摘 要
威廉·萨默塞特·毛姆，英国小说家、剧作家。他被称为英国的莫泊桑一生著作甚多，除诗歌以外的各个文学领域，都有所涉及，有所建树。他共写了长篇小说二十部，短篇小说一百多篇，剧本三十个，此外尚著有游记、回忆录、文艺评论多种。他的作品，特别是他的长、短篇小说，文笔质朴，脉络清晰，人物性格鲜明，情节跌宕有致，在各个阶层中都拥有相当数量的读者群。他的作品被译成各国文字，不少小说还被搬上银幕。他是20世纪上半叶最受人欢迎的小说家之一。本人将以毛姆的小说面纱为例，从五个部分分析毛姆《面纱》中的双重中国形象，第一部分：引言，通过对《面纱》的背景介绍，从“毛姆与中国”的角度为切入点展开分析；第二部分旨在分析《面纱》中，毛姆对中国的偏见。分别是从毛姆对底层中国劳苦人民的敌视；面纱中的异域风情；毛姆对中国的刻板印象这三方面铺展开来。第三部分指出毛姆把中国文化看作他者的建构。此章分别从物质文化、科学知识、中国人的形象三方面展开论述，毛姆认为中国文化是一种颓势、需要布施的文化，从而验证西方文化应该统治，领导其他的文化。第四部分从文化优越性的角度去分析，他们分别是西方对中国的救赎和中国文化的低劣这两个方面，进而展现出中国文化的双重现象。第五部分：结论。《面纱》中的双重中国形象不仅帮助读者了解了毛姆对中国的态度，而且也能让读者知道西方世界里的东方的形象。因此，中国的读者可以通过此类作品来进行自我反思，避免像西方国家一样产生文化误读的现象。
关键词： 双重形象；文化认同；文化优越
Abstract
William SomersetWilliam William Somerset is an English novelist and playwright. He is known as the English Maupassant, who wrote many things in his life, including in every field of literature except poetry. He has written 20 novels, more than 100 short stories and 30 plays, including travel notes, memoirs and literary criticism. His works, especially his long and short stories, are simple, clear, vivid and dramatic, with a considerable number of readers in all classes. His works have been translated into various languages, and many novels have been brought to the screen. He was one of the most popular novelists of the first half of the 20th century. I will take Maugm’s novel veil as an example to analyze the double image of China in Maugm’s Veil from five parts. In the first part, from the perspective of “Maugm and China”, the second part is to analyze Maugm’s prejudice against China in the Veil. Maugham’s hostility to the toiling people of the bottom of China; the exotic aspect of the veil; and Maugham’s stereotype of China. The third part points out that Maugham regards Chinese culture as the construction of the others. This chapter discusses from three aspects: material culture, scientific knowledge and the image of Chinese people. Maugham believes that Chinese culture is a declining culture that needs to be distributed, so as to verify that western culture should rule and lead other cultures. The fourth part analyzes from the perspective of cultural superiority, they are respectively the western redemption of China and the inferiority of Chinese culture, and then show the dual phenomenon of Chinese culture. Part V: Conclusion. The dual Chinese image in The Veil not only helps readers understand Maugham’s attitude towards China, but also reveals the image of the East in the Western world. Therefore, Chinese readers can use such works to reflect on themselves and avoid cultural misreading as in Western countries.
Key words：Dual image，cultural identity， cultural superiority
1 Introduction
William Somerset Maugham is a favorable English writer in the 20th century. In the early 20th century, he followed the tradition of realism in the 1900s, impacted by the French naturalism, and was good at examining and expressing life with naturalism. Most notable for his work on International Subjects is William Somerset Maugham, who writes about the English colonies and their natural landscapes, most of which are exotic. The reason why William Somerset Maugham’s works have been widely spread and praised is that he is good at writing the distant and Heterogeneous Oriental Culture from the perspective of potential readers’ expectation, to satisfy people’s curiosity about foreign lands, his works are famous for their exotic atmosphere. His works are noted for their exoticism. He is good at telling well-known stories in foreign environments. He had many admirers and admirers among his fellow writers, from Virginia Woolf to Gabriel José de la Concordia Garcia Marquez in Latin America. They called him “the most interesting and talented living British short-story writer of the serious type.”（Victor Thornton Pritchett） “A writer of great dedication.” （Graham Greene） “first-rate professional writer. ”（Elizabeth Bowen）“The only living master of art, a man can learn something useful under his tutelage”（Evelyn Waugh）George, who took a different view of life from Maugham’s, was also surprised to say: “The greatest influence I have had on modern writers was Samoset William Somerset Maugham, and I admire his ability to speak his mind and tell his stories without any pretense.”（George Orwell）.Under his research concerning the Orient, most Chinese academician believe that he finished his criticism of European society by constructing the foreign others. However, as a Western writer living under the background of Western imperialism, when he wrote about the east, he completed the construction of the empire on the level of literary imagination with the belief and feelings of empire, the concept of cultural hegemony that Western culture is superior to Eastern culture is constantly reaffirmed.
Taking his classic work The Painted Veil as an example, this theme analyzes William Somerset Maugham’s dualistic description of Chinese culture and Western culture from the perspective of Edward Said’s orientalism, exposing William Somerset Maugham’s deep cultural superiority complex, this theme is to expose the prejudice and stereotypes of the east among Westerners. In today’s society, there are many phenomena of worshipping foreign countries. People celebrate Western festivals and believe in Western religions and so on. In order to resist this situation, I take The Painted Veil of William Somerset Maugham, the most popular British writer in the West, as an example, and discuss the prejudice and this paper discusses the prejudice and aversion of Westerners to the east in the novel from three aspects.
Therefore, we should look critically at Western culture, not worship foreign countries, and correctly understand our own national culture, take its essence and discard its dross, and strengthen our own cultural propaganda to enable the world to have a more comprehensive and profound understanding of China, promoting equal exchange of cultures and protecting cultural diversity.
Set in the 1920s in Hong Kong, China, and a small lake in mainland China, the novel tells the story of the heroine, Kitty, who, because of her good looks, wants to marry well into society and to avoid becoming an old maid, she accepted the marriage proposal of her reclusive doctor, Walter, and left London’s Gaudy, empty social circle with him to serve in the mysterious eastern colony ——Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, dissatisfied and bored with her married life, Kitty began a quiet affair with her heartthrob, Hong Kong Assistant Chief Secretary Charles Townsend. When Walter discovered his wife’s infidelity, he frantically began his terrible revenge plan, and Kitty had to travel with him to Xiangtan, mainland of China, to quell a cholera epidemic that was raging at the time. Kitty is forced to travel with her in the face of a falling out between lovers, but in the face of a beautiful and dangerous foreign world, Kitty experiences disillusionment and death as she struggles through the Maelstrom of love, betrayal and death, through the gift of thought, Kitty finally lifted The Painted Veil over her the life before her eyes and embarked on the road of spiritual growth without regret.
This article will take “orientalism” as the theoretical background to analyze the Chinese culture and the Chinese image in the eyes of foreigners. First, it illustrates the Western prejudice against China represented by William Somerset Maugham, which is reflected in the author’s description of the characters, the environment, and the impression of China. First of all, the main focus of the character description is on the bottom of the laboring people, these people are generally characterized by the poor people without education or even food can’t afford. Secondly, the description of the exotic environment mainly focuses on the plague-ravaged Mei-Tan-Fu mansion and the Manchus. Finally, it is foreigners ‘stereotypical view of China as a backward, suffering and barbarous society. And then is devoted to the analysis of William Somerset Maugham’s construction of Chinese culture as the other. They are poverty of physical culture resources, the weakness of scientific knowledge, the Chinese in need of rescue and marginalized. Thirdly, aims to analyze Maugham’s sense of cultural superiority. They are the western redemption of China and the inferiority of Chinese culture. To sum up, William Somerset Maugham constructed Chinese culture as an inferior and in need of salvation, thus, it is verified that the western culture should be in the dominant position in the eastern and Western cultures.
2 Prejudice against China
2.1 Hostile to the Underclass
First of all, we have to admit that William Somerset Maugham came from a modern civilization when he was in primary school, “The British empire was at its Zenith… the small British Isles were able to govern a vast empire, a virtue which, of course, in a school of William Somerset Maugham’s kind, was to be inculcated and praised.”He was inevitably influenced by the idea of racial superiority, from this point of view, William Somerset Maugham’s condescension and disdain for the backward state of China were inevitable, and prejudice was an instinct that could not be dismissed from the perspective of a race that had been taught to think of itself as Noble.
Most of the descriptions of Chinese characters in the novel focus on the low-class Chinese laboring people, such as Antique Shop Owners and Clerks, Sedan bearers, servants, beggars…the antique shop, the boss and the waiter are the first Chinese characters to appear in the novel. Kitty went to the antique shop for a “private meeting”, and before she went upstairs she saw the shop owner, a “little man”, also known as the “Oriental Man”, give her a “sly smile.” The shop owner seems to see through it, but it’s also kind of creepy. In addition, the description of the sedan bearers mentions that they “remained silent for a long time.” The body language of the litter bearers is “gesturing to get Kitty’s attention”, the language is “really mysterious and frightening”, and the description of the beggar is more straightforward: when the litter stops at the gate of the monastery, a beggar rose from the ground and asked Kitty for something. He was in rags, as if he had crawled through a Dung heap. Through the holes in his dress she saw that his skin was rough and unsightly, as black as goat’s skin, his feet bare and thin. His hair was unkempt, his cheeks sunken into a nest, his eyes wild and savage like the face of a madman. And Kitty’s reaction is also a typical western reaction. In the face of Antique Shop Owners and Associates, Kitty found them obscene and abhorrent, in the face of the sedan chair husband, they think he is like a primitive man, coarse grain and uncivilized, in the face of beggars, kitty was full of western condescension. “She gave the beggar some small money with trembling hands” and looked frightened. From these accounts, it appears that Kitty saw beggars as symbols of cholera and primitive madness, and that giving small sums of money seemed to be a superior form of almsgiving. As a representative of Western civilization, Kitty was filled with a mixture of hostility and fear towards Eastern culture.
China after being colonized is the representatives of indulgence, idleness and depravity. They are uncivilized, full of ignorance and ignorance, even more in Western literature directly called the Chinese people with “yellow peril”, which means the harm to the entire human society of the race. In this term full of racial discrimination, we can see that the image of China in British culture and even in Western culture is similar to the sad clown. The same is true, for example, of William Somerset Maugham’s depiction of China in The Painted Veil in which he describes Chinese people with “flat noses” and rickshaw pullers with “pointed language”, even babies are “strange animals”. Such a description is undoubtedly the Chinese People’s image of distortion and Nullification, full of denial of the Chinese and discrimination. This negation is based on the inequality of the two sides on the level of force and economy. Western writers began to devalue and reject the image of China unscrupulously, thus imagining and fabricating the image of China in their literary creation. Thus, by analyzing William Somerset Maugham’s description of the underclass, we can explore the western view of China in the 1990s, the disparity betwixt Chinese culture and Western culture shows that Westerners are full of contempt for Chinese people and Western prejudice against China and westerners’ sense of self-superiority.
2.2 A Mysterious and Terrifying Place
Through the eyes of the hero, William Somerset Maugham reveals a corner of The Painted Veil describing a mysterious and terrifying foreign land. The archway she saw seemed strangely resurrected, waving its arms at her with its teeth and giving her strange laughter. There are many more such descriptions:
“The bungalow stood half way down a steep hill and from her window she saw the narrow river below her and opposite, the city. The dawn had just broken and from the river raised a white mist shrouding the junks that lay moored close to one another like peas in a pod. There were hundreds of them, and they were silent, mysterious in that ghostly light, and you had a feeling that their crews lay under an enchantment, for it seemed that it was not sleep, but something strange and terrible, that held them so still and mute.”(p154)
This text uses kitty’s point of view, creating an atmosphere of strangeness and fear. This strange place is not only mysterious, but also terrifying; the river is shrouded in a white mist that makes it impossible to see, “ghostly light and Shadow” , the shadow is blooming, flickering, mysterious; Hundreds of little sailboats seemed to be at the mercy of some queer and dreadful power. It is clear that the mystery of a foreign land is no longer the inspiring “exotic” that people imagine, but a mysterious place where outsiders can be scared and make people uneasy. “But the people are dying like flies” (p95), the city “like the devil, high on the other side of the river” (p132), narrow streets, chaos, corners filled with garbage, stink, and from time to time heard crying. There is no doubt that China in Kitty’s eyes has become a confusing and frightening “dark center,”
Another foreign land in The Painted Veil is Kitty’s discovery of the crudeness and savagery of western ideals and beliefs. Especially when Kitty sees the Manchu Princess, the ancient, mysterious and elusive image of the East becomes clear to her from her elegant gifts,“Now she seemed on a sudden to have an inkling of something remote and mysterious. Here was the East, immemorial, dark, and inscrutable .The beliefs and the ideals of the West seemed crude beside ideals and beliefs of which in this exquisite creature she seemed to catch a fugitive glimpse. Here was a different life, lived on a different plane” (p278 ).
William Somerset Maugham’s novels are filled with a dichotomy between the exotic and the wild, a world of ice and fire. And in this polarization, it shows the split perception of the image of China in the West. On the one hand, the image of China in ancient times is regarded as the rich mysterious east, and on the other hand, in the real world, China is a bullied colony, full of wild and uncivilized people and things. In essence, the author believes that this is a one-sided view of the image of China by Western writers represented by William Somerset Maugham under the western-centered thinking. Whether it is exotic Utopia or full of sinister wilderness, are in fact Westerners for the image of China’s one-sided understanding, or even subjective imagination. The reason for this anomaly is that Westerners’ loss to China is self-centered. Therefore, in the description also appeared “let me Rub” the sense of superiority and racial discrimination. After the first half of the struggle and Epiphany, Kitty was struck by the breadth and depth of Chinese culture. When she saw such an ordinary intention as the battlements of the Mei-Tan-Fu Mansion, she fancied that it was a fantastic stage. On this stage, the Manchurian women were “unique characters”. They seem to be ordinary, the stage of the unknown, but they have indescribable meaning, more described as “ancient religious ritual dancers” (p340), in the complex rhythm of the mysterious meaning. Such descriptions reveal a sense of strangeness and Respect for China’s ancient history, in the image of the Manchurian woman, Kitty gained some other level of understanding about life, all of which came from the power of the eastern image in the exotic. In this description the Middle Eastern figures are mysterious and great, they are the vehicles of religion, and the pain and doubt of the Westerners represented by Kitty brings a richer understanding therefore from this point of view, The Painted Veil also contains mysterious descriptions of the eastern images, which partly reflect William Somerset Maugham’s admiration for the eastern religious culture. Thus, by analyzing William Somerset Maugham’s description of China’s environment, we can explore the western view of China in the 1990s, the disparity betwixt Chinese culture and Western culture shows that Westerners are full of contempt for Chinese people and Western prejudice against China and Westerners’ sense of self-superiority.
2.3 The Stereotype about China
Historically, China has been a rich country with “gold everywhere” and 2000 years of culture. Therefore, from the western-centered perspective, it is inevitable to have a certain “awe” or even “fear” toward Chinese culture. In The Painted Veil, for example, the description of Chinese Buddhist culture, though full of prejudice and even blasphemy, still uses the word “ancient religion” In essence, the Chinese are still representatives of “cunning”, and the description of the antique shopkeeper in The Painted Veil Kitty described him as “a big, ingratiating smile”(p11) , described him as “smoking his way up the dim stairs”(p11) each time, and described him as full of “cunning” feeling, as if wily and wise enough to see through anything, but in Kitty’s eyes, he was still “obnoxious”. These descriptions reflect the western-centric stereotype of “cunning” in China’s image.
And based on this view, many Westerners think the Chinese are quite terrible, they are enough to endanger the survival of the entire white race space. William Somerset Maugham’s analysis of China’s image, based on a Western centric approach, is replete with Western centric ideology and utopias. Utopia is a kind of ideal description with subjective consciousness superposition, is a kind of unfair imagination centered on the west, full of subjective assumption. In The Painted Veil, for example, Kitty describes Chinese orphans when she arrives at the Monastery:
“The Mother Superior led them into a tiny room on the other side of the passage. On a table, under a cloth, there was a singular wriggling. The Sister drew back the cloth and displayed four tiny, naked infants. They were very red and they made funny restless movements with their arms and legs; their quaint little Chinese faces were screwed up into strange grimaces. They looked hardly human; queer animals of an unknown species, and yet there was something singularly moving in the sight. The Mother Superior looked at them with an amused smile.”（p197）
“scratching”, “looking fun”, and “unlike humans” and “strange, unknown animals” don’t seem to fit the description of a human being, as William Somerset Maugham himself put it, he was describing “strange animals” . William Somerset Maugham’s description is based solely on the differences in appearance between the East and the West, and thus reflects discrimination against China. In addition, William Somerset Maugham’s environmental portrait of Hong Kong, China, focuses on a plague ridden death ridden hell. Here, filled with ragged beggars, abandoned orphans, drug addicts and thieves ready to rob, the working people are animals who only speak the “sharp language” with gestures; they have no feelings, no flesh, just pull westerners up and down the tool. The streets were full of corpses, and before they reached their destination there were terrible graves, and the roads were strewn with fallen bamboo groves and laborers blocking the way. In The Painted Veil William Somerset Maugham’s description of China’s environment is, so to speak, biased, describing it as a society of backwardness, misery and barbarism. All this, of course, is due to the contrast with Western “civilization” .Thus, by analyzing William Somerset Maugham’s stereotypical depiction of China, we can explore the western view of China in the 1990s, the disparity betwixt Chinese culture and Western culture shows that Westerners are full of contempt for Chinese people and Western prejudice against China and westerners’ sense of self-superiority.
3 Other Cognition about Chinese Culture
3.1 Poverty of Physical Culture Resources
First, the description of life and dress of Kitty’s lover, Charles, in The Painted Veil reflects how rich the West is in both spirit and material, and contrasts the material and cultural resources of China’s poverty. For example, in Life Charles had a wide range of hobbies such as tennis, Polo and golf and owned a valuable racing horse, which easily surpassed anyone else. In his conversation with Kitty, he eluded to the lack of entertainment facilities in China, such as the London theatre, the ascot racetrack, suggesting poverty and hunger in China at the time. Death is everywhere, and these amenities are a Scheherazade for the Chinese people. In the suit, Charles’s cuff links and waistcoat buttons came from Cartier Jewelers, playing Polo in White breeches and jackboots like a star and wearing tennis clothes like a young man. Never before has the description of Chinese dress been as refined as in this novel, the contrast between Western material wealth and Chinese material poverty is revealed.
Second, William Somerset Maugham also created a group of Chinese people like oxen and horses, which he called “camel beasts”. In his description, China has no machinery, stagnation, used to carry the weight of living people everywhere for the suffering is the best proof. They are everywhere in William Somerset Maugham’s work, like soulless Wanderers, shuttling through William Somerset Maugham’s stories, never speaking, sometimes as rickshaw pullers, sometimes as boat trackers going upstream, may also be the burden of the burden of the hardship for or sedan chair bearers. They wear shabby clothes, do the worst jobs, they have no culture, no feelings, which is usually the most common image he uses to describe China. Compared with Europeans of good breeding and background, the Chinese are inferior even to animals. In a time of plague when many families in China were abandoning their children or trading them for money in monasteries to survive, he wrote that the Chinese were often mean, treacherous and cruel, and they had no names, usually has a code name, and is “the yellow race”.
Finally, five times the novel depicts Kitty as sitting at a window overlooking a small town perched on a steep hillside, looking out at a river and the town on the other side. Just as dawn was breaking, a white mist rose over the river, enveloping the crowded sampans that looked like lentils. There were one hundred dinghies, silent and mysterious in the ghostly light and shadow. It was as if they were not moored at ease on the river, but were under the control of some strange and terrible force that kept them so still. The alien landscape was not only mysterious, but also terrifying: The river, the white mist, and the Sampans were in “ghostly light and Shadow” the river was wreathed in white mist, and hundreds of Sampans were packed together like lentils, like “under the control of some strange and terrible power”（p154）. It’s like a place of horrors for outsiders. Along with this, the narrator outlines the plagues at the Mei-Tan-Fu Mansion, emphasizing that the horrors are not entirely imaginary: Death Occurs Everywhere, people “die like flies in droves”, and cries are heard everywhere, saw the “ragged coolies carrying coffins” hurrying by. All of it made Kitty feels that the whole city was “as high as the devil on the other side of the river” (p154).When she came to the center of the city, this negative image was not weakened by the narrowing of the distance, but became a reality: The streets were narrow and chaotic, the corners filled with garbage, the stench, and the occasional cry. The combination of her imagination and the sense of being there made her feel as if the city had no history, as if “suddenly emerged from nothing with a magic wand”(p155 ).There is no doubt that the representative of China in the novel, the Mei-Tan-Fu Mansion, is seen by Kitty as the poor and dark center of the East. Thus, by analyzing William Somerset Maugham’s description of China’s poor material and cultural resources, we can explore what Westerners thought of China in the 1990s, the imparity betwixt Chinese culture and Western culture shows that Westerners are full of contempt for Chinese people and Western prejudice against China and Westerners’ sense of self-superiority.
3.2 The Weakness of Scientific Knowledge
William Somerset Maugham came to China in the 1920s and finished The Painted Veil. China had just come out of feudalism, had been invaded by Europeans, had begun to engage with modern science, and its scientific knowledge was still relevant to ancient China. William Somerset Maugham set his novel The Painted Veil of the day, and his description of Chinese scientific knowledge is raw and pale. For example, the sedan bearers in the veil are dirty and lowly, and they are a sign of social backwardness. To Kitty, the sedan bearers spoke in strange tongues to deep guttural sounds in the dark, a mixture of secrecy and terror. Language seems to be a barrier between East and West Communication Gap, sedan bearers difficult to understand the body movements and do not understand the words like apes. This subliminal division also shows that in William Somerset Maugham’s mind the east and the West seem to belong to two classes of creatures, the litter bearers representing the primitive backward race, dirty and mysterious. For example, China’s means of transportation are coolie sedan chairs, Chinese rickshaws, and Chinese wooden boats, such as ferries, junks, and human-driven sailboats. The lamps were paraffin, chimney and lantern, and the windows were made of rice paper. They’re all ancient and primitive.
Due to the invasion of western forces, China’s economic backwardness, political oppression, ordinary people are suffering from a very bad living environment, and even face the epidemic. According to The Painted Veil, tens of thousands of people die of cholera every day in a Chinese town called Mei-Tan-Fu. William Somerset Maugham was so cold hearted as to compare the Chinese to the flies on the lips of his characters as he watched them die one by one. In this sense, William Somerset Maugham is an unsympathetic observer of the Chinese People’s pain. The novel suggests that the plague is spreading across China’s interior, with Mei-Tan-Fu Prefecture perhaps the worst hit. More precisely, the disease decimated the village population. Its severity can be seen in the words of William Somerset Maugham’s characters, In Kitty’s eyes, the Mei-Tan-Fu mansion is no longer the real one, it is the other Mei-Tan-Fu Mansion, the Mei-Tan-Fu Mansion under the construction of orientalist discourse, in the narrative text, the Mei-Tan-Fu Mansion is viewed from Kitty’s perspective and cultural psychology. China lags far behind the developed west in terms of both its industry and its economy, but William Somerset Maugham never thought of the profound reasons for this.
In addition, TCM can’t solve the epidemic, nor can it simply treat or alleviate the condition. As the book shows, Walter’s knowledge of bacteriology was crucial to the spread of the disease, so the Chinese officers admired and obeyed him. When Walter contracted the epidemic, all the army doctors could do was what Walter had taught him, and Chinese medicine had no value. Chinese medicine might cure the epidemic, but it didn’t work for William Somerset Maugham. In William Somerset Maugham’s view, traditional Chinese medicine is powerless and lifeless in the face of the epidemic, and the Chinese need to learn from the West. To sum up, the novel reflected the lack and weakness of scientific knowledge in China at that time. Thus, by analyzing William Somerset Maugham’s description of China’s backward and feeble scientific knowledge, we can explore what Westerners thought of China in the 1990s, the disparity betwixt Chinese culture and Western culture shows that Westerners are full of contempt for Chinese people and Western prejudice against China and Westerners’ sense of self-superiority.
3.3 Chinese in Need of Rescue and Marginalized
The only Chinese in William Somerset Maugham’s novel is a down-and-out Manchu princess who, in Waddington’s words, “is a lady”. Through Kitty’s eyes, we see a beautiful, elegant, traditional Chinese woman,“Here she is, said Waddington, and added something in Chinese. Kitty shook hands with her. She was slim in her long embroidered gown and somewhat taller than Kitty, used to the Southern people, had expected. She wore a jacket of pale green silk with tight sleeves that came over her wrists and on her black hair, elaborately dressed, was the head-dress of the Manchu women. Her face was coated with powder and her cheeks from the eyes to the mouth heavily rouged; her plucked eyebrows were a thin dark line and her mouth was scarlet. From this mask her black, slightly slanting, large eyes burned like lakes of liquid jet. She seemed more like an idol than a woman. Her movements were slow and assured. Kitty had the impression that she was slightly shy but very curious. She nodded her head two or three times, looking at Kitty, while Waddington spoke of her. Kitty noticed her hands; they were preternaturally long, very slender, of the color of ivory; and the exquisite nails were painted. Kitty thought she had never seen anything so lovely as those languid and elegant hands. They suggested the breeding of uncounted centuries.”（p276） Obviously, this is a representative of a traditional Chinese woman, bringing together almost all the elements of Chinese women. Although the author of this great lady made careful description, description, description, her heavy makeup is revealed as ridicule between the lines. Too much decoration is too much affectation, which can also be seen in William Somerset Maugham’s subsequent positioning of William Somerset Maugham’s creative psychology. “She seemed more like an idol than a woman”. (p276) In this way, William Somerset Maugham felt that such a heavily- makeup Chinese woman was artificial and devoid of vitality. As we all know, the Manchu princess was the wife of British Assistant Commissioner William Waddington. According to Waddington’s description, we know that the Manchu princess loved him so much that she abandoned her home, her family and her dignity and died with him. We can tell from Waddington’s description of his wife that the Manchu princess depended on her husband, Waddington. For example, “I haven’t the smallest doubt that if I really left her, definitely, she would commit suicide”.（p280） A conventional woman with almost all the trait of China, it is the embodiment of “China” here and Waddington, the assistant commissioner from the United Kingdom, the control of the Qing Dynasty, is clearly the “British” representative. The Manchu princess being rescued during the great revolution by Waddington is therefore deeply dependent on him. The Manchu princess is more like a “puppet” which has no thoughts and cannot control him. Who controls this Manchu Princess and who represents China? The Manchu princess represented China and Waddington represented Britain, so it was William Somerset Maugham’s underlying creative philosophy: only Britain can save the suffering Chinese people, the Chinese people need to rely on Britain to survive. Thus, by analyzing William Somerset Maugham’s depiction of marginalized Chinese in need of rescue, we can explore the western view of China in the 1990s, the disparity betwixt Chinese culture and Western culture shows that Westerners are full of contempt for Chinese people and Western prejudice against China and Westerners’ sense of self-superiority.
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