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How can I analyze Moon and Six Pence by Somerset Maugham?

In "Moon and Sixpence," loosely based on the life of Paul Gaugin, Maugham presents a study of the tension between the "civilized" life of 19th century Europe, and the lead character's desire to throw off the shackles of bourgeois life.


Charles Strickland is a middle-aged English stockbroker with a wife and family. By abandoning his domestic life, Strickland commits what many in European society would consider a gross betrayal of one of the foundations of that society. His decision to embark on a somewhat Bohemian life amidst the artistic scene in Paris is equally scandalous, another betrayal of the expected "life plan" of the majority of Europeans of the day.


Strickland further cuts ties with European culture when he travels from Paris to Polynesia, an area that had been colonized by European merchants and settlers only a century before. It is in Polynesia that the painter hopes to find a return to a more natural way of life, one unsullied by the corrupting influence of commercialism, Western religion, European cultural and social mores, and artistic practices that many artists like Gaugin believed had led to stifling all manner of artistic expression.

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