Revolutionary Hedonism in W.S. Maugham’s Cakes and Ale

Abstract

Abstract

In Cakes and Ale Maugham puts up strong defense of sex as a source of pleasure.His heroine defies traditional stepping on the old Victorian morality. She emerges as the model of hedonism and she has been examined without mercy, the manner in which exaggerated literary reputation are artificially stimulated. The novel gives us a great character, a sweet harlot whose worth survives the corrosion of the author’s skepticism. What we love in her is her unadorned beauty and boldness for frequent physical relations. Rosie the heroine is untamed but human goodness, delicious honest kindliness are the inseparable part of her personality. The charming extravagance and falsehood does not exist in the novel. There is adventure and it is romantic indeed. Rosie’s life is romantically adventurous and it is based on hedonism. It is contradictory in the novel that whether realism is pure or not but we have the sufficiently recognizable feature of life. The type of sex incorporated in it belongs to real life which in civilized states suppressed as a guilty secret.