The Painted Veil beautifully presents the story of a young society woman named Kitty and her redemption from a shallow and self-centered life through her growing ability to love. While there are several significant changes in how her journey toward a better life is portrayed and the particulars of her circumstances, the film nevertheless captures the essential change in Kitty’s character and so remains remarkably true to W Somerset Maughm’s book.
The first half of the film tracing the events taking Kitty from the high society of London to a remote, cholera-stricken village in China contains only minor changes from the book. Her marriage to Walter, move to China, her affair with Charlie Townsend and Walter’s discovery of it and the terrible choice Walter gives Kitty to accompany him to the village or face a scandalous divorce are all very similar. Not surprisingly, the book offers more detail, but the movie admirably portrays the details of the book. (1)
Probably the most significant departure from the book is the film’s portrayal of a tender romance between Kitty and Walter as they gain new respect for each other in the difficult conditions of the epidemic. (2)
The love that Kitty finds in the movie is both the cause of her transformation and its ultimate expression. She gains a second chance to love and be loved by her husband. It changes her, re-orders her existence. By the end of the movie, we see her content, independent, and happy with her son. The extent of her change is illustrated by her firm refusal of Charlie’s advances in the last scene.
The book presents a more tortured road for Kitty. She never loves Walter and reflects that she never could. Nevertheless, she ceases to despise him. More than anything else, she pities him. And Walter, for his part, is never able to forgive Kitty or himself, and he dies in a state of spiritual anguish. Kitty is sent for only at the very end of Walter’s suffering, and against Walter’s wish – quite a difference from Kitty’s tender nursing of Walter in the movie.
While the film doesn’t focus much on Kitty’s understanding of her own act of infidelity, it is the cause of much rumination for her in the book. As her heart begins to open and she gains a spiritual perspective on life, she thinks that it is ugly and base, but inconsequential. She compares it to a faux pas at a party, hardly something to repent of, but also something not to be repeated.
However, her conversion is not complete. Back in Hong Kong, on her way back to England, she yields against her better judgment to Charlie’s advances one last time. (For his part, Charlie is far more despicable in the book. He refuses to respect Kitty’s repeated requests to leave her along and forces himself on her.) This time, Kitty is wracked with shame and remorse at her act. Not, it must be noted, out of some loyalty to her dead husband, but out of a sense that her behaviour is base and animistic. That is, it is not an expression of love, but of lust only. Thus she has completely moved from condoning her own infidelity at the beginning of the novel, through thinking it ugly but inconsequential, to understanding it as a degradation of the noble spirit she has discovered inside of her.
The book reserves her complete transformation for a touching scene with her father at the very end. He was treated by his wife and daughters as a mere source of income, whose opinions and preferences were never taken into account. On Kitty’s return to London, she begs him to giver her a second chance to have a loving relationship with him.
in both book and movie, it is the capacity to love that ultimately changes her character. Maughm suggests that this capacity to enter a relationship with another person and to place that person’s welfare above one’s own also something of a mark of good character. Though the film portrays Kitty’s new capacity to love authentically in relationship with her husband, whereas the book portrays it in relationship to her father, the film nevertheless conveys the same point. Because of this, the changes described above do no great violence to the story or to Kitty’s character.
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1. For instance, the book mentions many times that Walter is utterly devoted to Kitty and goes out of his way to please her. One charming detail of the movie that portrays this dynamic occurs when Walter first brings his bride to China. Kitty, visibly unimpressed with the apartment, questions disappointedly “no piano?” Several scenes later, with no explicit mention, a piano is seen in the apartment.
2. See the essay titled “Place and Travel in The Painted Veil” for more analysis of this relationship, as well as for further analysis of Kitty’s character in the film.
