The Painted Veil

Walter Fane, Kitty’s husband, has a small, unprepossessing appearance. Although he is “unusually intelligent” (25), pursues innovative work as a bacteriologist, and has objectively good facial features, Kitty does not find him attractive owing to his shyness, dourness, and lack of charisma. Nevertheless, Kitty agrees to marry him—not only because she wants to be out of the country when the humiliating event of her younger sister’s marriage takes place, but also because “she [feels] in some mysterious way that his love [is] something she had never met before” (30). While Walter’s inscrutability and the vague foreign future he represents are initially a draw for Kitty, she continues to be insensible of his merits. Although Walter is publicly shy, as a lover he is emotional and shows a feminine side that makes Kitty squeamish and defensive.

Walter shows the depth of his love for his wife in continuing to love her despite his clear-sighted view of her shallowness, but his motive in taking her to Meitan-fu, a place where they are both likely to die of cholera, seems a sadistic form of punishment for adultery. However, like Kitty, Walter rises to a higher state of being in Meitan-fu as he goes from being an obscure bacteriologist to a life-saving doctor. When the nuns, from their objective perspective of Christian charity, look on Walter as a hero, Kitty feels guilty for mistreating him. Still, as Kitty is destined to continue her life rather than give it up in atonement, Maugham emphasizes the harsh truth that Kitty never loved Walter and that her loyalties are to herself. Instead of a husband or lover, Walter’s function in Kitty’s life is that of a teacher who challenges her to be a better version of herself.

Six-foot-two, blue-eyed Charles Townsend initially impresses Kitty as fashionable, dashing, and charming. At less flattering moments, he appears “fat and forty” with a figure that appears to reflect his decadent lifestyle (117). He is assistant colonial secretary and (according to Waddington) likely to achieve the highest office of colonial governor—not because he is capable but because he is charming and tactful. Although he has had numerous extramarital dalliances, his wife Dorothy is stalwartly supportive and keeps his excesses in check.

Kitty is taken in by Townsend because he is the opposite of her husband and fills her life with all the passion and excitement she lacks. He calls her a “raging beauty” (37), soothing Kitty’s insecurities that she has lost her looks, and she soon comes to believe she cannot live without him. Nevertheless, Townsend’s unwillingness to leave his wife at the crucial moment shows that he judged Kitty to be of easy virtue and that his passion for her was fleeting. The insubstantiality of his love is evident when, within the space of a few pages, he goes from saying that Meitan-fu is dangerous to urging Kitty to go so that they can both avoid scandal.

Townsend’s arrogant belief in his power and merit emerges in his willingness to use his connections to ensure that his career remains on track and in his risking having Dorothy and Kitty in the same house following the latter’s return from Meitan-fu. He even moves to seduce Kitty in his wife’s house, knowing that in Kitty’s weakened state she will be unable to resist him. Townsend’s desire to keep a wife and a mistress at the same time and to continue to influence Kitty’s life can be read as a metaphor for colonial greed. While others struggle to claim their fair share, the white male colonist aspires to own increasingly more, exploiting people in his path. Kitty, however, refuses to grant Townsend authority over either herself or her unborn child by disappearing to the Bahamas.

Townsend’s wife, Dorothy, is the mother of three children and a social arbiter in the British colony in Hong Kong. Kitty initially feels that Dorothy gives herself airs because she was a colonial governor’s daughter. Dorothy is Kitty’s physical opposite, being tall and fair with cold blue eyes, “a great deal of pale brown hair” (11), and unremarkable features. Townsend also plays his part in misrepresenting Dorothy to Kitty, saying that their marriage has long been a chaste one and that Dorothy is frigid and uninterested in sex. However, Waddington later reveals to Kitty that Dorothy’s social influence and stable character are chiefly responsible for her husband’s career success. He also reveals that Dorothy is aware of her husband’s infidelities and seemingly unthreatened by them, only making the catty comment that she could never befriend the women who “fall to her Charlie” because they are “uncommonly second-rate” (117). This provokes a change of heart in Kitty, who goes from considering Dorothy less powerful than her to seeing Dorothy as her superior.

Like Kitty, Dorothy undergoes a transformation in the novel as she learns not to judge others on appearances. While she initially dismissed Kitty as “actressy” and therefore flirtatious and superficial (38), through Waddington’s correspondence, she comes to view her as courageous for her feats in Meitan-fu. However, following Kitty’s final dalliance with Townsend and Kitty’s immediate departure for England, the women’s intimacy ends, as they realize that neither of them can be impartial when it comes to the man who has them in his power.

Kitty’s mother, Mrs. Garstin, is a “hard, cruel, managing, ambitious, parsimonious and stupid woman” (17). She is a social climber, having moved from industrial Liverpool to London on her marriage to Bernard Garstin. While she is a comic figure in her attempt to stage frugally spectacular suppers, even trying to trick her guests that her sparkling Moselle wine is champagne, her prioritization of the family’s social position above their feelings is destructive. She ruins her husband’s life by forcing him into career positions that he is unsuited to and teaches her daughters that they are worthless if they do not make socially advantageous marriages. She regards Kitty as an investment that depreciates when the years pass without her marrying. The fact that Kitty would rather enter a life of unknowns with a man she does not love than stay at home with her mother implies the extent of Mrs. Garstin’s cruelty.

Kitty inherits a measure of her mother’s social climbing, judging those in the British colony as beneath her and shocked when others find her common. She also berates Walter for having the same shyness as her father. By the time Mrs. Garstin dies, Kitty’s character has transformed, and she attempts to atone for both their sins by building a future around Mr. Garstin.

Bernard Garstin is a small man and the opposite of his wife, who pushes him to succeed where he will not; he is “painstaking, industrious and capable but he [has] not the will to advance himself” (17). He grows distant from both his wife and his daughters as he struggles in career positions that should allow the family a lavish lifestyle. Given that the family barely manages to keep up the terms of middle-class propriety, his wife despises him, and he lives in fear of her. Mr. Garstin shares traits in common with Walter, and Kitty’s decision to devote her life to him at the end of the novel is as much out of compassion for the husband she could not love as for the father she grew indifferent to. Free from Mrs. Garstin’s interference, Kitty and her father embark on a new model of being kind to each other and promoting each other’s happiness.

Mrs. Garstin underestimates the marital prospects of Kitty’s plain younger sister, Doris, who has a “too long nose” (19), a “lumpy” figure, and is awkward at dancing. Doris’s conquest of a baronet in her first “season” disrupts the expected course of events and is the catalyst that makes Kitty rush into marriage with Walter. That Doris is established in the heart of England while Kitty must go to a faraway colony magnifies the sense that Doris has displaced Kitty as the more valuable daughter. Throughout the novel, Doris remains vaguely sketched and is more an instrumental than dynamic character.

Waddington, the deputy commissioner that Walter and Kitty meet at Meitan-fu, has an unprepossessing appearance, being “a small thin man […] with a bald head and a small, bare face” (105). He is talkative and familiar and does not hide the copious amounts that he drinks. Unlike the other colonists, Waddington has assimilated somewhat, having a Manchu mistress, speaking Chinese, and expressing a fondness for aspects of Chinese food and culture. Nevertheless, he shows his colonialist thinking when he rushes to greet the Fanes, complaining that he has been starved of conversation with people of his own color who are not nuns.

While Waddington is Kitty’s friend and confidant, prompting her to ask big questions about the meaning of life and religion, he also has the instrumental role of providing her with different perspectives on the Townsends. Through his influence Kitty learns that Dorothy is the more capable partner in the couple. He also leads Kitty to the convent where she meets the nuns and exchanges her idle, solipsistic housewife’s existence for one of service.

The mother superior of the convent hails from noble French lineage and yet has been willing to endure a life of poverty by establishing a convent and orphanage at Meitan-fu. Kitty feels reverence towards this woman, whom she considers beautiful and extraordinary for her authenticity. The mother superior’s frank gaze encapsulates her essence, as Kitty feels that “here [is] a woman whose business it [is] to form an opinion of others and to whom it never occur[s] that subterfuge [is] necessary” (134). She is thus different from the insincere, shallow women that Kitty has encountered in the past.

Kitty finds that she cannot deeply relate to the mother superior and her nuns owing to the impersonal nature of their charity. The mother superior, who lives a life motivated by duty, does not hesitate to remind Kitty that her duty is to her husband and unborn child rather than her own spiritual quest. She ultimately arranges for Kitty’s return passage to Hong Kong, thus fating her to finish the journey she began rather than retreating to a convent. Additionally, the mother superior’s consistent praise of Walter is a testament to the nobility of his character.

Sister St. Joseph shares the mother superior’s reverence for Walter and sense of Christian duty, but she is a livelier, more spontaneous presence. A Breton farmer’s daughter who is “short and plump, with a homely face, red cheeks and merry eyes” (133), Sister St. Joseph is an easier confidante for Kitty. She is not so devoted to her duty that she is unwilling to gossip, and it is through her that Kitty learns about Waddington and his Manchu princess.