Perry's Reviews > The Painted Veil

Resentment's Presentiment

The time will come / When you'll be blue / Your cheatin' heart will tell on you.
Hank Williams, 1952

You'll look for me but baby I'll be gone.
This is all I gotta say to you woman: Your time is gonna come
Led Zeppelin, 1969

The English word "resent" or "resentment" comes from the Old French resentir, meaning to "feel again, feel in turn" (13c.) That is, to replay, feeling again and again, thoughts and emotions arising from a past negative event. For example, wife learns husband was unfaithful, then envisions hubs and his lover in bed doing really naughty things, and laughing at and ridiculing her, visions she projects in her mind's eye, each time with sensational new variations, daily over the following months so that these scenes transform into a warped and sickening reality to her.

The Painted Veil is Somerset Maugham's calamitous case study on the travesties begotten by a faithless, heartless wife who is--frankly--gullible to the charms of a cocksure cad, and indifferent to her caring cuckold's emotional pain and, at least at first, to his poisonous resentment.

The worst, the least curable hatred is that which has superseded deep love. Euripides

Kitty Fane ruthlessly ridicules her husband, Dr. Walter Fane, to her lover as she dreams of marrying this cad she can't see is playing her. Though the husband Walter loves Kitty still, after he finds out of the affair, his jaundiced need to get even goads him into taking her on his mission to rural China, into the heart of the cholera epidemic.

Prior to departing for China, he asks her:

"How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and you were my whole life. It is not very pleasant to realize that to you it was only an episode."

***
"I know that you're selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know that you haven't the nerve of a rabbit, I know you're a liar and a humbug, I know that you're utterly contemptible. And the tragic part is'--her face was on a sudden distraught with pain--'the tragic part is that notwithstanding I love you with all my heart."

Nonetheless, off they go. Dr. Fane works selflessly around the clock to save the cholera-afflicted. Kitty awakens late to the fallacy of the fornical fantasia and to the spinelessness of her muscled lover, who (check it...) was only interested in getting a lil sompin sompin. She undergoes a personal transformation among all the sickness surrounding her in this foreign land, finding her moral compass, and seeking forgiveness from her husband, as resentment consumes him.

Maugham couldn't have found a more perfect setting for exploring the most disastrous of tragedies to a living marriage. Maugham sets up a plethora of symbols on the after-effects of infidelity to contrast with society's notions of a husband and wife.

A super potent novel.