‘Going native’ in Maugham’s ‘The Yellow Streak’ – Journey towards interpretation

In Maugham’s The Yellow Streak, Izzart’s character can be read as a multiplicity of fractured identities regarding race, sexuality, colonial role, and hierarchical position in the new age of disillusionment after the clear-cut exotic perception of Asia was becoming murkier in the mind of the contemporary man. At the start of Maugham’s story, Izzart’s character is presented as the archetypal prejudiced Western man: strong physicality, amiably at ease with his peers, and proficient in his work with a clear contempt for, and hierarchical leverage against, the ‘native.’ We start to get a sense of interiority of the character when we learn that he is eager to be “liked and admired” and appears to be calculating his social moves keenly. White characters are given complexity whilst the natives of Malay are not afforded that privilege. Instead, they are reduced to an animalistic, unfeeling and subservient backdrop against the strife of the Western man, whilst the landscape is described as “violently luxuriant,” representing the emerging sense of volatility and hostility in this previously presumed paradise.

We then discover that Izzart is himself racially ambiguous; he has a “half-caste” mother (whom he is embarrassed of), and the story transforms into a meditation on his sense of paranoia of being found out to be non-white. This revelation cuts the narrative in two and changes the discourse from one of a man grappling with his colonial identity, to one of that trying to conceal his mixed heritage. Izzart’s paranoia at becoming found out as being ‘native’ (or possibly, of self-fulfilling his fear of himself as an innately different ‘other’) becomes the main focus. The story is one of a self-fashioned masculine archetype, unravelling. What is unclear is whether this study is a deft and sympathetic portrayal of the corrosiveness of internalised racism or whether Maugham is representing Izzart’s “drop of native blood” as his hubris, his essential flaw. If we take it as the latter, this feels very similar to the way that Othello’s tragic downfall can be read as a causal outcome of an outsider’s attempt to integrate into a society that is inclined to resort to racially ‘othering’ them.

Philip Holden’s essay on Maugham’s short story connects Izzart’s paranoia at concealing his racial identity with a homosexual subtext, illustrating Maugham’s struggle with his sexuality, the compartmentalisation, concealment of truth and the consequent fracturing of his identity. This further complicates the question of Maugham’s angle: he could at once be acting empathetic in his portrayal or distancing himself from a character of ‘moral’ ambiguity. Holden picks out the link of perceived effeminacy shared between derogatory stereotyping of both homosexual men and Asian men, and the prevailing idea that “a crisis in, or absence of, masculinity” is something to be feared.

Ultimately, we can interpret the subtexts of Maugham’s story in a variety of ways, and the inferred meaning changes depending on the prevailing discourses of the time in which one reads it. As a piece of art, its theoretical application can be ambiguous. It is not a didactic text, but purely an expression of a time and belief system. Although I am tempted to draw out subtle elements of empathy from Maugham to Izzart, I believe it is unfortunately a story showing outdated ideas of ‘progressiveness’ and assuming a causal effect between racial ‘flaw’ and undesirable outcome. Illustrating the anxiety of ‘going native,’ Maugham presents a character whose only real, tangible trait is his unwavering paranoia and fear which drives his actions, in many ways allowing this character of native heritage only a slight hint of complexity more than his fully native peers.

References

Maugham, W. Somerset, “The Yellow Streak”, The Casuarina Tree : Heinemann, 1926. New York. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Othello : 1622. Oxford. Holden, Philip, “W. Somerset Maugham’s Yellow Streak”, Studies in Short Fiction 29.4 (1992): 575-581