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A Young Wife in the Middle of an Epidemic




            Kitty Fane, a young wife of bacteriologist Walter Fane finds herself in a world where her former life as a debutante in upper-middle class England isn’t sufficient. In a land where the cholera epidemic runs rampant and children are orphaned by the disease. W Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, follows her story, as a young wife who is caught in an affair with another man, betrayed by her lover, and is suddenly thrusted into a world filled with disease and death. What make’s Maugham’s novel interesting is that it isn’t about the affair but about the growth of the character who suddenly realizes that her life isn’t a closed world filled with parties and becoming the wife of a respectable man. Kitty’s growth within the novel is about how the world around her shapes who she becomes once she’s away from the life that she had known. The Church and the disease within the town made her realize that life wasn’t only about who she was but who she should be as a person.

           Within the interior of China where Kitty and Walter Fane travel so that Walter may work on the Cholera epidemic, Kitty finds a place for herself within the local Church. The Church is run by a group of nuns that have come from France as missionaries within China and have found themselves in the middle of the epidemic. They work with the children who are left behind when their parents pass away, they treat the sick, they teach, and they convert many who want to join the Catholic faith. The woman that Kitty interacted with the most was Mother Superior from the convent. Upon their first meeting Maugham wrote Kitty’s impression of Mother Superior saying, “Your first thought when you looked at Mother Superior was that as a girl she must have been beautiful, but in a moment you realized that this was a woman whose beauty, depending on her character, had grown with advancing years”[1] Mother Superior would give Kitty a job at the orphanage that was attached to the hospital where her husband Walter was working. Kitty’s first impressions of Mother Superior and the Church was out of curiosity, because she had nothing better to do. From that curiosity was a chance for redemption for Kitty, not from the affair but from the life she had confined herself too.
            The Church where Kitty and her husband work at interacts with the cholera epidemic that has ravaged the land. Walter chose to move himself and his wife there in hopes that Kitty would suffer for the betrayal she caused him. Instead it changes Kitty and makes her realize that what she had done was a great disservice to her husband. When she first sees the disease she didn’t realize that the person was dead “At the foot of the wall that surrounded the compound a man lay on his back with his legs stretched out and his arms thrown over his head. He wore the patched blue rages and the wild mop of hair of the Chinese beggar. “He looks as if he were dead.”[2]  This is the first time she sees the disease and it causes her to tremble at the sight of it, for Kitty this is a wakeup call of the world her husband had brought her to. Instead of shying away from the disease and hiding Kitty confronts it, she volunteered to work in the hospital and she eats the food without it being boiled. Kitty wants to show her husband that she isn’t frightened by cholera and that she would face it with everything that she can. Even when she knew what Walter had planned when they moved into the interior, she learned to care for him even if their relationship wouldn’t be mended quickly from what she had done. So when Walter became infected with Cholera it was a great shock to Kitty, but Maugham uses the change in Walter to demonstrate the horrors of the disease and how it could change a person in mere hours, “It was unthinkable that in a few short hours he should look like another man; he hardly looked like a man at all; he looked like death.”[3]
            What makes The Painted Veil, an interesting novel is not that it is about a young housewife in China but it is a study in how an outsider sees the changes within the country because of the interaction between the Eastern and Western worlds. The events that happen within the life of the main character are just used as a way to show the interactions between two different cultures. The way that the novel uses the interactions between Kitty, the Church, and the Cholera epidemic is to display that what is happening isn’t just for one nation but it would affect everyone without properly looking at the problem. When a person first reads the novel they see Kitty and only Kitty, it isn’t until they see past the main character that they see the overall effects of what’s happening to the people within the country. The novel serves as a historical view of what an outsider sees when they enter another country during an epidemic. What Kitty sees of China and Hong Kong, the interactions of the people, even her affair are all a part of her life and they shape who she becomes after she leaves the region.  

[1] W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil (New York, NY: Vintage International, 2004), 117.
[2] Ibid, 106.
[3] Ibid, 189.

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