This image expresses Munch's ambivalent attitude to women, whom he saw as seductive and powerful, but dangerous and deathly. Here the woman embodies the virgin/whore duality; she is simultaneously a haloed Madonna, but flaunts a sensual provocative nakedness emphasised by her luxuriant hair. A foetus crouching in the bottom left corner symbolises the woman as fertile mother, and the image is framed with representations of sperm, but this is a vision of a predatory feminity rather than a nurturing motherhood. For Munch sex and death were fused in the bodies of women.