Spirit of the Dead Watching her fear. Mathews says it is too simple to attribute Tehura's terror to her belief in spirits and irrational fear of the dark; she says, following Sweetman, that Gauguin's sexual predilections should not be ignored when trying to understand the work. Rather, she suggests the girl's fear was a response to Gauguin's aggressive behavior, consistent with his known battering (so says Mathews) of his wife Mette, the submissive fear in her eyes his erotic reward. Stephen F. Eisenman, professor of Art History at Northwestern University, suggests the painting and its narrative is "a veritable encyclopaedia of colonial racism and misogyny".
Irrational Man Irrational Man Irrational Man: A Study In Existential Philosophy is a 1958 book by the philosopher William Barrett, in which the author explains the philosophical background of existentialism and provides a discussion of several major existentialist thinkers, including Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. "Irrational Man" helped to introduce existentialism to the English-speaking world and has been identified as one of the most useful books that discuss the subject, but Barrett has also been criticized for endorsing irrationality and for giving a distorted and misleading account of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Barrett discusses existentialism and its background,