The most mature fiction about the South Pacific is symbolic in nature. Works of Melville, Conrad, and Maugham … move beyond the superficial and the ephemeral into the realm of mythology. However, what these writers have in common is that they all make strong instinctive responses to the South Seas. (pp. 165-66)

[Those works of] Maugham which are related to the South Seas follow the design of the adventure of the mythological hero described by Joseph Campbell: 'A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into the region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men.' This archetypal quest is the organising principle, and archetypes are the primary images which form the narrative of … The Moon and Sixpence. [Strickland divorces himself] from the common world and [descends] into the depth of the mystical South Seas…. [Here, he] finds the source of creative energy within himself. (pp. 167-68)

[Strickland] sends forth from the South Seas disconcerting works of art. The legend he creates attracts others like the Maugham-narrator to the South Seas. (p. 168)

[Maugham] is overcome by a divine nostalgia when he is faced with the vast and empty ocean, and the low-lying heaven. He perceives the strange affinity of sea and man, nature and universe, and finds himself immersed in the changing moods of the universe…. He finds the ocean 'inconstant and uncertain like the soul of man,' and it makes him restless with ancient cravings for god, paradise, and eternity. The Maugham-narrator's journey in The Moon and Sixpence to the South Seas is a journey of 'a wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginning of history.' (p. 169)

The Maugham-narrator [senses] in these tropical valleys the life which flows from time immemorial according to immemorial ways. Here the primitives live in their naked innocence free from the existential anguish of Atlantis. (p. 170)

This myth of a South Seas paradise is a variant of the Greek myth of the golden age and the Christian belief in Eden…. [For Maugham, the] journey to the South Seas is in a sense a journey back to the primitive past of Western Civilization. Greece has lost its virginity and become corrupt, but the South Seas still preserves the ancient virtues. In [his] fiction, symbols from the South Seas easily merge with symbols from ancient Greece. Hence Maugham's South Seas is simultaneously a Polynesian paradise and the 'garden of the Hesperides', and the tropical lagoon in his story 'Red' is transformed into the 'Sea of Homeric Greece.' When Lawson bathes with the part-Samoan Ethel in 'The Pool' his mind is full of half-forgotten Greek he had studied at school. In this setting Maugham's European characters acquire the dignity of Greek gods. For example, Red in the story of the same name is described, as a 'Greek god … like Apollo.' (pp. 170-71)

However, the underlying psychic force in [Maugham's] writings is basically Christian even though the kind of comments … [he makes] are not necessarily Christian. There is an apparent primacy of Christian over Polynesian mythology [here]. Maugham does not employ any Polynesian mythology at all…. Like Gauguin, who transported the Adoration to the South Seas, and recreated a Polynesian fisherman as Adam and a Tahitian 'wahine' as the Maiden,… [Maugham employs] multiplicity of primitive Christian symbols for [his] Polynesian material. [He frequently calls] the islands the Garden of Eden, and the natives are referred to as Adams and Eves. Maugham's European characters are transformed into mythological Adams and Eves when they abandon themselves to the activities of the South Seas World. (pp. 171-72)

[Primitive] women are the opposite of Maugham's European women, who employ their femininity and normal sexual impulses as cruel psychological weapons. The primitive women are true sensualists who love without selfishness, inhibition, or cruelty. Maugham, in his research on Gauguin, had discovered that Tahura's greatest gift to Gauguin was that she loved him without wanting to possess his soul, so that he was free to create great art…. Maugham uses both Christian and pagan symbols to define this love. At this level pagan and primitive Christian concepts of love become identical. European characters in their relationships with primitive women rediscover this primitive Christian love. (p. 173)

In the novels of … Maugham, the juxtaposition of tales of idyllic love in the South Seas against bitter satire of Western Civilization is far from a fault in aesthetic judgement…. [His] use of themes and motifs derived from the South Seas, which have parallels in their own stable past, is a device for ironic comment. It helps to emphasise what a gross parody the West has become of the earlier more harmonious universe. In … Maugham's stories in The Trembling of a Leaf, praise of primitive life is combined with denunciation of the materialism of white traders and the dogmatism of Christian missionaries who try to impose on the primitives a civilization whose values are gravely in doubt. This technique provides an adequate criticism of the Western Civilization which has deviated from its own simple and honest past.

Maugham turns his savage irony against the missionaries in 'Rain'…. Maugham's missionaries, instead of bringing light, carry their own purgatory to the South Seas…. [Maugham sees] the missionary's reference to the primitives as 'benighted children' as an affront to the dignity of primitive life. (pp. 176-77)

The devil is an indispensable principle in the paradise myth. Even paradise has its ills, and the devil has to be created to carry the responsibility for those ills. The devil appears in several guises in South Seas literature. Maugham's missionaries are obviously devils in the same way in which French colonials are devils in Melville's romances. (p. 177)

[Maugham maintains that] he found the Hindu concept of the 'mysterious neuter' a much superior phenomenon to any in Christianity, yet he could never hope to make it his own. It remained forever simply an impressive fantasy.

Primitiveness at once fascinates and repels Maugham's characters. However, anyone who leaps into paradise first loses his ego and then his soul. Finally all 'decencies' of civilization are swept aside, and one is left face to face with an awful reality. Lawson's experience of sublime happiness at a tropical pool leads him to make a permanent home in this unearthly paradise…. [But the] tropical pool becomes a place of inexorable destiny; he literally ends his life in the very pool where he thought he had discovered paradise. (pp. 182-83)

The best illustration of this process of disintegration is Charles Strickland, an insipid stock-broker, who abandons business and family at the age of forty to become a painter in the South Seas. In Tahiti, freed from the imprisonment of convention, Strickland becomes a famous painter. While the South Seas inspires his genius it also degenerates his moral character. His brutal sexuality and limitless cruelty are part of the primitive forces which the South Seas releases, which in turn release his genius. In the end he is discovered, symbolically, in a hut glowing with dazzling paintings, and in the middle of this hut lies his foul and decomposing body giving off an unholy stench. (p. 183)

Maugham's Western man is a product of centuries of change and conditioning. He is capable of seeing the primordial level of his being only when he is confronted with a world without civilized restraints. Men and women who hide their true nature behind civilized masks are forced to abandon them in the South Seas. In Maugham's stories there are European civil servants who are disintegrating under their dinner jackets, and missionaries who are desperately trying to conceal the emotional turmoils in their lives under outward severity and exaggerated piety. The South Seas is rich in such stories and they are always accessible; here the doors and windows are always open and gossip circulates freely on the verandahs of hotels and in the club houses where most of Maugham's stories are set. His stories are dictated by the convention of their setting. They are told in an unemphatic conversational manner. Consequently, Maugham does not explore or create new symbols … [but] is content with cliches. As a result, Maugham's skill seems unequal to his theme in the potentially powerful story of the fiery and tormented painter in The Moon and Sixpence. The novel gives an impression of a story of an anguished genius told by a retired civil servant.

A striking feature of the South Seas literature under consideration is the absence of genuine Polynesian characters…. [Maugham] was never convinced that great novels or drama could be written about Polynesian characters. In a society where all kinds of sexual behaviour are accepted no one suffers the self-inflicted agonies as a result of jealousy. It lacks the conflicts and passions which made Othello possible. There is no conflict or violent passion when a society lives with its vices, prejudices, and virtues without feeling that they are contradictory. The story of Strickland is interesting because he brings his personality from the outside. He has no counterpart in the South Seas. And here is the contradiction that most writers about the South Seas encounter: regardless of how much they may admire the primitive South Seas, they discover, as they turn from mythological to secular viewpoint, that the South Seas material cannot sustain them as writers, and that in order to continue writing they must return to the conflicts and contradictions of the West. (pp. 183-85)