The Razor's Edge

Isabel speaks passionately about men and work. She regards work as an intrinsic quality of masculinity, essential to a man’s self-respect. A man who “loafs” as Larry proposes to do is not a man. Isabel has a particular kind of work in mind; she is horrified when Larry suggests that he might like to work as a carpenter or mechanic. People would look down on him, and she wouldn’t be able to bear that. Maybe she would feel distress on Larry’s behalf, but she might also feel it reflected on her value. Later, Gray demonstrates the identification of men with work when his company collapses and he feels that he has lost a sense of who he is. If a man is defined by his work, then Gray is almost literally made of money, whereas Larry, as a mechanic, would be hardly more than a machine.

Larry describes Americans as the greatest idealists in the world. Europeans see Americans as obsessed with money, but in fact, Americans don’t care about money at all; it’s just the yardstick they use to measure success. If Isabel and Gray define men by work and idealize the obligation of men to contribute to American ascendancy, then money is the measure of a man’s contribution to his nation. After her marriage, it is Isabel’s responsibility to spend Gray’s money in such a way as to display his success and his corresponding value to society. As Maugham observes at the end of the story, Isabel and Gray are no doubt an asset to their community. This is quite possibly the highest accolade Isabel could desire.

Larry seeks self-actualization by discovering who he is apart from external identifiers. He regards work as an opportunity to purify the mind, as he does whenever he needs to rest from the labor of study. He hopes to bring that aesthetic to America both by living it and by sharing it with other seekers after self-perfection.

The characters differ in their ideas about what makes life meaningful. Larry sets out with the burning need to understand not just what life is for but whether God exists and why there is evil and suffering. What he finds is that he doesn’t need the answers; he needs union with the Absolute. He renounces physical trappings like money, sex, and property. Those physical bonds are a distraction from contemplation of the Infinite, which is what makes life meaningful and significant to him.

Isabel and Gray are bored when Larry talks about enlightenment. Their understanding of the world is concrete and material, but that doesn’t mean they are without idealism. In addition to the American veneration of work for work’s sake, Isabel also speaks passionately about the idea of America, the vision of a young country on an unstoppable trajectory to transform the world. She sees it as a great endeavor that every man should be proud to contribute to.

If work is what Isabel sees as the meaning of life, then her own life seems rather pointless. Her ambition has always been to enjoy herself, to be seen in the right places talking to the right people and wearing the right clothes. She exists to exist, which gives her life no direction at all. If she did feel that her life was meaningful, she wouldn’t continue to long for Larry, who represents the search for inner truth. If work for work’s sake really satisfied her need for meaning, she would love Gray. With nothing of her own to reach for, she is trapped between two ideals, not in love with Gray and afraid to take the risk of following Larry. Unfortunately, she lacks the self-awareness to recognize that fact—or, if she does recognize it, she lacks the integrity to admit it to herself.

Elliott takes Isabel’s materialism to the furthest extreme. He locates all his sense of worth in his inclusion among the social elite, and he is devastated when they abandon him. He is saved by the Church, but ironically, his devotion to Catholicism is influenced by his perception of the Catholic Church as the social elite of religion. Sophie is another example of excessive attachment to the material. With the loss of the people she loved most in the world, she cannot love herself and is driven to self-destruction. Of them all, Maugham himself takes the most balanced view. He seems to feel that Larry would be better off if he were more attached to the world, and the other characters would have been happier if they were less so.