The Painted Veil is the type of book where the more you think about it, the more it lingers and the more it ferments in your head. It is a persistent, dull pain that you feel when you’ve bruised yourself somewhat, or if you have the pain of shame. It is a disturbing book, but you couldn’t expect less from Maugham who writes broken characters beautifully and with a bare economy of words, which oftentimes make his prose lyrical. He is also a master of deep dialogues, reminiscent of Hemingway, but the words of his characters stay longer. I finished reading The Painted Veil a few days ago, and I am still digesting. It’s stuck in my appendix.
The revenge of the cuckold
Kitty Fane is a pretty English girl who married badly. How bad can one get married? Well, how about getting married just because you don’t want your plain as paper looking sister is going to one up you and marry before you do? That’s just not gonna happen. It’s not like she didn’t have any suitors — all her suitors were just not cutting it — too old, too poor (mainly too poor), too boring. She jumped at the convenient opportunity marrying Walter Fane, a bacteriologist who works in Hong Kong. Sure enough, he took her there to live with him.
Walter isn’t making the big bucks and his profession is humble. He doesn’t know how to communicate with Kitty well, and she is bored by him endlessly. She jumped at the affair with Charles Townsend — an alpha male figure who’s destined for prestigious posts in Hong Kong. Walter knows about the affair however, and soon confronted Kitty. He gave her an ultimatum — to get a divorce or to come with him to a remote area of Mei-Tan-Fu, where cholera is raging and hundreds die daily. After quickly finding that Townsend is as unreliable as a pair of wet socks, she was devastated and in spite, followed her husband to Mei-Tan-Fu.
The illusion of the painted veil
Human affairs are rather awkward. Kitty never really wanted to marry Walter, but he was hopelessly in love with her. If you’ve read Of Human Bondage, you’d know that Phillip Carey is the biggest simp perhaps in the history of literature. Mildred Price enslaved Phillip, and he was utterly helpless. The Painted Veil turned this question right around — what happens if the simp gets the girl? It is a fascinating question that many simps can’t even remotely dream about. For most, they would take whatever they can get — the simple affections returned by the partner of their dreams, a kiss maybe, or bad sex, whatever it is. Walter loved Kitty to a fault, until he reached a breaking point.
It is hard to determine what triggered Walter in the end, as the story is written from Kitty’s perspective. But he just had had it with her affairs and decided to bring her along to Mei-Tan-Fu where they both might die, or perhaps she might love him again. Walter, as all the other characters here, is a contradictory character — he loves his wife, yet he couldn’t endure the suffering of his masculine vanity to the point that he wanted Kitty to die. He is a hero to many in the cholera-struck island, yet his motives are selfish. His gall to experiment with cholera killed him in the end — perhaps he always wanted to die and had surrendered to the idea that Kitty would have never loved him.
Kitty herself is a walking contradiction once she got into the island. But her contradiction is necessary in order for her character to develop. From the get-go she was portrayed as happy-go-lucky, putting importance in appearances more than the substance of character. She would not want to marry for love, but for status. She lives the high life and starved for attention, which led to the affair with Townsend. Yet, when she got to the island, she was involved with trying to help the convent and the orphans living in it. She became a help to the nuns and she showed affection to the orphans. However deep down, we know that she was lost, and trying to find that answer that Waddington can only describe as “Tao”. Her motives too, are selfish in a way.
But this is the painted veil. Maugham adopted this from Shelley’s poem:
Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call Life
What appears on the surface are oftentimes perceivable as the thing itself. In truth, we don’t know anybody’s motives. Altruism is often a selfish thing. When I opened my school in Cambodia, I saw volunteers who had other aims than just to help the community — some of them are doing it to boost their academic records, some want the volunteering stint on their CVs, some have other artificial motives. To be honest, I don’t know my own as well and question them sometimes. Perhaps I opened the school as a bridge to another career and that I felt obligated. Motives are often complex and in most cases, we can only perceive the face value, as the nuns did Kitty and Colonel Yue did Walter. Yet, perhaps it is the action that matters more than the motive — Good intentions can only come so far. In a world where we are constantly uploading our lives in social media, we are constantly living under the painted veil. But what happens when we take that off? What monstrosities and injuries are we going to find underneath?
Walter’s intention to bring Kitty to Mei-Tan-Fu was that he wished her to die, which is akin to an attempt of killing her. Out of all Maugham’s stories, according to the preface, this was the first where he already had a frame of story in mind, inspired by one of the cantos in Dante’s Inferno: Pia was a gentlewoman whose husband suspected her infidelities, took her to a castle with poisonous fumes where he expected to kill her. She didn’t die as fast as he’d liked and had her thrown out of the castle instead. Although the story ended differently, Walter’s intention is the same as Pia’s husband. Maugham also couldn’t fit the story to any setting that he knows until he decided on the distance and exoticness of the outskirts of Hong Kong.
Walter’s death is the most unexpected and ambiguous in the story, especially his final words, quoting the final lines of Oliver Goldsmith’s Elegy: “The dog it was that died.” In the poem, a mad dog bit a good man, but in the end the man recovered and the dog died. Was it Walter’s intention to be the man in the poem, and Kitty the dog? The outcome of the story is also the opposite of what happened in Dante’s Inferno — the wife was ultimately killed. But Kitty survived, and for her sake she merited some degree of freedom — the freedom at least to find peace in her own way, in her own definition of it when she finds it.
Yet, the contradictions of the characters make the story all the more real, all the more human, as my missus would say. Even after Kitty felt high and mighty making it through Mei-Tan-Fu, she still falters and was quite lost. And perhaps we couldn’t blame her nature as it was dictated very early on from her status-obsessed mother, who put Kitty on a pedestal until she became a nuisance, and undermined her sister who ultimately became a baroness. Her mother was also instrumental in pushing the benign husband for a higher career, even though her untimely death ironically prevented her from seeing his promotion. Thus, it was not until her death that there was some form of correction.
Seeing one’s own reflection in the painted veil
I could write about Maugham’s creation for days on end, he is that kind of a writer. He writes about broken people and writes them terribly well. All of us in some way had already been broken and weirdly enough, these characters resonate more than we’d like. It makes us reflect on our motives and the persons we are, and as much as we can view these characters scornfully, as they are admittedly hard to like, who says that we are any better? After all, we are nothing more than the wisp of a cigarette smoke in the ephemeral life.
