On The Painted Veil
Writing about W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil is the first time, in my attempts to Do Criticism, that I’ve googled the thing I’m writing about in attempt to generate some sort of thought.
That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the slender 1925 novella. After about twenty pages I realised that I’d read it before; I had a strong flashback to my school library - I suppose I must have read it on a rainy lunchtime, just wanting something short that wasn’t about being a schoolgirl in southwest London. The Painted Veil would have fit the brief. Certainly the story must have stayed with me, and equally certainly I must not have understood it at all when I first came to it at sixteen or seventeen.
It’s just that there probably isn’t much to say about The Painted Veil that hasn’t already been said. I couldn’t find much online about it, but I assume that what academic essays exist about it would make reference to Maugham’s Orientalism (lashings of it, industrial-strength stuff, the Tao is inscrutable and seductive yet fundamentally senseless compared to good old Catholicism, etc.). Such essays probably note that Maugham depicts colonials as vacuous types, the sort of person who would have got really into all the inter-house games at school. They would also probably observe that The Painted Veil is quite a sympathetic depiction of female shallowness. Kitty, the (anti)heroine, is, by her own words:
‘Not very well-educated and... not very clever... just a perfectly ordinary young woman. I like the things that the people like among whom I’ve lived all my life. I like dancing and tennis and theatres and I like men who play games.’ There’s something rather Wollestonecraftian about that: Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
But the fact remains that Kitty is not a good fit for her bacteriologist husband, Walter, and that is - Maugham makes clear - as much Walter’s fault for falling passionately in love with Kitty as it is Kitty’s fault for being shallow. The story opens with Kitty in bed with her lover, the still-more vacuous Charlie, who is in line to be governor of Hong Kong. Walter finds out about the affair and essentially coerces Kitty into accompanying him to the cholera-ridden city of Meitan-fu, as a sort of penance or suicide pact.
Kitty finds The Sublime there (as you do). She also finds her husband is, in fact, a good and admirable man. Rather refreshingly, that doesn’t mean that she falls in love with him (in contrast to the film adaptation starring Naomi Watts and Edward Norton - I guess they’re both just too good-looking to not fall in love). I think it was rather ballsy of Maugham to hold his nerve in that respect. After Walter has manfully died of manful cholera, ‘She would acknowledge that Walter had admirable qualities; it just happened that she did not like him; he had always bored her.’
Maugham isn’t fashionable now, and maybe that’s why I had a tough time outsourcing my opinions on him. Maybe it’s the Orientalism or the colonialism, but maybe it’s just the sort of people he writes. Morally upstanding people who do weird abusive things like force their wives to accompany them to plague pits. Redeemed people who have found the sublime yet still have one last-hurrah fuck with their seedy ex. Perfectly okay people who really shouldn’t have married each other. People, in short. Inconsistent, normative, pathetic, real people.
