Masculinity In Colonies: An Analysis Of Male Subjectivity In The Opriental Novels Of W. Somerset Maugham

This thesis discusses the oriental fiction of W. Somerset Maugham in the light of current theoretical models introduced by postcolonial and gender studies. Very popular from their publication to the present, Maugham's novels and other writings set in Asia and South Pacific show a perfect recycling of colonist 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 continence, rationality and inspection. 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, destabilizing the integrity of the subject they strive so assiduously to create.This thesis first makes a comparison between the primitive East and the civilized West in Maugham's first oriental novel The Moon and Sixpence which is set in the South Pacific. Even though Maugham disapproved of the division between the East and the West, we can see that he conformed to this division in his Hong Kong novel The Painted Veil all the same. The last chapter explores Maugham's novel of India, The Razor's Edge, and makes a detailed analysis of the triangle in the novel as well as the role of the narrator in the text.Unlike many of his contemporary writers, Maugham did not even attempt a liberal critique of British Imperialism. For him, writing and narration are processes closely related to codes of imperialist manliness. Maugham's objective narrators and the"Maugham persona"which the writer carefully cultivated, exhibit a strong investment in the British male subjectivity outlined above.