论文总字数：38335字

摘 要

《人性的枷锁》反应了作家毛姆对人性的思考和对生命意义的探索，本文试图从小说主人公菲利普同他自身的关系、同他周围人的关系以及同他借以生存的世界的关系角度论证虽然他一直都在挣扎着摆脱人性枷锁的束缚，最终却与之达成和解，回归庸常的生活。唯有接受真实存在的生活的喜悦、苦痛，理智面对伴随其中的种种枷锁的束缚，才能真正醒悟，获得自由。

关键词：幻灭；理性；妥协；庸常

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 1

3. Reasons of Philip’s Compromise with Life 2

3.1 Physiological Defect and Emotional Vacancy 2

3.2 Influence of Different Assortments of People 8

3.3 Era Background and Social Limitations 12

4. Conclusion 14

Works Cited 15

1. Introduction

William Somerset Maugham is a popular British realistic writer in the end of the 19^th century and the early of 20^th century. As a transitional writer and in quest of the understanding of the meaning and spirit of freedom, Maugham scammed a large number of philosophical works, of which Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, had exerted great influence on him. During his lifetime, Maugham produced a considerable amount of works, of which The Moon and Sixpence, Of Human Bondage and The Razor’s Blade were among the best. Of Human Bondage is generally acknowledged to be Maugham’s masterpiece. It is a semi-autobiographical novel that touches upon the life of the main character Philip Carey, who was alike to Maugham, lost both his parents at an early age and brought up by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. Philip’s clubfoot causes him endless humiliation and self-conscience, echoing Maugham’s struggle with his stammer. Most of his ordeals and afflictions stems from his clubfoot, which also serves to shape his sensitivity and unsociability. “Maugham, like Philip, found his experiences at school uniformly unpleasant and chose not to take a degree at a British university, even though all of his relations had done so.” (Smiley, 1991:7) The writer poured his own sentiment into the characters so as to demonstrate vividly his ambivalence about humanity and bondage accompanying it. In fact, individuals do not only suffer from their fate bondage, but also benefit from it. The humanity bondage, rather than casting them down, spurs them on. Its two aspects are so intermingled that people can rarely distinguish one from the other. Taking stand from that point, this thesis tends to interpret Maugham’s outlook of life.

2. Literature Review

Maugham showed peculiar disgust and disdain for middle class because of their moral standards, interests and hobbies, and lifestyles. In Of Human Bondage, he approached humanity from different angles, endeavored to reproduce his inner struggles, thus making a stir. Chinese scholar Ma Linxian analyzed religious consciousness in Of Human Bondage. He pointed out that the humanity and the divinity were not a total antinomy, and either of them cared in its unique way, and eventually unified everyone. It was only when the two were consistent that the characters were content, if not, painful. Philip searched for life is a path for redemption. Scholar Li Xueshun dissected Of Human Bondage with naturalism, which attributed to Maugham’s unflappable, stoical attitude towards life. Dr. Liu Cuilan also analyzed this novel with naturalism, but her study was done in a detailed way by dividing into five parts: connection between Maugham’s lifetime and Of Human Bondage, nexus between novelistic authenticity and novelist’s visibility, relationship between animality and characters’ behaviors, between conditions and characters’ fate and relationship between objectivity and characters’ language. Scholar Ji Zhaorong interpreted the novel with Chinese Taoism. She concluded that the good in humanity did not antagonize the evil; the character finally acquired peace after impacts on mind and body. Xie Juan applied existentialism to her study of the embodiment of human bondage and Maugham’s life philosophy. What’s more, Mi Haiyan employed deconstructionism to analyze the binary opposition of bondage: ideal and reality, sense and sensibility and meaning and nihility, reaffirming the encapsulation that life was meaningless. Based on their studies, this thesis attempts to demonstrate the main character’s compromise with life and to interpret Maugham’s view on life: pain matters as much as happiness. They come in, both of them, as other details of life come in, to the elaboration of the pattern of life. Life is to be lived rather than to be thinking about, only embracing full dimensions of life can one get utterly free.

3. Reasons of Philip’s Compromise with Life

3.1 Physiological Defect and Emotional Vacancy

“If, from any case, you are afraid to look life in the face, you had better leave Mr. Maugham alone and turn for solace to some of the thousand-and –one novels that concern themselves with the improbable romances of ideal men and women who have little or no footing at all on the earth we know; but if you prefer that your fiction should reflect the truth and, by opening magic casements on the world as it is, enlarge your knowledge of and sympathy with actual humanity—then Mr. Maugham is a novelist who will count with you.”(Curtis and Whitehead, 2013:34-35) The main character Philip was born with a clubfoot, which made him uncommon in the common world, catching eyes of people everywhere. However, this deformity, which should have engendered sympathy and solicitude, resulted in his deformity in mentality and defect in personality: sensitivity, shyness, precocity, diffidence and craving for love. As much as he was raised in a Christian family by an uncle, the Vicar, and an aunt who devoted no less than him husband did, Philip had been scarily truly cared and loved since the couple had no child of their own. His uncle inculcated him with Christian dogmas and homilies in order to let him take Holy Orders when Philip grew up. He also sent Philip to a boarding school, where Philip was faced with derision and humiliation. When one night discussing the matter of faith, the Vicar told Philip that if he had really believed in God, he could move the mountain. Philip made no doubt have the statement. Instead of moving a mountain, he only beseeched God to make his clubfoot whole. “He prayed with all the power of his soul. No doubts assailed him. He was confidence in the world of God. The idea came to him that he must do something unusual to attract the attention of God, and he returned back the rug which was in front of his bed, so that he could kneel on the boards; and then it struck him that his nightshirt was a softness that might displease his maker, so he could took it off and said his prayers naked.”(Maugham, 2006:55) All these were done in a bitterly cold night. To his disappointment, God did not response to his allegiance. Thereafter, he moved on with a belief that no one ever had faith enough; his eagerness for being normal was disillusioned.

Unconsciously Philip accepted his fate bondage: a clubfoot that could never be cured, though he could not help concealing from public sight. When Philip left King’s school and went to Germany, he thought he had been made fun of because the Fraulein sisters showed smothered laughter, undertone words and giggling. Deformity, as we can see, did not only exist in his body, but also sprouted in his character and his mentality. He was devilishly sensitive to words and behaviors in which affirmations could be found. “He treasured the smallest word of commendation which by chance fell from his lips.”(Maugham, 2006:73) He yearned for friendship, love and above all, freedom, but his deformity isolated him from all those. What a predicament that deep inside his heart he wanted attention for his incomplete body and the attention he caught were betrayal and deception.

Before he left King’s school, be made a friend Rose who was so charming that Philip could not resist him. But their friendship saw its end early for Philip wanted a more exclusive attachment. “To show his indifference he struck up a violent friendship with a boy called Sharp whom he hated and despised.”(Maugham, 2006:83) Even though Rose tried to make up, he acted against his will and said something that wounded no one but himself. It was the first time that his beloved friend had described him with the piercing word “cripple”. His pride was hurt; his feelings could hardly be expressed. Another “cripple” came out from the mouth of the object of his masochistic obstinacy, Mildred, who bad no feelings for him, spent all his money and nearly destroyed his future. But this time he got sense, leaving the house where they shared, finding a new one and keeping on.

The clubfoot was Philip’s hallmark, something implied his incompatibility with everybody. He had not the courage to confess it, thus making it possible for people to humiliate him. Once he came to understand, the clubfoot shall not be bondage anymore. People may judge him as inconstant, whimsical for he had moved from place to place and jumped from one occupation to another: he was trained for Holy Orders, but his enthusiasm for religion was slaked; he apprenticed accountancy, but soon found it insipid; he went to Germany then Paris; he thought he had talent for painting but eventually was qualified as a doctor. These legendary experiences had more or less taken root in the defect in his body. His life had been limited by it, but had not been framed rigidly. This vacant part could be restored elsewhere. Therefore, his determination to amend the deficiency was made. However hard was life, he never lost his confidence in life. It was not a story telling of a young man finding his heart; instead, it was a story telling of a heart continuously finding itself. Philip was not reduced to complaint, hate and revenge; he absorbed tolerance, kindness and gratification. When his mind went to the baby created by him and Sally: “Already he felt in himself a passionate devotion to it. He thought of passing his hands over his little perfect limbs, he knew he would be beautiful; and he would make to him all his dreams of a rich and varied life.”(Maugham, 2006:708) His sincere wishes could not be more suitable to answer his and Maugham’s attitude towards perplexities, vacillations and traumas. To invent a character with a verisimilitude of his own growth, which presumably was the true charm of this novel that everybody seemed to watch himself laugh, cry and struggle, Maugham spared no effort.

If deformity is the external cause of the inextricability of bondage, lack of love accounts for the other one. Philip’s mother died when he was only nine, such a young age that he barely remembered anything about her. But her death evoked little Philip’s desire for love, reminding him incessantly that his maternal love hand been taken away. That was why he asked his uncle to take the servant Emma with him. His uncle refused under the pretext that it would cost too much money. Being a Vicar, his uncle, Mr. Carey, exhibited an opposite side of what a Vicar should be: indifferent, selfish and sanctimonious. His aunt, Louisa, had no idea of conveying feelings to a child because she was childless, and sometimes she was even awkward. In such a family, Philip grew shy and reserved, and “Insensibly, he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.”(Maugham, 2006:35) When Philip was sent to school, his clubfoot incurred bully and humiliation. It took him two years to make a friend, whose name was Luard. One day when they was playing, Luard inadvertently broken Philip’s penholder, which was bought during his last holidays at Blackstable. However, Philip claimed it a present from his dead mother with tears rolling down his cheeks. He did not know why he had invented that pathetic story and why he should have being so genuinely by it, but it“occurred to him that scene when Emma had told him of his mother’s death, and, though, he could not speak for crying, he had insisted on going in to say goodbye to the Miss Watkin so that they might see his grief and pity him.”(Maugham, 2006:53)

Lack of love made search for love his lifelong pursuit. Miss Wilkinson was the first woman that stoked passionate emotion in Philip despite the fact that she was older than Philip by over 20 years. Philip submerged before Miss Wilkinson’s irresistible temptation and had sex with her. In some degree, Miss Wilkinson acted as a stimulation, which palliated Philip’ s self-abasement and timidity: she did not estrange Philip for his deformity, but encouraged him to take steps. Their relationship ended soon since Philip became weary of Miss Wilkinson. He yearned for the kind of love that would not restrict him once it was gotten.

After tasting the first love, Philip fell in love with Mildred.“Everything about her contradicts his lifelong fantasy of love.”(Smiley, 1991:9)“ He had often thought of falling in love, and there was one scene which he had pictured to himself over and over again… They caught the midnight train to Paris; and they sped through the silent, star-lit night into the unknown.”(Maugham, 2006:321) Philip could not understand why he was crazy for Mildred, whose most salient quality was shameless, combined with selfishness, vanity and uncouthness. His infatuation blinded him at first; he cared not her faults of person or of character. Then it evolved into such an awfully desire that he could only cure himself by satisfying his sexual hunger for Mildred. Sadly it never happened. Finally it became a morbid obsession that deprived Philip of self -consciousness and dignity. Though his obstinacy had not being slaked, tormenting him and twisting him, he was still willing to be enslaved. When Mildred came back to his side, pregnant, he resolutely left Norah, who was Philip’s lover as well as friend. She was cheerful, optimistic and courageous. She loved Philip with all her heart and soul; she had a domestic temperament, which warmed Philip; she pitied Philip’s deformity and expressed it in tenderness. However, Philip’s prodigious stupidity blinded him again: he accepted Mildred. He had known Norah would make a perfect wife and a charming friend, but learnt it by heart when Mildred ran away with his friend Griffiths. He came back to Norah only to find her engaged.

He later met Altheney, his best friend. The warmth of the Altheney family touched Philip. Before this, family affection was never mentioned by Philip .It was through him contact with the family that he cultivated a preference for domestic happiness. Philip did not realize he was in love with Sally Altheney until he joined the annual family hop picking. In the end of this novel, he struck up to Sally a proposal which insinuated a strong contrast with the original one, bringing him back to the simplest pattern, a pattern in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died.

A great deal of readers deprecate this perfunctory consummation, some even asserted it the biggest failure. As like an apple to an oyster, it is this ending that exerts a fascination. Firstly, difficulties and setbacks are to be solved, not to be escaped. When Philip lapsed into quagmire, he did not committed suicide like Fanny Price, or degenerate to a prostitute like Mildred. Along the way “he clenched his teeth and repeated that what happened was inevitable because it happened. Regret was absurd.”(Maugham, 2006:583) Neither happiness nor pain is unfailing. Although Philip was haunted by attachment to Mildred, “that love had caused him so much suffering that he knew he never, never quite be free of it. Only death could finally assuage his desire.”(Maugham, 2006:710) He decided to marry Sally who would love him sincerely. He realized he had once missed such a woman as Norah; he must take hold this time. At last Philip surrendered to mundane life, gave up his mysterious, teeming and intense life, and took refuge in Sally’s love, which would make up the vacancy in his emotion and give him the audacity to face life. Second, the lightness and cheerfulness of the ending made a contrast with Philip’s depressed and disconsolate life experiences, which were essentially a true inflection of reality. What kind of people writes what kind of word. Owing to his multifarious experiences, Philip learnt to choose one that fitted him, learnt to cherish the moments now, learn to distinguish what was of importance. His reason was of great use to him, so was Maugham’s. Maugham in the disguise of Philip appeared as an observer that biased towards nothing. He was more delighted to know about humanity than to judge it. His interest was to “write about people whose characteristics were special… Or to write stories about people who were embroiled in the unexpected that stemmed from accidental events and conditions.”(Cassill, 2006:875)

Philip’s epiphany was the bosom of Sally’s warmth, of all these he had underwent. He came to understand life, accept all that were set for him, “In Of Human Bondage, as in Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), both heroes must have relationships with several different woman before they can truly grow up.”(Meyers, 2010:111) Furthermore, he forgave Griffiths for his treachery and Mildred for the pain she cause him. “They could not help themselves. The only reasonable thing was to accept the good of men and be patient with their faults.”(Maugham, 2006:708) At this point, it was manifest that why the title of the book was finally settled on a section from Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics: “Man’s lack of power to moderate or restrain the affects which I call bondage, for the man who is subject to affects is under the control, not of himself, but of fortune… so that he is often forced to follow worse, although he sees the better before him.” replacing the original “Beauty From Ashes”. The latter insinuated pleasure after pain faded, displaying a beauty of fortitude whereas the former was vouchsafed more heaviness for its sounding inextricability: “The spectrum of human emotions are all functions of ways in which eternal things affect our powers or capacities”. (Nedlar, 2001:133) The process of Philip’s growth, as well as the process of his exploration of meaningfulness of life is quintessentially the process of his acceptance of real existence and his reconciliation with bondage.

3.2 Influence of Different Assortments of People

The complication and intricacy of humanity are in every possible way more diverse than novelists have created, so in his novel, Maugham’s posture was more of an observer to know about people rather than of a judge to eulogize or to castigate. He jumped out of his time, entered more deeply into human nature to explore true human feelings, thus, his observations and studies had acquired nuanced and vivid details. The characters appeared in his novel was not a bunch of typed characters, but had the traits of reality and philosophical meaning which made Maugham across time, becoming a permanent thinker of humanity. Of Human Bondage recounted the protagonist Philip’s growth and mental development, simultaneously, it unfolded life of people from miscellaneous social classes, exhibiting vivid images ranging from country Vicar, account, to poverty-stricken teacher, fortitudinous painter and eccentric doctor. These characters whose portrayal left a blatant impression on readers with vraisemblance were actually a clue throughout the whole text. Everyone was worth appearing, but only six produced significant influence.

The first one was Philip’s uncle, Mr. Carey, also known as the Vicar. He was the pivot of Philip’s conversion of religious belief. Since young Philip was weaned on a regular diet of Christian doctrine and homilies. All his knowledge about religion was gained from Mr. Carey, whose profession should have set him as an example as benignant, avuncular and devoted. As a matter of fact, every facet of him presented the opposite: indifference, timidity and hypocrite. “As Philip grew up, he had learnt to know his uncle; Philip was downright and intolerant, he was baffled that a man should sincerely say things as a clergyman, which he never acted up to as a man. The deception outraged him. His uncle was a weak and selfish man, whose chief desire was to be saved trouble.”(Maugham, 2006:88) Contact with the Vicar revealed to Philip the sanctimonious nature of religion. Thus, it could be fluently deduced that Philip’s rebellion against religion bad a great deal with his uncle. When he ceased to believe in Christianity he felt infinite liberty. However, the cultivation of Christianity never ceased to influence him. “When he put away the religion in which he had been brought up, he had kept unimpaired the morality which was part and parcel of it.”(Maugham, 2006:297) When Philip lost all his money in stock market, forced to loiter around streets, coincidently, his uncle refuse to help. He nourished a malicious reckon on Mr. Carey death through which he could get money that would support him to finish his courses at the medical school. But Mr. Carey’s death seemed unforeseeable; Philip even mediated a thought to kill him, which horrified him. In the end, his conscience, which represented the good part of humanity, defeated the evil part. Adherence to dogmas, restrictions on behaviors and accordance with religious ethics are Christian requirements. Concluded from the contrast, it is justifiably unequivocal that Philip did not get rid of bondage of religion, without which he would probably fell into immorality, which was one of the irredeemable consequences. Another blatant example of his restriction by Christianity was his treatment to Fanny Price. She was an art student sticking to painting without taking noticing of teachers’ denial and classmates’ mockery; she was adamant in her success, even though she had not at all art talent. When they had luncheon together, “Philip was squeamish, and the way Miss Price ate took his appetite away. She ate noisily, greedily, a little wild beast in a menagerie, and after she had finished its course rubbed the plate with pieces of bread until it was white and shining, as if she did not wish to have a single drop of gravy.”(Maugham, 2006:231) So steadfast a girl as she was crumpled by poverty: she committed suicide after 3 days’ starvation. Her death wrung Philip from his fantasy of being an artist; he realized he had no talent either. Therefore, Philip dropped painting and returned to England after he dealt with Miss Price’s funeral.

The second was Mildred, a waitress that stultified Philip’s reason. Although Philip was aware of her vanity, inanity, rapacity and uncouthness, he loves her desperately. He was obsessed with her body, willing to do anything for her sake. But Mildred had no feeling for him; she stayed by his side just because of her lack of money. She came from the bottom of society, she did not pay attention to gentility, all that she cared was three meals a day. If anything was worth mentioning, that was her anticipation of love. However, reality drifted apart from her ideal: she was deceived and abandoned. When she came back, pregnant, Philip accepted her. He offered to look after her and raise her baby, but what was paid back was ridiculous: Mildred was in love with his friend, Griffiths, and she even spared the trouble to conceal her passion before Philip, finally perpetrated elopement with Griffiths. She returned to Philip some time later, and after a destruction of Philip’s house, left again. In her last appearance she was reduced to prostitution, which was predictable because her superficiality had always obstructed her from entering into Philip’s heart, the only heart that sincerely cherished her and loved her. Philip bore insufferable infliction and torture in his contact with her. He abused her thousands of time, but when she reappeared, he would instantly forget her faults, surrendering his reason to morbid desire. Nearly all Philip’s money on Mildred; his study was neglected; he even invited humiliation and insult to palliate his pain. It was not until Mildred degradation that Philip relieved himself of the self-torture. But the trauma would never convalesce, as bondage of desire, which was the paramount bondage, never ceased to be. In the last chapter, Philip hand made up his mind to marry Sally, but when he ran across a figure characteristic of Mildred, he felt a stabbing in his heart. “That love had caused him so much suffering that he knew he would never, never quite be free of it. Only death could finally assuage his desire.”(Maugham, 2006:710) He welcomed his new life with the old buried deep in his heart. Through Philip’s emotional entanglements, Maugham relayed a message that bondage of desire would remain for life, and to live on, one had to put up with it. Philip’s decision to marriage was not suggestive of his breaking off, but indicated that he had learnt to face bondage with a stoical temperament.

The third one came to Norah, a woman novelist who wrote novelettes that were universally considered as an inferior sort of literary work. She made a difference from other characters for her modern femininity. Separated from her husband, Norah earned her living and her child’s by meager income. Whatever difficulty she got into, she never lost her sense of humor. Though life disclosed an aspect of drudgery towards her, she addressed everything with her wisdom, reason and sincerity. “Life would not be worth living worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.”(Maugham, 2006:367) It was her feminine sympathy that touched Philip’s heart. She poured her love over Philip like a mother. Accordingly, Philip appreciated her companion; his belief in himself was restored; he became less difficult to live with because his thirst for compassion and care was satisfied. With Norah’s encouragement, Philip picked up his study passed examinations successfully. What’s more, he gained utter control of himself, retrospectively revolting against Mildred and his hideous passion for her. Unfortunately, Philip abandoned her for Mildred. At this stage, Philip was entangled with his desire for Mildred and only when was lacerated again, he would truly understand what was indispensable to him: maternal benignity and feminine placidity. The ending for Norah generated a little disappointment; she was scintillating, independent and optimistic, leading a life of her own accord. Such a woman like her should have urged other women to work hard, to win dependence of both spirit and material, but she yielded, or put it precisely, she was set to yield. Maugham labeled her and all women with vulnerability, firmly believed that they needed love and a shelter. As a result, Norah reconciled to life.

The forth was Hayward, a painter whose life was as equally meaningless as his death. Philip made his acquaintance in Paris, and impressed by his rhetoric discourses, thus coming to adorn him. He was a man of ambition and romance, but fiendish reality pulled him further away from his ideal and shriveled his youth with one blow after another. Meanwhile, as Philip was exposed to more dimensions of life, his disappointment for Hayward grew stronger, until nothing held them together but habit and old memories. Hayward joined the army when he achieved nothing in art or any anther profession, wanting to fight for his country for a reason he did not know himself, but definitely not for patriotism. He died, soon after landing, of a stupid disease, failing once more, even at the end, to accomplish anything. It was his death that sparked off Philip’s epiphany of the Persian rug: life was meaningless. Happiness, pain and any other details of life were just added to the elaboration of the design, the pattern of life. Hayward was an idealist, unconsciously, he exerted influences upon Philip, and ultimately conduced to his transformation to realism.

The fifth was Cronshaw, an impoverished poet. He claimed that he should have been born in the nineteenth century when he could have attained achievements for his sharp perspicacity. As a matter of fact, he earned a bare subsistence by translating vulgar novels and composing insipid poems. In Cronshaw’s perspective, life was to be lived rather than to be written about. He resolved to search out the manifold experience that life offered, wringing from each moment what of emotion it represented. He gave to Philip a Persian rug through which Philip was asked to discover the meaning of life. Years later, when he was extremely ill, Philip took him to his house, attended to him and buried him after his passing away. Philip did not perceive the denotation until his loss of another friend: life had no meaning; it was merely a pattern that meant nothing but indicated one’s personal pleasure. “Life was insignificant and death without consequence, Philip exulted as he had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of belief in God was lifted from his shoulders. It seemed to him that the last burden of responsibility was taken away from him; and for the first time he was utterly free.”(Maugham, 2006:614) Cronshaw had no hope for life, he abandoned all his perusal, which included all his impractical ideas as well as happiness. He seemed the only one in the novel that thoroughly broke off bondage and gained utter freedom. It could be asserted that he turned Philip from a realist to a nihilist. Any plot or character was not designed for nothing. The characters, though, ostensibly irrelevant, served as a link between different stages in Philip’s inner growth. Maugham’s ingenious design tightly grasped the desultory character tie.

The sixth was a journalist, Thorpe Altheney, whom Philip met in hospital when working as an intern. In some way, Altheney was another Cronshaw: being intellectual, having a great deal of knowledge about the world. But acceptance of the surroundings and comprise with actuality made him contrary to Cronshaw: he had a stable occupation, which was though far from affluent, but enough for him to maintain the livelihood of a large family. Philip became a good friend and a regular guest of his family, the ambience of which saturated him with warmth and coziness. “If they are beautiful I don’t much mind if they are not true. It’s asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetics.”(Maugham, 2006:505) From the kind Altheney and his family, Philip learnt contentment. When he was reduced to streets, penniless, Altheney’s apropos help pulled him through. During his summer hop picking with the family, a love affair took place between him and the family’s first daughter Sally, who was more maternal than any woman he had met. “The elusive pattern of Philip’s life finally falls into place when he realizes the quite conventional desire ‘for a life and a home and love’ and married the warm responsive Sally. The novel—which opened on a gray, dull day, with heavy clouds and rawness in the air—ends with a shining sun.”(Meyers, 2010:111)

3.3 Era Background and Social Limitations

Victorian age was the stratosphere of the first industrial, due to which Britain was launched into unprecedented prosperity, expanding its overseas colonies, thus known as the “Sun Empire”. At the same time, Britain completed primitive accumulation of capital; traditional social values and ethical values were accordingly challenged. Science and technology gradually took over religion as the mainstream.

“The years of World War I were the most turbulent, eventful and complicated of Maugham’s life. In 1914 he was forty, in his prime as a man and a writer. In 1915 he published his most personal and ambitious novel, Of Human Bondage. His unhappy relationship with Syrie consumed time and energy, and for months he wavered uncertainly between his homosexual desires and commitment to a respectable position in society.”(Meyers, 2010:96) With the outbreak of WWI the original frame of religion, morality and culture broke to pieces, forcing a spiritual crisis on individuals: people were getting skeptical of Western civilizations; their confidence and hope were cracked down; their initiative and creativity were deprived of. Mental contradictions put the whole society to an abyss. Everything was denied, no substitution was yet found, and social values were in a blank stage in which no spiritual sustenance was provided.

Mildred traded love with money, dating with Philip though in fact she did not at all care about him. “It was only when he gave her anything that she showed any affection. She knew the price of everything and her gratitude was in exact proportion with the value of his gift.”(Maugham, 2006:341) Made out of her conditions, Mildred had no choice but to live on, waiting changes. Maugham did not fling off a remark on Mildred throughout the whole novel; he did not exaggerate nor downplay either material or spirit, but paying the same amount of homage to both of them. When Philip worked in the hospital, it flummoxed him that baby was not welcomed. Parents preferred to have it dead; if not, they should kill it under the pretend of accidents. Cronshaw had always tried to seek another world, escaping from the present. “Philip’s rule of life, to follow one’s instinct with due regard to the policeman around the corner, had not acted well there: it was because Cronshaw had done this that he had made such a lamentable failure of existence.”(Maugham, 2006:488) Here, using Philip’s thought, Maugham put across his mind: people could hardly be independent of the conditions in which they lived, everything they did was bound by a certain thing. The main character Philip spent a long time achieving an utter freedom that was under restriction that he finally realized. Norah, as mentioned before, stood out from her peer because she had the audacity to blaze out a new road for the rest feminine world. She had been assiduous to gain independence but still succumbed to take refuge in marriage. “Every character was not determinant of social contradictions, thus, few of them could control their destiny.”(Ma, 2006)

4. Conclusion

In Of Human Bondage Maugham enumerated shackles inflicted on humanity, such as desire, poverty and emotionality. Struggling to break off the shackles, the main character attempted to find out the meaning of life, but eventually he reconciled to reality, returned to a philistine life because of psychological defect and emotional vacancy, influences of different assortments of people as well as era background.

Life is to be lived, with a thorough acceptance of its duality. With rationality, one will constantly bear in mind that the unhappiness he has suffered is no more than part of a decoration of the pattern of life, a decoration that is elaborate and beautiful. He should accept with voracity everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it adds to the richness of life. People should make their own decisions, know what they are doing and learn by heart that what you are fond of is not necessarily the best, what suits you is. A total affirmation of life, with all its suffering and absurdity, sharps one’s confidence and sagacity, cultivates a phlegmatic and stoical temperament, and leads a road to freedom.

Works Cited

Cassill R. V. and Bausch Richard. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. New York: W W Norton amp; Company Incorporated, 2006.

Curtis Anthony and Whitehead John. W.Somerset Maugham. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Maugham, W. Somerset. Of Human Bondage. New York: Random House, Inc, 2006.

Meyers Jeffrey. Somerset Maugham: A Life. Random House LLC, 2010.

Nedlar Steven. Spinoza"s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind: Immortality and the Jewish Mind. Oxford University Press, 2001.

Smiley, Jane. Introduction to Of Human Bondage. New York: Random House, 1991.

陈艳.《虚伪还是放荡———以心理分析法研究毛姆笔下的女性形象》.上海:上海外国语大学,2009.

侯维瑞.《英国文学通史》.上海:上海外语教育出版社,2002.

马小强.《矛盾冲突之间的精神挣扎—读毛姆的小说《人性的枷锁》》.天水师范学院学报 2006 (1). 

欧阳谦.《20世纪西方人学思想导论》.北京:中国人民大学出版社,2002.

杨锐.《英国作家 W·S·毛姆精神探求路上的双重选择》.沈阳农业大学学报(社会科学版 ), 2007 (5).

剩余内容已隐藏，请支付后下载全文，论文总字数：38335字