The Painted Veil by W. Somerset
Maugham
The Painted Veil
Set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920s, The Painted Veil is the story
of the beautiful but love-starved Kitty Fane. When her husband discovers
her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to the heart of a
cholera epidemic. Stripped of the British society of her youth and the small
but effective society she fought so hard to attain in Hong Kong, she is
compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her life and learn how
to love.
The Painted Veil is a beautifully written affirmation of the human capacity
to grow, to change, and to forgive.
Personal Review: The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
This is a superb book, dealing with multiple themes around human
relationships, character development, distinguishing love and infatuation,
the transcendental experience, and the meaning of existence. That sounds
like a lot but this small book covers a lot of ground.
Through a wide array of characters, Maugham explores the nature of
human relationships. There a parental relationships where parents are
overbearing and judgmental. Kitty, the protagonist of this novel, has such a
relationship with her mother. She eventually marries just to escape her
mother's judgments and criticisms. There are also unexamined
relationships that are taken for granted and only later are seen in a new
light. Such is the case with Kitty and her father. He is a judge and ample
supporter for his family. Yet he is a status symbol for her mother and a
source of income and support for Kitty. It isn't until Kitty gains in maturity
and painful experiences that she eventually is able to even begin a
genuine relationship with her father. Social roles of parent, child, mother,
son, daughter, and father may often provide a social matrix for interaction

but subtle violence and disregard and neglect may characterize the
relationships that are seen to the outside world as loving and in fact those
who dispense emotional violence and those who absorb emotional
violence may never grasp the reality in which they are stuck, and thus
characterize their relationships to family as loving when in fact, love is not
present.
Growing up in such a home, Kitty seems oblivious to the compromise she
creates when she agrees to marry a socially awkward but highly intelligent
bacteriologist. He falls for her but she never really reciprocates with the
emotional depth of her husband. She is young and self-absorbed and
shallow in many ways, yet he loves her.
But Kitty has never given herself fully to another person, she has never
been infatuated, she has never been out of control and in constant pain
when she is away from her lover. Unfortunately for Kitty, she falls for a
married diplomat who is highly self serving and manipulative. Charlie
Townsend begins to dominate her every thought and she becomes lost in
day-dreams of marriage to Charlie far away from the real world of their
marriages. The ancient Greeks believed Jupiter gives mankind wisdom
through painful experiences and Kitty is about to be educated. Having
discovered that his wife is having an affair with Charlie Townsend, Dr.
Walter Fane, is inwardly heart broken but he display a highly controlled
exterior. He offers Kitty an ultimatum which has been carefully thought
through for it helps reveal to Kitty how shallow is her relationship with
Charlie. Walter insists that Kitty join him in a distant city which is being
ravaged by cholera. She has no choice but to follow him. Yet this
experience is the critical experience of her life as well as Walter's life.
Kitty meets a minor ugly alcoholic British official, Waddington, who
eventually becomes her intimate friend and one of her guides toward
herself. Waddington quickly picks up that the Fane's relationship is a
disaster and he helps Kitty find meaning in her life as an aide in a French
Catholic orphanage. He also gradually introduces her to Taoism and the
concept of desire and connection being the source of much human pain
and suffering. Kitty gradually goes through multiple stages of grief and
anger to begin forgetting Charlie Townsend.
At the French Orphanage, Kitty also begins to grow and change in
character as she cares for Chinese orphans and interacts with the highly
spiritual nuns. Kitty observes that the nuns act calm and loving and gentle
and supportive of all humans in all their interactions, but she sees that they
are not attached. They are not emotionally bound to the children they
serve, there love is a spiritual grace and transference from God to the
children. They are willing conduit between God and suffering mankind.
Thus they are able to love and let go, they care and then forget, moving
onward to the next suffering soul. In this regard Maugham is certainly
connecting the sublime nature of Christian non-attachment to the Buddhist
and Taoist philosophies of detachment from the world. Kitty has several

transcendental experiences, sometimes evoked by great beauty in the
natural world or in vast vistas of man's interaction with nature.
Thus Maugham does something outstanding. He conveys how a person
may grow in character by pain and self examination as well as how a
person learns to integrate or experience the mystery, the unification with
the unknown, the wordless and thoughtless mind of God that changes
perception.
But like relationships, ever changing and growing, the transcendental
experience is never complete or present at all times. Kitty longs for the
serenity of the nuns, their spiritual and emotional centeredness, but finds
that just like relationships, our glimpses into the mind of God are ever
changing.
Maugham has selected to show us that a shallow self absorbed young
woman can begin to glimpse the mystery of existence, the flow of pain and
desire and attachment out of the human heart. Like the Buddha, she sees
a corpse in the road, the reminder of our temporary status on this earth.
The test comes as Kitty realizes that Walter is in pain and that he must
forgive her to move beyond the pain. She has moved and grown greatly if
she now can empathize with Walter to the point that she sees fully his pain
and sees the way beyond his pain. Just as Walter saw her infatuation with
Charlie and the steps needed to reveal Charlie's lack of character to Kitty,
she now sees that Walter has a broken heart and in his heart bears pain
and anger, but more importantly, he is now willing yet to move beyond the
pain and anger and move into a state of forgiveness. Kitty has reached the
point of maturity that she wants this forgiveness, not for herself but for
Walter. She has moved beyond herself absorption, her self definitions, and
her own perceptions and like the compassionate Buddha, she sees into
Walter's heart and knows how she must be healed.
Unfortunately, life is not predictable and Walter falls deathly ill with cholera.
As he dies she urges him to forgive her, something that she needs but also
something that she clearly sees that he also needs.
The resolution of the novel shows Kitty dealing with the consequences of
her choices, the recognition of her own human frailty and needs, the
separation from her mother's bonds, and the initiation of a genuine
relationship with her father.
This is an outstanding work of literature, unwinding a profound and
complex theme, revealing the nature of relationship to the self, to others, to
the Tao beyond. No small achievement.
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