“Rain” by Somerset Maugham occupies a murky place in 20th century literature which might be called the Postcolonial Novel as descended from the early modernist Joseph Conrad (although Achebe would argue that Conrad is reductive in his stock character natives.) The missionaries and settlers that the story follows are a small outpost of civilization against a vast wilderness that never ceases to encroach upon them (like the rain itself.) In fact, the rain is a metaphor which fires on multiple levels throughout the story: the muddiness which obliterates difference, the shelters built against chaos that are inevitably helmed by Strong Men, the cleansing instinct which is itself a wildness. The fundemental differences untamed in the Hawaiian wilderness become a perfect disorder for The Davidsons to cull and thus derive power from - in other words, the difference constituted by the natives is a heterogeneity or "a place of in-betweenness" (2118) that makes asserting power over them easier because there is no central organization to defend the natives "whose identity is [their] difference" (2119). The Davidsons speak of “the depravity of the natives” with a certain eagerness because their power is derived from the ability to “other-ize” – if there is nothing to tame, then The Davidson's quickly lose power and become irrelevant. This quickly factors into the story as Mr. Davidson seeks to make the flamboyant Miss Thompson into an ascetic believer by (as we learn at the end) defiling her. Mr. Macphail has come to offer medical support and undercut the danger of Mr. Davidson which is ideology: when people can be “made to wear a pair of trousers,” then they can be made to do just about anything. The narrator says of Mr. Davidson that “the most striking thing about him was the feeling he gave you of suppressed fire” which seems to suggest a false chastity; later the narrator says that “his sincerity was obvious in the fire of his gestures and in his deep, ringing voice” which undercuts the disparity between the gestures and the man. Mr. Davidson is a complex character who loses power when his ‘slave’ acknowledges his control, paradoxically breaking it by calling reference to its utter absence. The idea of confronting an Other and coming up against the inexorable wall of the Self is a thoroughly modern construct that peaks out of the best Victorian work and becomes isolated in a slew of 20th century literature. Miss Thompson, in becoming a clean slate, turns the rapacious Mr. Davidson back on himself until the "obliteration of the trace of [the] Other in its precarious Subjectivity" (2115) recoils on Davidson himself (because there is nothing left but his subjective position when Miss Thompson shockingly becomes the perfect, silent pupil.) Maugham's story "Rain" seeks to underscore what Spivak describes as the "explanation and narrative of reality [being] established as the normative one" (2115) by pinpointing the ordering instinct and tracing how devastating it can be not only in the matter of Others but when it is turned upon the fundamentally mysterious Self.
Or, in much simpler and more romantic terms, take it away Richie and Fela:
Spivak. "A Critique of Postcolonial Reason." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Maugham, Somerset. "Rain by W. Somerset Maugham: Rain." www.classicauthors.net. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://maugham.classicauthors.net/Rain/>
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