The Nigerian playwright and poet, Wole Soyinka, once said, "Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness."
As we continue our reading of W. Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil, we watch our main characters travel from the relatively comfortable Westernized society of Imperial Hong Kong into the more rural interior of China's mainland. While much of the plot is driven around the drama of Walter and Kitty's marriage, we can't ignore that this novel is written from the colonial perspective of an "invader".
Does Soyinka's quote hold true for what you are seeing so far in the novel? Is Kitty moving from a place of arrogance to openness? Does the changing physical landscape have anything to do with this? So far, how do you see the setting of the novel impacting the plot?
As we continue our reading of W. Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil, we watch our main characters travel from the relatively comfortable Westernized society of Imperial Hong Kong into the more rural interior of China's mainland. While much of the plot is driven around the drama of Walter and Kitty's marriage, we can't ignore that this novel is written from the colonial perspective of an "invader".
Does Soyinka's quote hold true for what you are seeing so far in the novel? Is Kitty moving from a place of arrogance to openness? Does the changing physical landscape have anything to do with this? So far, how do you see the setting of the novel impacting the plot?
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