This study will examine the morality of the actions of Charles Strickland, the protagonist in W. Somerset Maugham's novel The Moon and Sixpence, in leaving his wife and children to paint in Tahiti. The study will consider the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche in assessing Strickland's morality and the views of Maugham's narrator and the character of Mrs. McAndrew on that same subject. The basic issue is the difference between the conventional morality of Mrs. McAndrew (stay with wife and children, do not follow "selfish" artistic dream) and the unconventional morality of Strickland and, apparently, the narrator (behavior which transcends or purports to transcend the limits of conventional morality). In other words, moral behavior has no one single standard. If it did, and if that standard were the conventional standard, then the problem of the morality of Strickland would be no problem at all--he would clearly be immoral according to such a standard.
However, with Strickland, in the view of the narrator, something beyond conventional morality, something beyond "pure selfishness," is involved. Strickland is undeniably guilty of immoral behavior according to the simple and straightforward conventional standards of Mrs. McAndrew. He abandons his wife and children to pursue personal interests. He blatantly takes advantage of his patron and his wife and apparently feels nothing for the wreckage he leaves behind him.
The question, then, is whether a higher, or at least different, morality applies to Strickland. Does an internal or external creative, spiritual, mystical or even individualistic force transcend conventional morality? Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche believe it does. Kierkegaard refers to a spiritual or religious morality: "The ethical is the universal and . . . the divine . . . All duty is ultimately duty to God . . . The duty becomes duty to God by being referred to God." Strickland or Maugham's narrator might use such a claim...