Man and Woman in Chagall's Dancing Pair

I wrote in my previous post on Chagall's painting Dancing Pair that the colors (and contrasts) in the painting indicate to me that Chagall is assigning male and female essences to his protagonists. The following struck me as I re-read my post: Is woman more in tune with her surrounding environment, and is man more in tune with himself?

I wrote about the woman's position in the painting:

[T]he red/rose of the woman's dress contrasts with the green of the background... But, this contrast, as it isolates the woman, also gives her a self-contained environment.

What I mean by this is that the woman validates her womanhood, her essence, by interacting and melding with her surrounding, her environment, which includes both its physical presence and the people and objects in it. Perhaps this is what we mean by the vanity of woman, who, like Eve, will solicit the approval of anyone, including the serpent, to feed that vanity, or that desire to be included in her (in all her) surrounding. Yet this constant desire (more narcissistic than altruistic) aids her to be more in tune, or more in empathy to use a kinder word, with her environment and gives her an identifiable personality, and a unique perspective or essence, which makes her a woman.

Whereas about the man, I wrote:

The man's bright yellow straw hat contrasts with his blue costume, also giving him a contained, individual presence.

Man's relationship to the environment is through himself. His color "contrast" in the painting is not with the surrounding field, like the woman's, but with his own colors. Unlike the woman, he doesn't require external validation. He has to validate his manhood to himself, and this validated manhood allows him to lead his woman (wife), family, and ultimately his surrounding (his environment). He cannot lead all this, including that elusive environment, if he is fully in empathy - "in tune" - with it.This separation (or isolation) from the mundane world, from the environment, gives him the position to destroy/dismantle what he finds wrong with his world, and restructure it for the best. He is not sentimental about his environment. His task is to make it right, not to be engulfed in its experience.

Extremes of this masculine prerogative for destruction and reconstruction can give rise to demagogues like Hitler, whose ventures arose from a misguided masculinity, and ultimately an evil enterprise to destroy all life and to restructure it according to his mandate. Hitler's missing factor, of course, is that man is not guided by his wisdom alone, but by God's wisdom, who has given him temporary lease on the world. Without this transcendental factor, man's recreations are likely to lead to disaster.

Extremes of a woman's empathy leads to an inability for a woman to separate her emotions, positive or negative, from the lives around her, and especially her children's lives. In Greek mythology, Medea comes to mind.

An overly (feminized) empathetic man cannot lead, would be lost in a myriad of choices in the spherical engulfment of empathy. A masculine woman, who secludes herself, ignoring her environment, could never muster the necessary emotions to take care of a crying baby.

What would feminists make of these ideas? And of the painting? I wonder if they would laugh at the exuberance of the man, and be annoyed at the passivity of the woman?

And all this from a painting!