At first, I found the heroine Kitty infuriating. She was vain. She was foolish. She married a man she didn’t love just to upstage her younger, then cheated on him without a second thought. She spent a thousand times more time in front of the mirror than with a book. I almost put the book down in the early chapters. I thought, why bother writing about this kind of woman? But Maugham has this talent: the people I hate at the beginning, he makes me cry over by the end.
Warming a pair of slippers never beats a bouquet of roses
Walter broke my heart from start to finish. He would probably never say “I would die for you” at a wedding. His love was drying Kitty’s shoes by the radiator every morning. It was standing outside the door waiting for her to come home after she had been with her lover, then pretending he didn’t know. He knew he wasn’t interesting enough, romantic enough, or worthy enough for his radiant wife. What he could give her wasn’t roses or sweet words. It was a pair of warm slippers.After he discovered Kitty’s affair, he didn’t get hysterical.
He didn’t throw things. He said:
“I know you are stupid, frivolous, and empty-headed, but I love you. I know your goals and ideals are vulgar and ordinary, but I love you. I know you are mediocre, but I love you.”
That passage doesn’t read like a love confession. It reads like a man stripping away his own dignity, layer by layer, layer by layer, and laying it at Kitty’s feet. He turned love into self-flagellation, a silent martyrdom he had to endure alone. And what Kitty had always wanted was never this deep, this dirt-under-her-feet kind of love. She wanted excitement. She wanted praise. She wanted a man who would make her shine in social circles. Walter couldn’t give her any of that. So he chose to take her to Mei-tan-fu. The city being devoured by cholera.
Cholera blew away the veil and opened her eyes
The title of this book is The Painted Veil. Maugham never explains the image. But after finishing it, I understood. Everyone has a veil over their face. Kitty’s veil was her fantasy of love. She thought she wanted passion. What she actually needed was to be seen. Walter’s veil was his perfect image of Kitty. He turned a vulgar woman into a goddess, and then watched her shatter. Her lover Charles ‘s veil was the upper-class persona he had carefully crafted. In reality, he was a coward at his core.
The cholera in Mei-tan-fu was like a strong wind. It blew everyone’s veils off. In that place, Kitty saw death swinging its scythe, reaping lives without mercy. She saw nuns dedicating their entire lives to the children of strangers. She saw her husband, a quiet bacteriologist, turn into a savior in the eyes of the locals. And she saw herself. She used to think she was just a passenger in her own life. Pushed by her mother into marriage. Provoked by her younger sister into rushing to the altar. Dragged by desire into an affair. But in Mei-tan-fu, for the first time, she actively did something. She went to help at the convent. She took care of orphans whose parents had both died. Those children were dirty. Thin as kittens. But they smiled at her. In those smiles, Kitty found a kind of value she had never experienced in her entire life.
From a man’s accessory to her own master
Many people finish this book and keep wrestling with one question: Did Kitty ever actually love Walter? My answer is: it doesn’t matter anymore. When Walter died of cholera, Kitty held his hand and listened to his last words. In the end, Kitty never fell in love with Walter. But she learned to respect him. She learned to respect a quiet, clumsy man who loved in his own way for a lifetime. That kind of respect is rarer than love. Because it isn’t the product of being swept away by passion. It is the choice a woman makes after she truly opens her eyes.
Don’t pick up this book looking for a manual on how to marry for happiness. It won’t teach you how to spot a jerk. It won’t guarantee that every woman can awaken through suffering. But Maugham points a road out for you. That road is bumpy. Some people fall down along the way. Some people get halfway and want to turn back. Some people reach the end and find nothing there. But Kitty walked it to the finish. When she came out, she was covered in the dust of the cholera epidemic. There were wrinkles on her face. The light in her eyes was gone. But her spine was straight. And that was enough.
