suggests that Tahiti is beyond the reach of “civilized” society and so serves Strickland as a refuge from convention where he can express his individual vision.
Themes
Literary Devices
Chapter 46. Shortly after arriving in Tahiti, the narrator meets Captain Nichols, who has heard that the narrator was asking people about Strickland. Captain Nichols is a thin man with bad teeth and shifty eyes—an obvious “rogue”—but he’s very friendly. He explains that he met Strickland in Marseilles when they were both beach-combers. Over the narrator’s trip to Tahiti, he will come to know Captain Nichols well. Captain Nichols, he learns, left England under mysterious, possibly criminal circumstances; he has been unhappily married for eight years to a severe, intimidating, silent woman of whom he is terrified; and he has a seven-year-old daughter.
Because Captain Nichols seems to be an associate of Strickland, his possible criminality again emphasizes Strickland’s disdain for society, convention, and even law. Meanwhile, Captain Nichols’s unhappy marriage to an intimidating woman problematically suggests that Captain Nichols is “henpecked”—that, in heterosexual romantic relationships, strong female personalities are inherently bad for men.
Themes
Chapter 47. Here the narrator lays out in order all that Captain Nichols told him about Strickland. In a flashback, Strickland and Nichols meet in Marseilles at a religious homeless shelter called the Asile de Nuit the winter after Strickland leaves Paris. When they can’t stay at the Asile de Nuit, they stay with Tough Bill, a mixed-race man who runs a boarding house for sailors and whose portrait Strickland paints in lieu of doing chores around the house like the other boarders. Strickland wants to travel somewhere in the southern seas, and Captain Nichols persuades him to try Tahiti.
Strickland’s extreme poverty after leaving Paris emphasizes his lack of concern with bodily needs or social standing, while his decision to paint Tough Bill’s portrait rather than doing chores like the other men not only emphasizes his artistry but also his disdain for communal and domestic activity.
Themes
Strickland doesn’t have papers, so Tough Bill gets Strickland a dead Englishman’s papers that allow Strickland to work as a sailor—in exchange for Strickland’s first month’s salary aboard ship. When Strickland refuses to work on ships going west—he wants to go to Tahiti—Tough Bill gets impatient and throws him and Captain Nichols out of the boarding house. One day, Tough Bill runs into Strickland and demands the papers back. Strickland rudely refuses. Tough Bill vows to revenge himself on Strickland.
Yet again, Strickland’s inability to get along with Tough Bill illustrates Strickland’s uncompromising and antisocial individualism.
Themes
One night, Strickland and Captain Nichols are at a bar in a red-light district when Tough Bill walks in with two friends and spits in Strickland’s face. Strickland hurls a glass at Tough Bill, and a massive brawl breaks out. By the time the police arrive, Tough Bill is unconscious and bleeding on the floor. Captain Nichols pulls Strickland out of the bar and tells him he needs to leave Marseilles or Tough Bill will have him killed. Strickland finds a job on a ship leaving for Australia, and Captain Nichols never sees him again. (Here the narrator comments that he likes this account of Strickland’s time in Marseilles for the contrast with his former life in London. But Captain Nichols is a massive liar, and the story might all be false.)
The narrator’s suspicion that Captain Nichols’s whole story about Strickland might be false makes clear to readers that Captain Nichols is an unreliable secondary narrator. Yet it also highlights that much of the narrator’s tale of Strickland consists of second-hand knowledge and is filtered through the narrator’s own preoccupations. This emphasis encourages readers to approach the novel not merely as a (fictional) biography of Strickland as an artist but as an expression of the narrator’s own artistic ideas projected onto Strickland.
Themes
Chapter 48. The narrator shares that he had once intended to describe Strickland’s life and death in Tahiti first and then flash back to his earlier life. That way, he could end with Strickland setting out heroically from France. Yet the narrator found he couldn’t write it that way and decided to tell what he knew of Strickland chronologically. He has a hard time narrating Strickland’s life once Strickland arrives in Tahiti. Most people there thought of Strickland as a poor man who painted “absurd” pictures; they only realized Strickland was an important artist years after his death, when European art dealers started visiting Tahiti and asking after his work.
When the narrator openly admits that he struggled with how best to tell the story of Strickland’s life, his admission again points to the story’s status as both a creative artwork and a product of a possibly biased or unreliable teller. Meanwhile, the revelation that people in Tahiti at first thought Strickland’s pictures “absurd” reminds readers that Strickland was not appreciated in his lifetime—that society often fails to recognize great individual artists.
Themes
In a flashback to the narrator’s time in Tahiti, he talks to a French Jewish trader named Cohen who owns one of Strickland’s paintings. Cohen tells the narrator that he felt bad for Strickland because Strickland was such a terrible artist and hired him as an overseer on his plantation. Strickland quit the job as soon as he’d made enough money for art supplies. A while later, he asked Cohen for a 200-franc loan. Cohen gave him the loan never expecting to get the money back. A year later, Strickland visited and—without mentioning the loan—gave Cohen a painting of his plantation. Cohen’s wife insisted they hide the painting in the attic.
That Strickland quit his job as soon as he’d made enough money for art supplies insists yet again on Strickland’s indifference to wealth or physical comfort in comparison to art, showing his commitment to expressing his individual vision. The insistence of Cohen’s wife that they hide the painting in the attic, meanwhile, illustrates how little the average person understood Strickland’s authentic artistic vision during his lifetime.
Themes
Years later, Cohen got a letter from his brother in France asking Cohen to send him any paintings he can find by an English artist who lived in Tahiti—European dealers were paying huge amounts for his work. After Cohen sends Strickland’s painting to his brother, he receives a letter back saying that the brother at first thought the painting was a practical joke—but he was able to sell it to an art dealer for 30,000 francs. Cohen tells the narrator that he wishes Strickland had survived so he could give Strickland 29,800 for the painting.
The massive appreciation in value of Strickland’s art after his death illustrates both how undervalued Strickland’s authentic vision was by society during his lifetime and how Strickland’s scandalous life story piqued interest in his art after his death—perhaps due to people’s interest in vicariously enjoying Strickland’s immoral and antisocial behavior.
Themes
Chapter 49. In Tahiti the narrator stays at Hotel de la Fleur. The hotel’s owner, Tiaré Johnson, sadly tells him that she went to Strickland’s estate sale after his death and bought his stove for 27 francs—but none of his paintings, which were selling for 5 to 10 francs and which could have made Tiaré wealthy. Tiaré is a tall, obese, kindly woman, about 50 years old, whose parents were a Tahitian woman and an Englishman. She helps out men staying at her hotel who can’t pay their bills, and she likes to gossip about love. She tells the narrator that when her father discovered she had a lover at age 15, he beat her and forced her to marry Captain Johnson—which she didn’t mind, because he was handsome.
Yet again, Tiaré’s story of missing the opportunity to buy Strickland’s now massively valuable paintings emphasizes how little Strickland’s authentic artistic vision was initially appreciated by society. Meanwhile, Tiaré’s story about not minding her beating and forced marriage at age 15 because her husband was handsome suggests—in ways that may trouble a modern reader—that moral objections to domestic violence should be considered culturally relative and that pleasant, kind women like Tiaré don’t complain about strong men’s mistreatment of them.
Themes
Of Strickland, Tiaré tells the narrator that he occasionally came to the hotel and she often saw him around Papeete. She felt sorry for his thinness, gave him dinner sometimes, and tried to get him jobs—but he always quit them after a while. He once told her that when he arrived in Tahiti—six months after leaving Marseilles, traveling from France to Australia to the U.S. to Tahiti—he thought it seemed simultaneously “familiar” and like “the place [he’d] been looking for all [his] life.” Tiaré says that Tahiti sometimes captivates people like that.
Because the novel has characterized Strickland throughout as individualistic and hostile to civilized society, his immediate affinity for Tahiti—illustrated by his claim that it’s “the place [he’d] been looking for all [his] life—problematically supports the idea that Tahiti is less oppressive to the individual than Europe because it is less “civilized.”
Themes
Chapter 50. The narrator speculates that some people are not born in their true homes and end up homesick for places they haven’t been. He tells Tiaré about an acquaintance of his, Abraham, who gave up a brilliant medical career in London to general astonishment. Ten years later, the narrator encountered him in Alexandria. Abraham explained that when he visited Alexandria, he suddenly knew he had to live there—that’s why he quit his London job. Later, the narrator had dinner with another doctor he went to medical school with, Alec Carmichael, who revealed that he got Abraham’s job after Abraham quit and that he owed his wealth to that accident. Alec thought Abraham had ruined his own life, but the narrator thought that depended on whether you thought society or individual passion deserved more from people.
From the story of Abraham and Alec Carmichael, the narrator implicitly derives the lesson that Abraham had the better life because he followed his individual passion even though he ended up less wealthy and socially important than Alec Carmichael. This lesson accords with the preference the novel shows for individualism, authenticity, and passion over society, convention, and duty.
Themes
Chapter 51. Tiaré tells the narrator that she found a wife for Strickland in Tahiti. When the narrator points out that Strickland was already married, Tiaré says that his first wife is in England—too far away to matter. Anyway, Tiaré had a distant relative, a 17-year-old named Ata, who worked for her at the hotel. After Ata admitted to Tiaré that she liked Strickland, Tiaré suggested to Strickland that he settle down and marry Ata, who has a piece of rural property where Strickland could paint. Strickland asked what Ata thought about it. Tiaré brought Ata in. When Strickland told Ata he would beat her, Ata replied, “How else should I know you loved me?”
Tiaré is a positively connoted character whom the narrator describes as generous and kind. As such, the novel encourages readers to see her matchmaking between Strickland and Ata as positive—even though modern readers may be disturbed that Tiaré is marrying off a 17-year-old to a middle-aged man. Meanwhile, Ata’s suggestion that she won’t know that Strickland loves her unless he beats her again indicates that, in the novel’s view, the immorality of domestic violence is culturally relative, and some women may even welcome being violently dominated by their male romantic partners.
Themes
Tiaré tells the narrator that her first husband, Captain Johnson, used to beat her violently and that she was heartbroken when he died. She divorced her second husband because, though he was tall and strong, he never drank or beat her even when she was unfaithful to him. She concludes, “It’s a terrible thing the way some men treat women.” After commiserating with Tiaré, the narrator asked her to keep speaking of Strickland. She explained that she suggested Ata and Strickland cohabit for a month to decide whether they liked each other. After the month was over, they married and moved to Ata’s rural property.
Tiaré’s comment, “It’s a terrible thing the way some men treat women,” implies that it is wrong for men not to beat their wives. With this comment, the novel not only doubles down on its contention that domestic violence is immoral only in the eye of the beholder but also—by putting this endorsement of domestic violence in the mouth of a sympathetic female character—suggests that men’s violent domination of women is essentially natural and good.
Themes
Chapter 52. The narrator speculates that the next three years were the most joyful of Strickland’s life: he read and painted, unbothered on Ata’s rural property, while she had a baby and more and more of her relatives came to live with them.
When the narrator speculates that the happiest years of Strickland’s life were those he spent painting while unbothered by urban society, it emphasizes yet again Strickland’s antisocial individualism and commitment to his art.
Themes
Chapter 53. One day, Tiaré introduces the narrator to a Frenchman named Captain René Brunot, who also knew Strickland. Brunot tells the narrator that he used to play chess with Strickland and bought some of his pictures—which he now intends to sell for his daughter’s dowry. And once, Brunot recalls, he went to visit Strickland at Ata’s rural house. Brunot says that the house was located practically in “the Garden of Eden.” When Brunot asked Strickland whether he was happily married, Strickland replied that Ata provided what he wanted from a woman: peace, food, babies, and obedience. When Brunot asked whether Strickland never missed Europe or felt lonely, Strickland laughed and said Brunot didn’t know what it was like to be an artist.
In the Jewish and Christian traditions, the Garden of Eden is where the first man and woman lived in a state of naked, pre-civilized innocence before they obtained knowledge of good and evil. The allusion to the Garden of Eden here yet again problematically suggests that Strickland loves Tahiti because it is, in contrast with Europe, primitive or pre-civilized. Meanwhile, Strickland’s apparently happy marriage to Ata is based on her submissive obedience to him, hinting that in the novel’s view, heterosexual relationships work best when the man controls the woman. Finally, Strickland’s claim that Brunot doesn’t know what it’s like to be an artist implies that a true artist would know that Strickland, able to paint in peace in Tahiti, could never miss Europe or feel lonely—again associating artistry against “society” (here problematically represented by Europe) and with antisocial individualism.
Themes
Tiaré suggests that Brunot take the narrator to see Dr. Coutras, who can tell the narrator about Strickland’s death. Brunot agrees to take Strickland right away. They go outside and begin walking, briefly stopping to watch some Tahitian boys splashing and laughing in a nearby river.
The novel’s emphasis on all the different people the narrator interviews to reconstruct Strickland’s story—Captain Nichols, Tiaré, Cohen, Brunot, and now Dr. Coutras—again directs the readers’ attention to the potential unreliability of the story and thus to its status as the narrator’s creative, artistic interpretation of Strickland’s life.
Themes
Chapter 54. The narrator expresses his surprise that people in Tahiti were much more compassionate about Strickland’s oddities than people in Europe. Brunot says that he, for his part, was compassionate toward Strickland because they both were searching for beauty. Strickland was ruled by a terrible compulsion to create beauty. Brunot understood this because he was too: after financial ruination in France, he and his wife moved to the South Seas to make their fortunes. He bought an uninhabited island, and after 20 years, he, his wife, and their servants have turned that island into a paradise of beauty. When the narrator comments that Brunot must have great strength of will, Brunot says he could not have completed his task without “belief in God.” Then they arrive at Dr. Coutras’s.
By paralleling Brunot’s creation of a beautiful home with Strickland’s creation of paintings, the novel suggests that authentic “art” can include creative activities not traditionally supposed to be fine art (i.e., homemaking, gardening, and farming). Yet Brunot’s attribution of his success to “belief in God” suggests he is quite different from Strickland, who never expressed religious sentiments and would likely dismiss religion as a social fiction.
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Literary Devices
Chapter 55. Dr. Coutras is a massive, elderly Frenchman. He tells the narrator about his relationship with Strickland. In a flashback, Dr. Coutras is visiting a patient in Taravao when a sobbing young girl approaches and tells him that Ata has sent her down from the hills to get help for Strickland. In that moment, Dr. Coutras is hesitant to make the 14-kilometer journey on foot—he thinks Strickland “an idle useless scoundrel,” having no idea he is a genius—but ultimately goes.
Dr. Coutras’s belief that Strickland is an “idle useless scoundrel” illustrates the low social esteem in which antisocial Strickland was held before his art became widely appreciated. Yet again, the novel is hammering home the point that great, authentic art may not be appreciated by society during the artist’s lifetime.
Themes
When Dr. Coutras comes to Ata’s, she meets him outside and tells him Strickland is inside painting. Dr. Coutras is annoyed, thinking that Strickland could have made the walk if he’s well enough to paint. He enters the house and immediately, to his horror, sees that Strickland has leprosy. When he tells Strickland, Strickland at first thinks he is joking. Yet when Strickland realizes it isn’t a joke, he seems to experience no emotion—he just asks how long he has. Dr. Coutras tells him that with leprosy, time to death may vary tremendously. Then Strickland insists that Dr. Coutras take a painting in payment for his trouble.
Leprosy, a bacterial infection, is associated in the Judeo-Christian tradition with social exclusion. Indeed, the word “leper” can refer both to a person suffering from leprosy and a person who is ostracized from society. Strickland’s contraction of leprosy while in Tahiti thus symbolizes the cost of his antisocial individualism, reminding readers of the narrator’s earlier argument that it is hugely difficult for the individual to survive without society’s protection. That Strickland is painting when Dr. Coutras finds him and delivers the news underlines that it is Strickland’s artistic ambition that has led to him becoming a literal and figurative “leper.”
Themes
Dr. Coutras and Strickland exit the house, where Ata and her family are crying. Strickland tells Ata to stop and announces his intention to quarantine himself on the mountain. Ata, suddenly forceful, insists she would sooner die by suicide than leave Strickland—though everyone else can go. When Strickland tells her she could get another man easily enough, she just insists again that she will stay with him. Though Strickland begins to cry, he comments sardonically that women are odd—you can beat them terribly, and they’ll still love you, though naturally they are soulless creatures. When Ata realizes that Strickland will allow her to stay, she embraces him passionately—and Strickland comments to Dr. Coutras that women are all the same, regardless of race: “In the end they get you.”
Strickland’s tears at Ata’s loyalty and his claim that “in the end [women] get you,” imply that he reciprocates or at least appreciates Ata’s love for him in a way that he did not reciprocate Mrs. Strickland’s or Blanche’s. Yet his further comments suggest that his love for Ata arose from her total submission to him, including her submission to his physical violence. By representing the only reciprocated heterosexual love in the novel as based on male domination and female submission, the novel suggests a gender-essentialist view in which, to be happy, men should pursue their own individual ambitions as Strickland has done while women should simply serve men.
Themes
Literary Devices
Dr. Coutras tells the narrator that he did not hear much of Strickland for the next two years. Ata’s extended family ceases to live with them, until Ata, Strickland, and their children are living alone on Ata’s property. Other Tahitians, in horror of Strickland’s leprosy, throw rocks at Ata when they see her washing her clothes in a brook. They threaten to burn her house down if she uses the brook again.
Like Strickland’s leprosy itself, his subsequent total social exclusion in Tahiti illustrates the real costs of his commitment to his art and to his individualism: his antisocial choices, though represented as bold and arguably “heroic” by the novel, lead to illness and near-complete isolation.
Themes
One day, Dr. Coutras decides to visit Strickland again. He comes to Strickland and Ata’s house, which looks dilapidated and desolate. When he finds Ata and her son outside, Ata says she’ll go tell Strickland inside that the doctor has come. She comes out again and says that Strickland refuses to see Dr. Coutras. When Dr. Coutras tries to go in anyway, Ata refuses to let him inside. Dr. Coutras asks if there is anything he can do, and Ata suggests that he send paints. He comments that it’s a poor life for her, but she smiles with “superhuman love,” though further conversation reveals that one of her two children by Strickland has died.
Ata’s request that Dr. Coutras send paints to Strickland while Strickland is dying of leprosy indicates again Strickland’s total devotion to authentic self-expression through art: he cares about his art more than he cares about his life. Meanwhile, Ata’s “superhuman love” for Strickland again casts their relationship as the novel’s sole positive depiction of a heterosexual couple, suggesting its gender-essentialist commitment to heroic masculine individualism served by feminine domestic submission.
Themes
Chapter 56. Two or three years later, Dr. Coutras gets a message that Strickland is dying. When he enters Strickland’s dilapidated house, he finds a terrible stench and Ata crying on the floor. As his eyes adjust, he sees painted walls that express something “primeval” and suddenly reveal to him Strickland’s genius. Then he sees Strickland’s corpse on the floor and announces in shock that Strickland was blind. Ata replies that Strickland had been blind for almost a year before he died.
The surprising detail that Strickland has been blind for almost a year suggests that he painted the walls of his house while blind or at least while going blind. This suggestion in turn implies that the walls represent the culmination of Strickland’s authentic self-expression, his “inner vision” as it were. The association of Strickland’s artistic genius with the “primeval”—a word that means ancient, prehistoric, or primitive—insists that Strickland was expressing something outside of or beyond conventional modern civilization.
Themes
Chapter 57. Back in the present, Madame Coutras arrives, interrupting Dr. Coutras’s tale to the narrator. After she talks a while, Dr. Coutras asks whether the narrator would like to see the painting that Strickland gave him. When the narrator says yes, they go outside, and Dr. Coutras says that for a long time he couldn’t stop thinking about Strickland’s painted walls. The narrator, who hypothesizes that Strickland finally managed to exorcize himself and die peacefully after completing this masterwork, asks what the walls represented. Dr. Coutras says it was a kind of Garden of Eden painting that has made him see nature differently ever since.
Earlier, Brunot compared the isolated rural spot where Strickland lived to the Garden of Eden. Now, Dr. Coutras compares the painted walls to the Garden of Eden. This parallel implies that Strickland’s Tahitian surroundings inspired or enabled him to paint his authentic vision—a problematic implication, given that it implies that a Polynesian island populated primarily by non-white people constitutes an escape from “civilization” that can allow a white European artist to finally achieve authentic self-expression.
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Literary Devices
Dr. Coutras compares the effect of Strickland’s walls to the effect of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel—except that Michelangelo’s art was sane, whereas Strickland’s was “troubling,” scary like an empty room you nevertheless feel is somehow occupied. He admits he wasn’t sorry to learn that the walls were destroyed. When the narrator cries out in surprise, Dr. Coutras explains that Strickland, though untroubled by his approaching death, made Ata promise to burn the house down after he died. The narrator comments: “He remained the same till the end, then.” He suggests that after creating an entire artistic world, Strickland chose to destroy it “in pride and contempt.”
While Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo (1475–1564) painted a wide variety of Biblical scenes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the famous centerpiece represents God creating the first man, Adam, who lived in the Garden of Eden prior to his fall from grace. Thus, Dr. Coutras’s comparison between the Sistine Chapel and Strickland’s painted walls continues the association of the walls with the Garden of Eden and all that it implies: pre-civilized prehistory, innocence, nakedness, and so on. Strickland’s decision to have the painting’s destroyed, meanwhile, shows that “till the end” he remained uninterested in sharing his authentic vision with others: the important thing for him was “pride[ful]” self-expression, not social communication, which he held in “contempt.”
Themes
The narrator asks what happened to Ata and her child with Strickland. Dr. Coutras says that they went to live with relatives; apparently the child, a son who works on boats, looks a lot like Strickland. Then Dr. Coutras leads the narrator into his consulting room, where Strickland’s painting is on display: a still-life of tropical fruit with non-realist colors, somehow representing “sensual passion,” horror, alienness, prehistory, and magic, like the fruit of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. The narrator stops looking at the painting, feeling as though “Strickland had kept his secret to the grave.”
Yet again, an allusion to the Garden of Eden is used to describe Strickland’s painting, suggesting themes of prehistory, innocence, nakedness, and so on. The specific allusion to the fruit of knowledge in the Garden of Eden—in the Biblical tale, one tree in the Garden bears fruit that gives heretofore innocent mankind a knowledge of good and evil—suggests that Strickland’s authentic vision of the world contains some moral or rather immoral “secret” knowledge, albeit one the narrator is unable to interpret. Meanwhile, the reference to “sensual passion” reminds readers that Strickland channels his sexual energy into the expression of artistic ideas, subordinating body to mind.
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Literary Devices
Chapter 58. The narrator leaves Tahiti, saying an emotional farewell to Tiaré. About a month later, in London, he exchanges letters with and then visits Mrs. Strickland. When he arrives, Mrs. Strickland already has as a visitor: an American art critic who is asking her about Strickland. Somewhat surprisingly, Mrs. Strickland has reproductions of Strickland’s paintings on her walls. While Mrs. Strickland and the critic talk about how “decorative” the art is, the narrator wonders whether Mrs. Strickland knows that one of the paintings represents Ata with her baby by Strickland.
Mrs. Strickland’s ignorant description of Strickland’s disturbing paintings as “decorative” indicates that she has embraced her husband’s work after his death for social clout, not out of any genuine appreciation for it. Given her previous hostility to Strickland, her pleasant discussion with an art critic about him suggests social climbing and hypocrisy.
Themes
After the American critic leaves, Mrs. Strickland mentions that her children are present, as she thought they’d like to hear what the narrator had to say about Strickland. The children come in. The daughter has married a soldier. The son, Robert, is currently on leave from the war—though he’s itching to get back. The narrator tells them everything he knows about Strickland’s time in Tahiti—excepting Strickland’s second family. Once he’s done, Robert says, “The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.” The narrator suspects the whole family believes this quotation comes from the Bible. He suddenly pictures Strickland’s son by Ata, merry aboard a ship on the Pacific, and narrowly avoids quoting that “the devil could always quote scripture to his purpose.”
The war referenced in this passage is presumably World War I (1914–1918), as the novel was published in 1919, the year after World War I ended. The phrase “The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small,” which refers to divine punishment for sin, is not originally a Christian proverb—it derives from ancient Greece and originally referred to “gods” rather than “God”—but came into common usage in European countries in the 1500s. The narrator’s comment that the Stricklands probably belief the quotation is actually from the Bible implies that they are hypocrites who don’t know their own religion particularly well. The phrase “the devil could always quote scripture to his purpose,” meanwhile, is a paraphrase of “the devil can cite scripture for his purpose,” line 105 from Act I, Scene 3 of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–1598). It means that an evil person can say good or holy things to appear good. Here, the narrator is implying that the Stricklands are wicked, hypocritical people for suggesting that Strickland got what he deserved in dying of leprosy—and indicates that the narrator ultimately sides with Strickland in his conflict with conventional society against people like Mrs. Strickland and Robert who continue secretly to hate him for his behavior.
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