A Study Of William Somerset Maugham's Short Stories From The Perspective Of Postcolonialism

William Somerset Maugham is a famous writer,novelist and playwright in the20 th century.He is known as a world traveler.He collects a great number of writing materials during his journey in the Far East.He records surroundings with his sensitive observation that prolific works created from a unique perspective.His three short story collections are The Casuarina Tree,The Trembling of a Leaf and Ah King has been called the trilogy of the Malay story.This thesis will analyze these three collections of eastern short stories as a whole by using the postcolonial theory.It explores the cultural hegemony of western imperialism,the orientalization of the Orient and the survival dilemma of the Orientals under influence of the Eurocentrism.This thesis attempts to explore how the contemporary imperialist discourse reflected in Maugham's works through the method of close reading.Three of Maugham's collections of short stories take place in the Malayan Archipelago and the westerners who Maugham sculptured come to the colony for various reasons.Under the context of postcolonialism,this thesis explores how the West oppresses the East for maintaining the central position in the world by analyzing the oversea life of the Occidentals in these short stories,which reveals the writer's potential imperialism tendency.This thesis contains five parts that mainly analyze the eastern short story collections from the perspective of postcolonialism.The first part is the introduction,including the background of William Somerset Maugham and his three collections of short stories,the summary of postcolonial theory,the researches of Maugham and his works at home and abroad,and the framework of the paper.The main body of the thesis consists of three chapters.Chapter One analyzes how the westerners realize the cultural hegemony that severs to the ruling class.The westerners control the ideology of the easterners by infiltrating the foreign culture as well as they dominate the natives by using the dominance power.Maugham in his short stories arranges the westerners as the Resident who come to the colonies of the Far East,they use their power to dominate the easterners for maintaining the dominant position of the West during theperiod of colonialism.Chapter Two focuses on the “Orientalizing the Oriental”.The Orient is created by the Occident for maintaining their western central position in the world.The Occident through the binary opposition between the “Self” and the“Other” to make the Orientals orientalized.Maugham is attracted by the exotic environment of the East,but he inevitably gets rid of the inherent prejudice and bias.There are many instances of demonized writing of the Orientals present in his short stories that make them exist as the “Other” in the orientalist discourse.In these short stories,Maugham places the West in the center of the world and makes the westerners own the discourse power that embodies the writer's superiority of imperialism.As a result,the East has been marginalized severely as the opposite side of the West.Chapter Three discusses the survival dilemma of Orientals.At first,the cause of the identity crisis is the Orientals identify the western culture under the influence of Eurocentrism.And then the Orientals become the “subaltern” who lost the opportunity and right to speak under the oppression of imperialism and male centralism.Finally,the Orientals especially the women in the colonies lost subjectivity because their discourse power is deprived.The third part is the conclusion.In this part discloses the mainstream of the Eurocentralism discourse run through these three collections of short stories that the background set in the Southeast Asian countries and the potential imperialism of the writer.Although the writer avoids the problem of the imperialism in his eastern short stories,he makes use of the hegemonic discourse of writing skills to present his prejudice to the East and ignores the development history of the East.