I picked up The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham because I love the film with Edward Norton and Naomi Watts. It’s a slow burn of heart-rendering, complex emotion, ending in tear-jerking scenes. Edward Norton is particularly impressive in it, and it quickly became one of my favorite movies. Upon reading the book, I learned the first half of the movie is a faithful rendition of the book, and then the book and movie diverge and go in two separate directions, and I value both for different reasons. *Spoilers ahead on both.*
The first thing that stuck out at me about Maugham’s book is the strange chapter breaks. All the chapters are very short even when the particular scene continues. The scene would just pick up again in the next chapter as if there wasn’t a break, and it disrupted the flow. But I did eventually get used to it. I otherwise really enjoyed Maugham’s writing style. I thought he showed a unique understanding of the human mind and his characters. He had to know each one intimately in order for them to be able to convincingly confuse each other so completely and dance around each other the way they did at the beginning. And I liked how he described his characters. He blended physical descriptors with mannerisms and personality and knew how they informed each other. He enjoyed using oxymorons to describe the same thing. Waddington’s gaze was simultaneously malicious and singularly kindly. An ugly and vulgar little chapel also had a delicate beauty because it was adored. Mother Superior had “an austerity that was passionate.” A day was simultaneously agreeable and melancholy. Maugham is a very thoughtful and skillful writer, though I did think Kitty’s dialogue was occasionally too stilted.
I think it’s very interesting that Maugham chose to write such perceptions that are in this book through the lens of an otherwise vain, vapid, frivolous, thoughtless woman—it made her more human and sympathetic. Kitty experienced a lot of growth over the course of the novel, but it was a very realistic growth. Even at the end, she succumbed to sinful impulses and she continually made excuses for herself despite her self-loathing. I could never like Kitty, even at the end. I’m more of a Dr. Fane, and I suppose the book proved that such characters could never get along. But her perceptiveness, which was strong even at the beginning, even if it was purely of a social intelligence, and her compassion, if incomplete and not outstanding, prevented her from being a totally dislikeable and unsympathetic character. It was ironic how her intended punishment improved her so much. Her expanded horizons helped her see herself, the elitist world she was born into, and her worldview in a different light. She even learns to see her own racism. Some moments of her bias towards other people, especially the Chinese children, were particularly uncomfortable to read. It was startling to read such base reactions in a main character, but it was interesting that she learns to overcome those impulses through watching the love and generosity in people she admired.
Dr. Fane was always a more interesting character though he’s barely a character at the beginning—we don’t get to know him well at the start because our narrator, Kitty, didn’t care enough to. He’s a devastating character. Self-controlled, proud, cold, but also tender and noble with a huge capacity for love. He fell entirely in love with a silly woman because she was everything he was not. She could be easy in herself and with other people and he didn’t know how to let go. And then he despised himself for loving her because all she was was a disappointment. He really is a character that breaks my heart. “There was a shadow of a tremor in his voice; it was dreadful that cold self-control of his which made the smallest token of emotion so shattering.” And he always knew who Kitty was: “I never expected you to love me, I didn’t see any reason that you should, I never thought myself very lovable. I was thankful to be allowed to love you and I was enraptured when now and then I thought you were pleased with me or when I noticed in your eyes a gleam of good-humored affection. I tried not to bore you with my love; I knew I couldn’t afford to do that and I was always on the lookout for the first sign that you were impatient with my affection. What most husbands expect as a right I was prepared to receive as a favour.”
I would love to know more about his thought processes and intentions when bringing Kitty into the center of a cholera epidemic. When Kitty eventually asks him whether he wanted her to die when bringing her there, and when he eventually submits to answering, he admits, “At first.” I wonder if it was a premeditated murder plot or if it was a dark impulse, one where if it became an eventuality he would think of it as karma rather than a death by his hand. Because Kitty herself says that Dr. Fane has a sensitive conscience and probably wouldn’t forgive himself if that eventuality took place. And she says that he could always be trusted to behave admirably. Both after his confession. I think it’s the latter, and that his foremost motivation was always his own death, but that he couldn’t ignore a poetic justice in them both dying together. “She knew that he was not vindictive; he would forgive her if she could but give him an excuse to, an excuse that touched his heart, and he would forgive completely. She could count on him never to throw the past in her teeth. Cruel he might be, cold and morbid, but he was neither mean nor petty.”
Kitty learns to appreciate her husband for all of his better qualities though she never comes to love him. She couldn’t love a man for virtue, she could only appreciate charm and passion. “It was a pity that with his great qualities, his unselfishness and honour, his intelligence and sensibility, he should be so unlovable. She was not in the least frightened of him now, but sorry for him, and at the same time she could not help thinking him slightly absurd.” There was a part of the novel where I thought that Maugham was making us readers fall in love with Dr. Fane at the same time as Kitty, because at that point I was under the assumption that the book and the film were following the same storyline, but a couple of pages later I lost hope in that.
The Painted Veil is an entire novel of mismatched and one-sided marriages. The only couple that truly loves and is faithful to one another, Waddington and his Manchu princess, aren’t even married. Kitty’s parents only tolerate one another, and her father felt relief upon his wife’s death just as Kitty did upon Walter’s, and the Townsend’s marriage was rife with infidelity. I’m not sure it’s a commentary on all forms of marriage itself but more of a commentary on the institutions we hide behind as one would behind a painted veil, using marriage and elitism and culture as examples.
I appreciated the intertextual literary references. The title, The Painted Veil, is from a poem by Percy Shelley, “Lift Not the Painted Veil.” We don’t even choose a transparent veil to view the world, we paint a perspective on the inside from which to see. And Walter’s last line before his death in the novel: “The dog it was that died,” is the last line from Oliver Goldsmith’s poem “An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog.” Honestly, I can buy more than one interpretation over whether Walter or Kitty is the man vs the dog, though I think the most obvious one is that Walter is the dog, thought mad by everyone for heading into a cholera epidemic with his wife, the false flower who expected to die, only for the dog to die from ingesting the bitter poison of his wife’s infidelity and continual presence. It was so like Walter to use his last words to comment on the irony of his position rather than to forgive his wife.
There is so much in this novel to unpack, and I absolutely love books that make you think. I do think there is something that prevents this book from being an absolute favorite of mine, perhaps because Walter’s death was so anticlimactic, particularly for Kitty, and the book ends on Kitty’s future, and I was never entirely invested in Kitty by herself. I’m slightly inclined to say that I like the film a bit more, though I think both the film and novel are so valuable in their own right. The film ends on a sweeter note, and is shorter, so I’ll probably consume that version of the story more, but I do want to revisit both. Over and over. Both are masterpieces.
