Disease, Disability, and Narrative Collapse in The Moon and Sixpence

Abstract: This essay reads W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence for its unique rehearsal of the Künstlerroman . Maugham flirts with the cultivation of spirit fitting to the artist novel; but as a novel of disease and degeneration, Maugham undercuts such drives to artistic realization. Using Disability Studies frameworks, this essay studies Maugham’s representations of disease and degeneration of the artist figure and how he aligns corporeal pathology and decline with the novel’s own narratological corrosion. I argue that, though ostensibly about a tortured painter, Charles Strickland—a revolutionary “man of genius” based on Paul Gauguin—Maugham ultimately reorients the focus of artistic education to the narrator of the novel himself. The narrator’s Künstlerroman about Strickland crumbles, mirroring Strickland’s own decline into illness and disability. At the same time, we find the narrator’s various failures are in fact rehearsals as he writes his own artist story into existence.