"Brideshead Revisited" by Evelyn Waugh

Victorian era is generally considered to be the best period for Great Britain when due to the numerous dominions the country turned into one of the the most influential empires of the world, but there is one more “Belle epoque” for the British - the interbellum period. These are two short decades between the two World Wars when the victory of the Triple Entente during the first one persuaded the people that the Empire was undefeatable and the thoughts of the other Great War didn’t yet cross anyone’s mind. This period of easy-going attitudes and the utmost of British aristocracy, when hedonism was the synonym of good manners and the estates were glittering with luxury, this time is the subject of “Brideshead Revisited”. This novel is a flow of nostalgy for the past which makes it so incredibly beautiful.  

The narrator, Captain Charles Ryder, and his battalion in the last year of war is ordered to the old English estate of Brideshead. The mansion known to him since his youth provokes a series of recollections, makes his consciousness resurrect the people who once lived in it and the description of dark days of war changes into the bright memories of the fascinating pre-war years now gone forever.

Charles’s story begins in Oxford where he meets young and eccentric Sebastian Flyte whose family owns Brideshead. The connection of Charles to Sebastian and later to his sister Julia makes the basis for Waugh’s novel.

Brideshead and religion

Although Sebastian’s family is rather unusual, they embody all the specific traits of British aristocracy. Still the characters are so bright, they can hardly be defined as typical: all of them are so vividly represented that you can easily imagine they were real personalities appealing to the reader from the book pages.

Inside the family there is a visible disagreement on the basis of religion - some members of it are Catholic (which is quite unusual for English society of that period was mostly Protestant(Anglican)), others are determined atheists.  

The issue of religion is one of the key problems of the novel as Evelyn Waugh wanted to express his own complicated attitude towards it. Throughout his life he identified as agnostic (meaning he neither was a complete atheist nor believed that there is any proof of the existence of God). Nevertheless he was eager to discuss religion and was looking for his own way in it for many years until in 1930 he shocked his friends and relatives by accepting Catholicism. All these doubts and discussions influenced the representation of religion in his novel.

“Brideshead Revisited” doesn’t impose an religious dogmas upon the reader, but helps to understand those people for whom those dogmas are important. Moreover it is characteristic for Evelyn Waugh to refuse from the opposition between atheist and people of faith, attempting to show all the varieties and half-tones between the faith and the lack of it. Religion is described as a complicated matter which required not only reason but also heart to understand.

A brief sketch of characters

Sebastian is definitely the most eccentric of characters, notable for his extravagant style in clothes and teddy bear Aloysius always present by his side. Researchers name several people who could have been a prototype of this character but the most probable theory is that Waugh combined the features of some different people in one image.

In the first part of the novel dedicated to the Oxford years of Charles the narrator becomes quite enchanted by Sebastian and yearns to spent as much time with him as possible. This fact alongside with Sebastian’s unconventional behavior give a reason for some researchers to state that Waugh hinted at homosexual relation between the two young men, although there is no clear evidence of it in the text. The narrator himself refers to his attachment to Lord Flyte as a preface to his stronger and more lasting relations with Sebastian’s sister Julia.

The image of Sebastian Flyte is rather tragic. Of all Flyte children he is the one most resembling his father (who is according to general opinion the cause of manz sufferings to the family)  and all the other members of the family make it their aim to protect the boy from mistakes so numerously committed by his parent, first of all from the inclination to alcoholism. Apart from this, Sebastian as the favourite of the family has to correspond to much higher expectations than any other Flyte. Such close attention doesn’t do Sebastian any good. His eccentric behaviour is just one of the forms of protest to the pressure of relatives and by and by the young man seems to lose the control over his actions, what was planned as merely a game turns into lifestyle, he doesn’t know where to stop any more and begins to act beyond any reason and common sense. Thus, trying to save the child, the family just spoils him and the effect in the end might be quite the opposite to what they had expected.

His sister Julia is another complicated character. Notwithstanding her having received a traditional Catholic upbringing, she fails to value her religion and even wants to follow the path of her father and brother and become an atheist, being appalled by the conventions imposed within the church. But that would be all the wrong path for her. Getting older Julia seems to take consolation in Catholicism and keeps appealing to it to the great dissatisfaction of Charles who being an agnostic can’t understand or accept her growing attachment to the church. However her growing yearning to religion clashes brutally with her wish to embrace the worldly pleasure thus leading to another dramatic conflict in the Flyte family.

Charles Ryder really seems to be rather phlegmatic and restricted in the shadow of such bright personalities,you can’t help thinking that his image lacks dramatism and acute emotionality characteristic of Sebastian and Julia. He meets all the misfortunes seemingly calmly and cold, even though he had a whole hurricane of emotion inside his soul. In the beginning of the novel (i.e. in the end of the story) we find Charles indifferent to everything, only his visit to Brideshead evokes some feelings in him. He misses the days of his youth and realizes that his was not as happy as it could have been. But he doesn’t regret anything. He has acted his role in “the fierce little human tragedy” and is quite satisfied with this fact. Such attitude feels fatalyst and even a bit existential (as the thought of a person as a little almost  irrelevant part of the great mechanism of life was very popular in the latter movement).

Et in Arcadia ego

This Latin phrase is the epigraph to the first part and the key to the whole novel. Arcadia is a marvelous country, heaven on Earth and the native land of Tristan from the myth about Tristan and Isolde. Throughout the history this place was associated with happiness, thus the phrase “Et in Arcadia ego” (literally translated as “I [have been] in Arcadia too”) basically means “I have also been happy”. Perhaps everyone has an Arcadia, a place which is so beautiful and comfortable that you want to return there over and over, that only there you feel pure happiness. Charles Ryder’s Arcadia was in Brideshead.

This magnificent mansion with glittering ponds, enormous gardens, fountains and arches and a little chapel, with admirable paintings on the walls, antique refined furniture and many exotic trifles on coffee tables, with numerous servants and maids, with gracious hounds and horses, ladies in elegant dresses and gentlemen in finely tailored suits - all this luxury surrounds the characters of this novel. Having visited Brideshead once Charles forever becomes an essential part of this gorgeous house, this symbol of the golden age of British aristocracy, wherever life might take the narrator, he keeps coming back to this magnetic place.

The descriptions of Brideshead create an absolutely unique atmosphere, the house becomes one of the characters of the novel, living its own life and changing but staying ever so beautiful, a small Arcadia hidden in the woods of England.

Unfortunately no Arcadia is eternal as no Flytes are everlasting. The closer the second Great War, threatening to sweep across the continent with even more fierce and cruel power than the first one, the closer is the decadence of the Flytes. Certain events tear up relations within the family, driving them apart for the war time or even forever, and soon deemer gets the glitter of Brideshead, which moves towards its decline. When Captain Ryder comes to revisit, the house is already rearranged to suit the military needs, the paintings are stolen, the furniture is broken, the flowers withered. Brideshead is a pathetic view but one can still notice the traces of the past elegance which painfully echo in Charles’s memory. He is watching and seeing another Brideshead, Brideshead full of people, noise and life, Brideshead reborn, Brideshead at its utmost.

Yet the house is destroyed, gone is Brideshead and gone is the Belle Epoque between the wars, this small period of aristocratic grandeur. But nothing comes and goes unnoticed. This time will live on in the memories of people. In his last monologue Charles imagines a lantern shining above the gates of the mansion as a symbol of new life and new beginning. Brideshead is still there but it will never be the same as the world after the war, they both are bound to change.