This thesis discusses the oriental fiction of W. Somerset
Maugham in the light of current theoretical models
introduced by postcolonial and gender studies. Immensely
popular from their time of publication to the present,
Maugham's novels and short stories set in Asia and the South
Pacific exhibit a consummate recycling of colonialist
tropes. Through their manipulation of racial, gender, and
geographical binarisms, Maugham's texts produce a fantasy of
a seemingly stable British male subjectivity based upon
emotional and somatic continence, rationality, and
specularity. The status of the British male subject is
tested and confirmed by his activity in the colonies.
Maugham's situation of writing as a homosexual man, however,
results in affiliations which cut across the binary
oppositions which structure Maugham's texts, destabilising
the integrity of the subject they strive so assiduously to
create.
Commencing with Maugham's novel The Moon and Sixpence,
and his short story collection The Trembling of a Leaf, both
of which are set in the South Pacific, the thesis moves to a
discussion of Maugham's Chinese travelogue, On a Chinese
Screen, and his Hong Kong novel, The Painted Veil. Further
chapters explore the Malayan short stories, and Maugham's
novel set in the then Dutch East Indies, The Narrow Corner.
A final chapter discusses Maugham's novel of India, The
Razor's Edge. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Maugham
does not even attempt a liberal critique of British
Imperialism. Writing and narration are, for him, processes
closely identified with codes of imperial manliness.
Maugham's putatively objective narrators, and the public
"Maugham persona" which the writer carefully cultivated,
display a strong investment in the British male subjectivity
outlined above. Yet Maugham's texts also endlessly discover
writing as a play of signification, of decoration, of
qualities that he explicitly associates in other texts with
homosexuality. If Maugham's texts do not critique the
formation of colonial subjects they do, to a critical
reader, make the rhetoric necessary to create such subjects
peculiarly visible.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/6830 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Holden, Philip Joseph |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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