A Painted Veil:An Interpretation Of The Distorted Image Of China In Maugham’s Novel The Painted Veil From The Perspective Of Paul Ricoeur’s Social Imaginary

W.S.Maugham(1874-1965)is regarded as the prestigious novelist and playwright whose works are the most exotic in the modern British.His novel The Painted Veil has received great attention from domestic scholars for its exotic descriptions since its publication in 1925.Based on the background of the early twentieth China,the novel mainly tells a story of Kitty who accompanies her husband to the Cholera-invaded town—Mei-Tan-Fu for medical practice.The artistic world created by Maugham’s rich imagination presents readers an exotic landscape of the East.Based on the theory of Paul Ricoeur’s Social Imaginary and the starting point of close reading,this thesis tries to make a further interpretation on utopian and ideological image of China in this novel and discusses Maugham’s perspectives toward foreign culture.Paul Ricoeur advocates that social or cultural imagination is of the duality rather than oneness,and it operates either in the form of utopia or ideology.Utopia is considered as a cultural phenomenon which represents major appeals for the accomplishment of all dreams,the function of which is to put imagination into somewhere out of the reality(that is “nowhere”).Essentially,it has the centrifugal function with social subversion.Embodied as the life mapping in people’s imagination,ideology is an interpretation towards life,the function of which lies in the relay station of collective memory.It has the centripetal function that can sustain the reality in nature.As the two expressions of social collective imagination,utopia and ideology sometimes fill up the absent image of an existent and sometimes replace the absence through fiction.Based on Paul Ricoeur’s Social Imaginary theory,this thesis tries to interpret the image of China in The Painted Veil from utopia and ideology in “social collective imagination”.The image of China embodied in the text is also listed and analyzed to indicate that utopia and ideology are interrelated and co-existed.The thesis explores the image of China with utopian construction embodied in the imaginary projection at Mei-Tan-Fu,social subversion in Manchu princess and centrifugal function of Taoism.It also analyses the ideological description embodied in the centripetal function in exotic scenery and pathological features of the three kinds of Chinese people in The Painted Veil.The author figures out that Maugham’s description about the image of China is not objective,and his imagination for China has the duality of Utopia and Ideology in Ricoeur’s Social Imaginary.It tries to make a conclusion that Maugham’s expression for the imaginary China is covered with a painted veil.Hence,the image of China created by Maugham in the novel is unilateral,subjectively imagined or even distorted,which is opposite to the truth of China and is a misunderstanding to Chinese culture in image molding.