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Writer's pictureAnna Wang

The Ultimate Human Bondage is Our Desire for Meaningful Human Connections

I decided to tackle the formidably long book Of Human Bondage because it is said that Eileen Chang's writing was heavily influenced by Maugham.


The theme of Of Human Bondage is self-discovery. How is a person considered to have discovered themselves? The book presents two criteria: finding out what they love to do as a profession and understanding what kind of companionship they seek. Of course, as with all questions about real life, there are no right answers. For most people, the final solutions are relatively acceptable answers they can reach within their limitations.



The protagonist, Philip Carey, battles on those two fronts until the end of the book. Much of Philip’s search is constrained by money. Orphaned at nine, he is taken in by his uncle, a vicar in a town in Kent, who sends him to a boarding school. With Philip’s good grades, the best plan is for him to earn a scholarship to Oxford to study theology and become a clergyman. However, half a year before graduation, Philip discards his religious beliefs and decides to go to Germany to study modern languages. Philip’s late parents left him 2000 pounds. If he wants to walk his own path, he must pave his way with his own fortune.


After a year’s sojourn in Germany, Philip changes his mind. Next, he spends a year at an accounting firm as an apprentice, a position also funded with his own money. However, he cannot stand the boring and meticulous life of an accountant. He goes to Paris and enrolls in an art school. After studying drawing for two years, he realizes that he is not the most talented. He asks a senior writer he met in Paris' bar scene for advice. The older man inquires why Philip hasn't given up already if he knows he has no talent. Philip answers, “I like the life.” By the time he finally decides to pursue a more secure career as a medical doctor, his fortune has already dwindled by half. Still, if he economizes, he can support himself through the necessary years of medical school before securing a job in a hospital.


It is at this juncture that he meets his nemesis, Mildred. Mildred is a waitress—selfish, shallow, and not particularly beautiful. Philip doesn't love her at all, but he pursues her relentlessly simply because she is indifferent to him. Whenever Philip asks her out, Mildred simply answers, “I don’t mind.” Philip spends a lot of money entertaining her, but Mildred finds Philip’s bookish demeanor unattractive. Instead, she prefers a sweet-talking German businessman. She lives with the German, who later dumps her when she gets pregnant. Philip comes to her rescue and pays all her bills until she safely delivers a baby girl. Once Mildred recovers, she falls in love and elopes with Philip’s best friend. But their entanglement isn't over yet. A couple of years later, Philip meets Mildred on the street, where she is prostituting. Once again, Philip saves her from her predicament, even though he doesn’t love her anymore. Mildred wants to take full control of Philip and tries many times to seduce him. The last time Philip refuses her advances, she assaults him with the most vicious remarks and destroys all his belongings that can be destroyed.


Bette Davis (as Mildred) and Leslie Howard in the 1934 film version


By then, Philip has only a couple of hundred pounds left, which he later loses all in the stock market. He meets his lowest point in life when he is only half a year away from getting his license—he not only has to give up on studying medicine but also sleeps on the streets. Fortunately, he has a good friend named Athelny, who takes him in and finds him work at a dress shop. Athelny is also a man of character. He has literary talent and has been married to a wealthy woman. Resenting his wife’s pretentiousness and exhortations, he eloped with his wife’s maid and had nine children with her even though his lawful wife refused to grant him a divorce. Working at the dress shop as a press secretary, Athelny often reminisces about the wild adventure in his youth. Kindled by Athelny’s passionate narration, Philip decides that he will travel the world once he gets his medical license.


When Philip’s uncle dies, he leaves him a small fortune, enough for Philip to return to medical school. Upon finishing his degree, Philip immediately receives a job assignment to work as a substitute in a remote location, where he wins the love and respect of the patients. The owner of the practice, Dr. South, offers Philip a partnership, but he refuses because he seeks to be hired by cruise ships. His heart is set on “affronting and comprehending the manifold wonders of places more distant and more strange”(Maugham 492). A happy and elated Philip follows the Athelnys on a vacation, where he discovers that Athelny’s eldest daughter, Sally, has been secretly in love with him. Blissfully, he falls in love with Sally. It seems that every star aligns with Philip.


Sally tells Philip that she might be pregnant, which instantly sends Philip into deep distress. The honorable thing for him to do is to marry Sally, accept Dr. South's offer, and settle as a professional and family man. This means he must let go of the plan he has long been dreaming of. The meandering plot finally brings Philip to this crucial moment. For me, during much of the 492 pages of the whole 498 pages, I have been constantly guessing what the title, “Of Human Bondage,” is referring to. It could be vanity, which spurred his foolish obsession with the unworthy Mildred; it could be greed, which caused the loss of his lifeline on the stock market. But no, vanity or greed are too common human mistakes, and Maugham’s singularly great contribution, boiled down to the last six pages, for humans to understand themselves, is to point out: our ultimate bondage is our desire for meaningful human connections.


Let’s see what Philip has to give up for marrying Sally: “Philip knew by heart the list of places at which they touch; and each one called up in him visions of tropical sunshine, and magic colour, and of a teeming, mysterious, intense life. Life! That was what he wanted. At last he would come to close quarters with life” (Maugham 493). He thinks of Griffiths, his former friend who betrays him with Mildred. How he wishes he could be as indifferent and immoral as Griffiths. But he is not Griffiths, and he must do the honorable thing, and this is unfair because Philip “was one of the few people who was acutely conscious of the transitoriness of life, and how necessary it was to make the most of it”(Maugham 493).


When did Philip acutely feel the transitoriness of life? It was the night he and Sally threw themselves into each other’s arms:


They turned a corner, and a breath of warm wind beat for a moment against their faces. The earth gave forth its freshness. There was something strange in the tremulous night, and something, you knew not what, seemed to be waiting; the silence was on a sudden pregnant with meaning. Philip had a queer feeling in his heart, it seemed very full, it seemed to melt (the hackneyed phrases expressed precisely the curious sensation), he felt happy and anxious and expectant. To his memory came back those lines in which Jessica and Lorenzo murmur melodious words to one another, capping each other’s utterance; but passion shines bright and clear through the conceits that amuse them. He did not know what there was in the air that made his senses so strangely alert; it seemed to him that he was pure soul to enjoy the scents and the sounds and the savours of the earth. He had never felt such an exquisite capacity for beauty. He was afraid that Sally by speaking would break the spell, but she said never a word, and he wanted to hear the sound of her voice. Its low richness was the voice of the country night itself. (Maugham 485-486)

Philip is bathed in warm wind, immersed in the freshness of the earth, and witnessing the tremulous night. The beautiful surrounding gives him a sense of impermanence that suggests the inevitability of ending or dying. The more sensitive a person is to the transitoriness of life, the “more happy and anxious and expectant” he is to share his feelings with another soul—"to make the most of it.” Philip’s senses are sharpened and heightened by the desire to murmur “melodious words to one another,” and Sally’s presence fulfills this desire. It is this desire that catapults Philip into Sally’s arms and later fatefully hinders him from pursuing his dreams.


The desire to connect with another soul at our most blissfully receptive moment is our ultimate bondage as human beings. Philip couldn’t break free from this mental shackle, and therefore, in retrospection, he mutters despairingly, “I’m so damned weak” (Maugham 493).


Toward the end of the novel, Sally’s pregnancy is revealed to be a false alarm, and Philip happily marries her, choosing the settled life of a country physician. This ending feels like adding a dog’s tail to a mink’s coat—a Chinese metaphor for making a poor addition to something valuable. Maugham likely installs this rosy but mediocre ending to cater to middle-class readers. Personally, I think the book would be better off if it ended with Philip marrying Sally while feeling a secret disappointment in himself. However, the current ending is a tiny flaw that I can bear.


Now we come to the inevitable question: what could be the possible influence of Maugham on Eileen Chang? Without deliberate contemplation, I just jotted down two hypotheses:

  1. Money plays an important role in a person's choice of life.

  2. Family and social connections are necessary evils for grounding a person in life.


Works Cited:

Maugham, W. Somerset. Of Human Bondage. Moncreiffe Modern, 2022.

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