W.S.Maugham’s Chinese Theme Fiction

W. S. Maugham’s fame as a successful playwright and novelist was established in the early20th century. Although his reputation dwindled in home circles as time goes by, a large number of his readers always exist in U. S. and some Asia countries like Japan and China. Maugham’s writings which related to China influenced many European writers who also write about China later. Consequently, the profound meaning of Maugham’s creations and the importance of the position he stood in the connection between the Britain literature and China would be revealed through the discussion of Maugham’s Chinese theme works.Maugham’s Chinese theme works was written in different times:Firstly, like the novel Of Human Bandage, which was written before his China travel; Secondly, like the essay On a Chinese Screen, which was written under his travelling; lastly, like the play East of Suez and the novel The Painted Veil, which were written after he returned to Europe. China was described to be an exotic Orient in the first step, where is a land of freedom and romance. However, there is reprobate and dangerous because of lacking of religious morality. Those two concepts lead the author taking China as a tool to resist the various biases in daily life, and seeing China as a dreaming place. In the second step, Maugham depicted the arts, social scenes, and special things of ancient China. Some of his views are reasonable, while some of them are superficial. China seems to be a colony of the Great Britain where the white European colonist dominated. The works created in the third step was based on the author’s experience in China. However, In the process of transferring the materials collected in real life to literature, the author fabricated the Chinese characters and stories occurred in China by imagination, which is still showing the preconception of’the China’he ever known rather than the real China he ever saw.The purpose of my study is thus to analyze the history and culture related to Maugham’s China theme writings to explore his attitude to China, and explain why he wrote this, and how the discourse about China in English fictions being constructed. The conclusion is that we can not judge Maugham a racist or colonialist arbitrarily only by few isolated words picking up from his work which has been already misinterpreted. Maugham’s Chinese theme writings reflected the influences of the preconceptions in European cultural tradition relating to China. And the trend of the era Maugham living took an important part in his creations. Furthermore, Maugham’s personality, interests, and spirit pursuit directed the construction of his Chinese theme writings.