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Morality
Themes and Colors
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.
The Moon and Sixpence represents the mind, intellect, and spirituality as essentially superior to the body—but it suggests that, under the right conditions, the body can serve the mind. In the novel, the unnamed narrator sometimes compares the protagonist, painter Charles Strickland, to a “disembodied spirit”: someone totally attuned to his own internal vision and intellectual perceptions, which he expresses in his art. Yet Strickland also has periodic outbursts of extreme physical lust, which he experiences as a kind of hateful enslavement to the desires of the body. Initially, the novel represents Strickland’s mind and art as in competition with his body and his lust: the latter distracts him from the former. Yet eventually, Strickland begins to draw artistic and spiritual inspiration from his physical and sexual experiences. He paints a stunning nude of his lover Blanche Stroeve, even though he experienced his attraction to her as an infuriating loss of control. Much later, in Tahiti, he paints on the walls of his house a kind of “Garden of Eden” scene that uses the human body to represent spiritual and emotional concepts. Thus, the novel suggests that the mind is ultimately superior to the body but that, under the right circumstances, the body can serve the mind well.
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Mind vs. Body ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Mind vs. Body appears in each part of The Moon and Sixpence. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Mind vs. Body Quotes in The Moon and Sixpence
Below you will find the important quotes in The Moon and Sixpence related to the theme of Mind vs. Body.
Chapters 17–42
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“I’ll tell you what must seem strange, that when it’s over you feel so extraordinarily pure. You feel like a disembodied spirit, immaterial; and you seem to be able to touch beauty as though it were a palpable thing[.]”
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[T]here was in his face an outrageous sensuality; but, though it sounds nonsense, it seemed as though his sensuality were curiously spiritual.
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Blanche Stroeve was in the cruel grip of appetite. Perhaps she hated Strickland still, but she hungered for him, and everything that had made up her life till then became of no account. She ceased to be a woman, complex, kind, and petulant, considerate and thoughtless; she was a Maenad.
Strickland had burst the bonds that hitherto had held him. […] It was not only the bold simplification of the drawing which showed so rich and so singular a personality; it was not only the painting, though the flesh was painted with a passionate sensuality which had in it something miraculous; it was not only the solidity, so that you felt extraordinarily the weight of the body; there was also a spirituality, troubling and new[.]
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“She had a wonderful body, and I wanted to paint a nude. When I’d finished my picture I took no more interest in her.”
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Chapters 43–58
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I suppose that art is a manifestation of the sexual instinct […]. It is possible that Strickland hated the normal release of sex because it seemed to him brutal by comparison with the satisfaction of artistic creation.
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