China In The Context Of Orientalism

William Somerset Maugham is a notable British novelist and dramatist in the 20th century. He travels quite a lot and has taken a visit to China. Based on his travels he creates two major works:On the Chinese Screen and The Painted Veil which are permeated with a strong exoticism.Compared with other travels in the Far East, China is one of Maugham's important stops. The images of China and Chinese people in On the Chinese Screen and The Painted Veil are very complicated. On the one hand, in his heart, China still remains in the glorious and ancient past, full of exoticism. Therefore, he has lots of expectations from China. On the other hand, in these two works, the images of China are more often than not depicted as poor, backward, and filthy; and the images of Chinese are full of deception and stagnation. China has a large population and Chinese people are born to be addicted to smoking opium. Actually, the glorious and ancient images of China reveal the writer's discontentment to Britain's reality and his attempt to search for some sort of spiritual comfort from the ideal fairyland, thus experiencing the long-lost and pure Chinese idyllic life as well. Meanwhile, Maugham does not free himself from the bondage of the ingrained Orientalism in the West. Considering all above, the image of China portrayed by Maugham conceals the rascality of British opium and offers a good reason for their colonial domination as well.To some extent, any kind of images of foreign countries reflects their awareness and understanding of the foreign cultures, and they also show the introduction, communication, influence and impact of foreign cultures; meanwhile, they reflect the desires, minds and needs of the nation of image shapers. In Maugham's two woks, the images of China are shaped by English writers, and are also produced by English cultural psychology; thus, the images of China have their English brands. Moreover, these two Maugham's works are full of prejudice against China and Chinese culture. And his depiction fraught with the psychology of cultural imperialism and prejudice of colonialism; and the image of China is not real China. In fact, behind the images of China in these two works, they both reveal Maugham's inner psychology, that is, he wants to gain "self" identity and self-improvement through description and construction of "themselves". Based on Said's theory of Orientalism, this thesis tries to analyze the images of China in Maugham's works On the Chinese Screen and The Painted Veil. On the basis of close reading, this thesis anatomizes the reasons for the formation behind the images, writer's cultural imperialism and writer's prejudice toward Chinese culture.