The Arrogant Imperialist

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?

The Painted Veil

This week in British Literature we are beginning W. Somerset Maugham's 1925 novel, The Painted Veil. The story of a British couple living in Hong Kong at the height of the cholera epidemic, Maugham's novel has much to say about sin, redemption, and the power of forgiveness. It is also a fascinating look inside a prominent British colony and the relationship between the colonists and those who have been colonized.

The title for the novel comes from the first line of a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley. For this week's blog post, I want students to continue sharpening their poetry analysis skills by offering their own analysis of what this poem is about while also trying to see how they might already relate the content of the poem to what they have read of the novel so far. Below is the poem:

Lift not the painted veil which those who live

Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,

And it but mimic all we would believe

With colours idly spread,--behind, lurk Fear

And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave

Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear.

I knew one who had lifted it--he sought,

For his lost heart was tender, things to love,

But found them not, alas! nor was there aught

The world contains, the which he could approve.

Through the unheeding many he did move,

A splendour among shadows, a bright blot

Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove

For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley