On Maugham's Exploration Of The Modern Man's Salvation

The author of this thesis attempts to study William Somerset Maugham's three initiation novels written at different phases in his career, Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, and The Razor's Edge, intending to draw an outline of Maugham's exposure of the modern man's spiritual life and his way to salvation. The thesis is to provide one more perspective to Maugham studies.In the 20th century, three interrelated ideological subversions have prepared for the decline of Christianity, which is reflected in Maugham's novels in question. Firstly, Christian notions of truth and the absolute were rejected with the advance of scientific development, and the rejection, in its turn, paved the way for modern rationalism, which eventually made blind faith unacceptable for anyone who was reasonable or had common sense. Whether people have realized it or not, a spiritual crisis has emerged. Secondly, with the publishing of Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859, man started to learn that his ancestors were animals, which made him under a severer strain. He realized he was but a civilized beast subjecting to carnal desires and liable to commit drastic crimes instead of "the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals". Thirdly, Freud administrated the final blow with his hypothesis, which revealed that the unconscious might be more irrationally destructive than the conscious. As a logical result, man is neither the lord of the cosmos nor the lord of his own mind.William Somerset Maugham's attempt to reconstruct the modern man's spiritual life is based on those subversions. Turning to some new trend like existentialism, especially the concept of absurdity, which provides a perspective ranging from man's awakening (realizing the absurdity) to his action (resistance to the given destiny and the absurd living condition), Maugham reflects man's changed understanding of the world, and the newly established relationship between him and the world. Like the artists Freud depicts in Creative Writers and Daydreams, Maugham lived in the haunting memory of his carefree early childhood and the miseries he endured ever since his mother's death, the sharp contrast of which rendered Maugham "unsatisfied" with thereality, consequently, he found in writing a way of release, of expressing his most bizarre wishes, and as a liberation of his soul. He created a dream of his own and eventually found peace by reconciling with the substantial world through a Utopian way. What the author of this thesis intends to do is to reconstruct Maugham's understanding of human nature and his way to modern man's salvation.From the Edwardian period into the modern age, Maugham's protagonists in Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence and The Razor's Edge have gone through an odyssey of the modern man's ordeal and his revolt against destiny. They are infiltrated with the absurdity of existence and struggling for a significant life. Following the route of seeking emancipation, seizing the essence of freedom, and surpassing it, Maugham displays the role of a seer. The thesis thus concludes by reiterating a challenge implicit all along: are Maugham's creative dreams themselves truths or idle fancies?...