An Area of Whiteness: The Empty Sign of The Painted Veil

AN AREA OF WHITENESS: THE EMPTY SIGN OF THE PAINTED VEIL PHILIP HOLDEN University of British Columbia I R ecent theoretical approaches analyzing the production of sexuality in literature have moved away from the debate between essentialism and constructionalism of the late eighties.1Inspired by Judith Butler’s understand­ ing of identity not as fixed or essential but as performative, “identity as a practice” (145), critics such as Lee Edelman, Diana Fuss, and Marjorie Garber have demonstrated how nominally “deviant” subjectivities are inte­ gral to the construction of modernity. Homosexuality, for Fuss, “operates as an indispensable interior exclusion — an outside which is inside interiority making the articulation of the latter possible” {Inside/Out 3); Garber sees transvestism as symptomatic of a “category crisis” that is “the ground of culture itself” (16). The theoretical approaches articulated by Fuss, Butler, and Garber pro­ vide suggestive possibilities for a re-reading of the works of Somerset Maugham. Poised uneasily between modernism and late Victorian roman­ ticism, between popular and literary culture, Maugham’s novels and short stories have received little contemporary critical attention, and have been neglected even within the present explosion of critical publication in lesbian and gay studies.2 André Gide intervened publicly in discourses on sexuality with Corydon, while E.M. Forster left a substantial number of stories with homosexual themes for posthumous publication. Maugham, in contrast to his contemporaries, was silent, spending much of his literary career erasing traces of his sexuality. His stories thematize heterosexual, not homosexual transgression, “infractions against the legislation (or morality) pertaining to marriage and the family” rather than “offenses against the regularity of a natural function” (Foucault 39). If, however, homosexuality is an impor­ tant “interior exclusion” within modernity, texts such as Maugham’s novels, which display a heterosexuality built upon traces of homosexual identity, may prove fertile grounds for the investigation of the production of modern subjectivity. English Stu d ies in C a n a d a , 20, i , March 1994 II In 1921, Victor Purcell, a cadet in the Malayan Civil Service, was offered the chance to study Chinese in Canton rather than Malay in Malaya. Alone among the new recruits, who were all conscious of the low social status of administrative positions in the Federated Malay States Chinese Protectorate, Purcell volunteered to go: To me this sounded a marvellous opportunity. Instead of being restricted to the comparatively unevolved culture of the Malay Peninsula, the door would thus be opened to an acquaintance with one of the great civilizations of the world, comparable to that of Greece and Rome, and which to the vast majority even of educated Westerners was almost a closed book. (95) If Malaya, the setting of most of Maugham’s oriental fiction, was for the British an ordered fiefdom of signification, re-enacting English history in its entrance into modern history, China was, in contrast, irredeemably Other. From the time of Mandeville and Marco Polo on, it was present in the Euro­ pean imagination as a mark of absolute cultural alterity, a parallel civiliza­ tion that might be invested with utopian or dystopian potential, but never surveyed with indifference. Hong Kong, the setting for the first part of Maugham’s novel The Painted Veil, might thus be described as a liminal zone, a revolving door connect­ ing two areas of signification. Palmerston’s “barren island with hardly a house upon it” (qtd. in Endacott 18) had always been more a factory, in the nineteenth-century imperial sense of the word, than a colony, pendent from and dependent upon a vast Chinese hinterland beyond the control of the British crown. The Hong Kong of Maugham’s time of writing illustrated both the vast extent and the overextended nature of the British Empire. Its harbour was jammed with shipping, but China was never very far away. Hostilities broke out during the British takeover of the New Territories in 1899, and were followed by an attempt on the life of the Governor a decade or so later. After the failure of the 1911 Revolution in China, Canton became a new centre of revolutionary activity, and the force of Chinese national­ ism was felt in Hong Kong. The seamen’s strike...