The Painted Veil

The Painted Veil depicts white men ruling and administering the British Empire with women and people of color in their service. Their subjugation not only makes white men’s lives easier but maintains the hierarchies of gender and race that the empire depends on.

As an upper middle-class British woman, Kitty is expected to marry in her late teens or early-twenties and devote her life to her husband and the family they will create. Her leverage lies in using her natural beauty and easy social manner to acquire a wealthy or titled partner who will give her a life of ease and social dominance. However, as the years beyond her 18th birthday pass, her suitors dwindle and become less eligible, increasing in age and decreasing in position and salary. When she reaches her 25th birthday without marrying, Kitty is considered to be “on the shelf” or “second-rate” (32; 74)—both epithets that objectify her as a thing that has lost its value and is no longer useful to society. Her plainer younger sister’s marriage at 18 further reveals Kitty’s defunct status and throws her into a state of shame and obscurity. Kitty’s marriage to Walter is a last-ditch effort to attain the kind of respectability granted to married women.

While Kitty’s affair with Townsend would seem to confirm that she can still rely on her looks, the terms of the affair—timing, location, and duration—are dictated by him. Thus, while Kitty may gain romantic and sexual satisfaction from the relationship, the dynamic between her and Townsend reinforces patriarchal norms, as the affair becomes a type of ephemeral boys’ own adventure for Townsend even as he retains the status and respectability of his marriage.

Kitty finds more liberation from subjugation at Meitan-fu, where an egalitarian friendship with Waddington enables her to see more of the world outside her home and learn about the Chinese culture that she has previously ignored. Kitty learns to make up her own mind and begins to question the beliefs she grew up with. Moreover, her friendship with the Catholic nuns shows her a form of empowered sisterhood, as women collaborate to heal, nurture, and educate in service of the local people. However, the nuns’ Catholic faith alienates Kitty and forces her to look inside herself for answers on how to live her best life. Although she settles on going to the Bahamas and looking after both her aged father and unborn child, her vision of raising a woman who can stand on her own feet applies to herself as well as her baby. Additionally, her resolution that she and her father should model their shared life on being “kind to one another” is more egalitarian than the imperial norms of hierarchy and dominance (281).

While white men subjugate white women, white people of both genders subjugate the Chinese colonial subjects, who are mostly unnamed and dehumanized beneath the shade of their hats or under the chairs on which they bear the white characters about the countryside. While Kitty is being ported in this manner on her journey to Meitan-fu, she can mostly ignore the labor of the nameless Chinese servants and, “protected by the curtains of her chair” (101), indulge in private thoughts and pain. Thus, while the novel grants Kitty complex human emotions, it treats her Chinese servants like inconspicuous mules defined by manual labor and apparently lacking inner lives; Kitty is only aware of their labor when the road gets bumpy, drawing her attention to them.

While Chinese people are a consistent presence in Maugham’s novel, their objectification and lack of three-dimensional qualities mean that they never fully come alive as characters. The novel, adhering to the perspective of a white woman, tells us little about the Chinese experience. Instead, the white characters’ attitude towards Chinese people is the more illuminating subject, as this reveals their values and beliefs. For example, Townsend’s unshaking belief in the discretion and devotion of Chinese servants and his willingness to intimidate them indicate his absolute confidence in the colonial project. It also reveals the contradictions of the colonialist mindset, as there would be no need to bully a “happily” colonized people into submission. In contrast, Waddington’s residence in Meitan-fu (away from the seat of power in Hong Kong) and his acquisition of the Chinese language indicate a deeper investment in the local culture. He is willing to open himself to new ways of experiencing the world and to learn from the Chinese. Nevertheless, he still displays aspects of white supremacy in his longing for the company of fellow white people and in his objectification of his Chinese mistress. While Walter loses his life trying to stem the cholera epidemic that is destroying Chinese lives, both the nuns and Colonel Yü speak of him as a white savior in a way that might make modern readers uncomfortable. Still, although Waddington and Walter’s interactions with Chinese people ultimately reinforce colonial hierarchies, from Maugham’s perspective, their engagement indicates a depth of character and critical thinking that the most jingoistic colonists (like Townsend) do not possess.