In his foreword of Of Human Bondage, William Somerset Maugham narrated how the novel came to be. He explained that one day he was assaulted by the memories of his past. He grew restless and he knew he had to do something about it. And he just thought that the only way to be free from the past was to write it. He quit the theatre for two years and put the story that would not let him rest on paper. He wrote about Philip Carey, a club-foot boy that was orphaned at the early age of nine. He stated that it was an autobiographical novel, a combination of both reality and fiction, to which he owed to the fact that, “The emotions are my own. Many parallel situations in their lives were presented in the novel such as their losses, their relatives, deformities, attitude, travels, careers, and masochistic tendencies. The likeness is striking but one may wonder how much of it is true. In the beginning of the novel, Philip was shown as a young boy of nine who had just been woken up by a servant girl to take him up to his mother’s room. He was still too young to understand the meaning of what’s happening in his surroundings. His mother was dying and he was about to become an orphan. It is not farfetched when it is compared to Maugham’s childhood.
Maugham was eight when his mother died of Tuberculosis in 1882. And two years later, his father died with cancer. Maugham admitted later that his mother was one of the reasons why he wrote the novel. He wanted to be cleansed of his grief. But even on his ninetieth birthday, he wasn’t rid of that feeling. Both Philip and Maugham suffered the loss of their parents at an early age. It also suggests that both of them lived through hard times alone in such a young age and how the repercussions of that incident affected them for the rest of their lives.
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Plato's biography is mainly drawn from the work of other ancient writers and a few of Plato's own letters. He was born in Athens around 428 BC to an aristocratic family with a long and esteemed history of political leadership in the state. According to an anecdote of dubious veracity, Plato was originally named Aristo cles, but was quickly dubbed, "Platon," meaning "broad," by schoolmates ...
When his mother died, Philip, being an only child, was sent to Blackstable to stay with his father’s brother, Uncle William and Aunt Louisa. William Carey was the Vicar of Blackstable. The Maugham Family lived in France with their father as a solicitor in the British Embassy. Although Maugham wasn’t an only child, he might as well have been because his older brothers had already gone to boarding schools when he was three in England. When his father died in 1884, he was sent to Whitstable, Kent. His uncle, Henry Maugham, and his wife, Sophie, took him in their home.
His uncle was Vicar of Whitstable. The move turned to be catastrophic for Maugham. He particularly didn’t like his uncle because of its cold and stiff demeanor. Both Philip and Maugham’s life in the vicarage was tame and emotions were controlled. They weren’t allowed to show their feelings get out of hand. Both were quiet, private but very curious, and this denial of the emotion of others was at least as hard on them as the denial of their own emotions. Philip’s uncle and aunt soon after sent him to the King’s School in Tercanbury.
Having an unusual limp because of his club-foot, he became the center of attention in class. He was laughed at by his classmates and he became more subdued because of it. He was bullied by the other students and was occasionally threatened to show his club-foot in front of many people. Having French as his first language, Maugham was clumsy in using the English language. When he was sent to King’s School in Canterbury, the other students made fun of his Bad English and his short stature, a trait he got from his father.
It was in this time that he developed a stammer that would stay with him for all of his life. The club-foot and stammer may be different in form but it tells the same thing. Philip and Maugham carried these stigmas in their lives. It showed how they dealt with their individual deformity. It showed how they tried to fight off the shame it entailed. Philip was miserable in his life at the vicarage and the school. It resulted in his being biting when giving remarks to those who displeased him. It is the same way with Maugham. This attitude of his was reflected in his writings, like Philip himself.
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High school is a place where young teens learn to become mature and responsible. It is a place where students get trained to take on bigger challenges in life. Obstacles such as college. From my own personal experiences, high school didn’t seem that way. Students were more concerned about getting a passing grade then about what they were taught. They would even cheat their way out of high ...
Philip’s uncle wanted him to go to Oxford after the King’s School but he wishes to go to Germany instead. Philip’s uncle and the school headmaster were opposed to this but they eventually gave in and let him go to Heidelberg for a year. In Heidelberg, he lived with other foreigners in a boarding house and studied German through listening and conversing with the people in it. He met many interesting characters such as Hayward who has an interest in literature and who considers himself a poet, and Weeks, an unorthodox American who thought Hayward was a weak, superficial man.
After his year in Germany, he returned to his uncle’s at Blackstable. Taking matters into his hands, Philip’s uncle convinced him to move to London to take an apprenticeship to become a chartered accountant. Philip did not fare well in that area. He began to think about Paris and decided that he wanted to try to be an artist. He persuaded his uncle and aunt to give him money to attend art classes but his uncle was adamant to not giving it. His aunt, however, had a soft spot for him and deposited her money in the bank and ave it to him. Finally in Paris, he attended art classes and became friends with Clutton, Lawson, Cronshaw and Miss Price. Miss Price had taken a fancy to him but he didn’t return the sentiment. The girl committed suicide because of poverty. It was very traumatic for Philip because he was the one who saw her corpse. Philip then realized that he didn’t have the talent to paint and that he was just mediocre. He wondered if it would do him good to settle for mediocrity. He decided to leave art behind and went back to Blackstable.
Like Philip, Maugham refused to go to Cambridge and went to Germany instead. He studied philosophy, literature and German in Heidelberg University in contrast to the private sessions Philip had with his mentors in his stay there. During this time, Maugham met John Ellingham Brooks who was said to have had a sexual relationship with him. When he returned to England, his uncle found him a position in an accounting office. Like Philip, he was miserable as an accountant’s clerk. He gave it up a month later and returned to Whitstable.
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I woke up on a Friday morning to catch my plane back to Los Angeles. I was coming back from a 3 week vacation from El Salvador. I was really sick the morning I arose to eat a delicious breakfast. But it wasn't a fever or a cold. It was more of a confusing and stressful hangover. The night before, I was out doing some ridiculous things that I should have never done. There came times that I wish I ...
His uncle was not pleased about it and set about finding a new profession for him. Like Philip, Maugham flippantly agreed to become a doctor. The figure Mildred posed drew many questions if she were a real person in Maugham’s life. She who had shown nothing but indifference to Philip; she who only used him for his money. Since Maugham had a tendency to lean on men more than women, it is not so far-fetched to think that Mildred could be a man. Maugham’s physical description of her was, “tall and thin with narrow hips and the chest of a boy. It is also evident that Maugham had this tendency to be masochistic. When Mildred snubbed him in the eatery, his obsession began to claw at him. He knew that if she had acted the way he wanted her to, he would be indifferent to her. But when she acted indifferently, rudely to a point, he began to ask for more. He became obsessed with her that even though he found her repulsive, he stomached the stupidity and the inappropriateness of her behavior. He asked her out on dates and knew deep in him that she was only using him to go to places but he didn’t care.
When they argue, though she’d said too many awful things and he had sworn never to see her again, he’d come crawling back. He knew he didn’t deserve such treatment but he came again and again as if he was not disgusted by the way he was treated and the way he responded to it. On the second time she left him, it was because of his friend, Griffith. When he arranged a meal for the three of them, he instantly knew that there were sparks flying about the two but he even left them alone as wanting the pain to be more intolerable.
He’d seen that while she was holding his hand, she was also holding Griffith’s on her other hand and felt that he wanted to hurt himself bad. He even groveled at Griffith’s feet not to take Mildred away. Maugham confirmed later that the episode of Mildred and Griffith was autobiographical. He himself had given a rival money to take a trip with a person he loved. When Maugham published Of Human Bondage in 1915, the world wasn’t ready for it because of the First World War. The people had other important things to occupy themselves with rather than read a book of fiction that could not alleviate their sufferings.
It is also burdensome to read because of its 600-page length and the subject matter of Bildungsroman, a literary style that has a young person as protagonist journeying through life, was already commonplace among the British writers. It didn’t help that many of his contemporaries had improved their use of the style such as DH Lawrence and James Joyce. Also, Maugham was quite known as a dramatist than a novelist. But it became widely read when the war ended. And it is because of the tangibility of life it exuded. It showed the real journey of one restless soul that wanted to be cleansed of the burdens of his heart.
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