Brideshead Revisited

by

Evelyn Waugh

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Brideshead Revisited: Part 3, Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
Charles and Celia get a divorce, and Celia plans to marry a younger man named Robin. Boy Mulcaster helps Charles draw up the agreement. Boy is rather happy about the whole thing and says that it has worked out very nicely. Celia will take the children, who love Robin. Charles tells Boy that he will marry Julia as soon as the divorce is final, and Boy thinks that this is a waste of time and that Charles should enjoy his freedom.
Celia is popular and social, and it is unsurprising that she has already found someone to marry. Boy has a childish approach to relationships and feels that men are forced into them by women. This demonstrates that he has not experienced real love and is, perhaps, incapable of this depth of emotion.
Themes
Innocence, Experience, and Redemption Theme Icon
Authority, Rebellion, and Love Theme Icon
Rex does not want to divorce Julia and hopes that Charles can talk her out of it. He doesn’t mind that she is unfaithful, but he doesn’t want the public scandal because his political career is not going well. One afternoon, Julia is invited to lunch with Brideshead’s fiancée. Afterward, Charles asks what she is like, and Julia says she is “common” and that her manner is friendly but condescending. Julia thinks her main objective in marrying Brideshead is to find a nice home for her family.
Rex does not care about Julia and only cares about how the marriage makes him look. Beryl patronizes Julia because she knows Julia is a “fallen woman,” and so Beryl thinks she is morally superior to Julia. Beryl and Rex are both modern and both lower-class, compared with Charles and Julia. Their prioritization of status and comfort reflects, in Charles’s opinion, the degeneration of the modern world. However, it also reflects the fact that people from different classes had more opportunities as these old boundaries broke down.
Themes
Suffering, Persecution, and Martyrdom Theme Icon
Authority, Rebellion, and Love Theme Icon
War and Peace Theme Icon
Globalization, Culture, and Modernity Theme Icon
Charles’s divorce goes through swiftly and, publicly, everyone takes Celia’s side. Julia’s divorce is a lengthy process, and Rex moves out of Brideshead. He gives a ferocious speech in parliament about the possibility of war and does not yet know how the public will take it. One afternoon at Brideshead, Julia and Charles look out of the library windows at the rain, and Julia says that they will not see spring. Charles says that he left Brideshead once before and thought he would never return.
Julia’s divorce is more complicated because she is from a wealthy family with lots of assets. Rex tries to win over the public with an aggressive speech because he knows people want an aggressive leader in wartime. The end of spring represents the end of life and hope. This signifies both the reality which closes in around Charles and Julia as they go through their divorces, and the approach of war in Europe, which will bring about a new period of death and destruction.
Themes
Innocence, Experience, and Redemption Theme Icon
War and Peace Theme Icon
Globalization, Culture, and Modernity Theme Icon
Wilcox comes in and tells them that Cordelia is on her way home and will arrive that night. Julia is delighted. She tells Charles that Cordelia went to Spain during the war there but did not return with the other nuns when the war ended. Instead, she stayed in Spain to help people who had lost their homes. Charles thinks that this is a waste of her life.
Cordelia does not lose her faith as she grows up, and instead puts it to practical use as a nun engaged in charity work. Charles cannot see the value in this because he thinks that the meaning of life lies in romantic love. As a nun, Cordelia can never have sex or get married.
Themes
Suffering, Persecution, and Martyrdom Theme Icon
Authority, Rebellion, and Love Theme Icon
War and Peace Theme Icon
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When Cordelia arrives, Charles is surprised to find that she has grown up “ugly.” He thinks her manners are coarse because of her time spent away. Charles, Julia, and Cordelia go to visit Nanny, and Cordelia tells them that she recently saw Sebastian. She says that he is ill and is being cared for by monks in Morocco. He is very religious now, she says.
Charles is narrow-minded and can only see Cordelia’s lack of refinement, not her kindness or compassion. Charles only appreciates aesthetic beauty and has little interest in the practical side of life. Sebastian’s return to God is connected to his suffering because, according to Catholicism, suffering makes one holy and wins God’s grace and mercy.
Themes
Suffering, Persecution, and Martyrdom Theme Icon
Authority, Rebellion, and Love Theme Icon
Globalization, Culture, and Modernity Theme Icon
Julia once said to Charles that it scared her how he had completely forgotten about Sebastian. Charles says that Sebastian was the “forerunner,” but inside he knows that he has not forgotten Sebastian; he is reminded of him constantly by Brideshead and by Julia. The next day, he asks Cordelia to tell him everything she knows about Sebastian
Charles downplays his love of Sebastian to Julia because he does not want to make her jealous or feel that she does not compare. He partly loves Julia because of her likeness to Sebastian, and Charles enjoys his time at Brideshead with Julia because it feels like a return to his first love (the best time in his life) with Sebastian, which was also cultivated at Brideshead.
Themes
Innocence, Experience, and Redemption Theme Icon
Authority, Rebellion, and Love Theme Icon
Cordelia says that she heard Sebastian was dying and so went to Tunis to find him. In Tunis, she found the place where he had stayed, but the owner said that they had not seen him. They were terribly worried about him and had tried to take care of him. He refused to eat and still drank heavily. Cordelia says he is still “loved wherever he goes.” She visited a nearby monastery and was told that he had been there and wanted to become a monk; he wanted to work in a leper colony. The Superior turned him away but told Cordelia that Sebastian was “holy.”
Despite his flaws, Sebastian is likable and charming. He is vulnerable, and this makes people love him more. This supports the idea that he is loved by God because he suffers more than other people. Sebastian, like Charles, craves extreme experience—his desire to work with lepers mirrors Charles’s trek into the jungle. Leprosy is a wasting disease, and because there was no cure at the time, people with leprosy were kept separate from the general population.
Themes
Innocence, Experience, and Redemption Theme Icon
Suffering, Persecution, and Martyrdom Theme Icon
Authority, Rebellion, and Love Theme Icon
Globalization, Culture, and Modernity Theme Icon
One day, the monks found Sebastian unconscious outside the monastery and took him in. Cordelia stayed with him while he was ill, and the day before she left, he told her what had happened. He and Kurt had gone to Athens and, for a while, they had been very happy together and Sebastian had stopped drinking. Kurt’s foot had healed too, and he became a better, nicer man. However, one day Kurt got into a fight and was imprisoned in Greece. He was then extradited to Germany and forced to be a soldier.
Sebastian’s life has taken a tragic turn and he has lost Kurt, who he obviously loved and with whom he had a solid relationship. However, his suffering increases his holiness and brings him closer to the status of a saint or a martyr. During this period, the Nazis in Germany were preparing for war. Since Kurt has been a solider before, he is forcibly enlisted.
Themes
Innocence, Experience, and Redemption Theme Icon
Suffering, Persecution, and Martyrdom Theme Icon
Authority, Rebellion, and Love Theme Icon
War and Peace Theme Icon
Sebastian went to Germany to find Kurt and found that he was a storm-trooper for the Nazis. However, Sebastian persuaded Kurt to run away with him. They escaped for a short time, but Kurt was recaptured and put in a concentration camp. Sebastian heard later that Kurt killed himself in the camp. Sebastian went back to Morocco and decided that he must travel somewhere away from civilization and become a missionary. Cordelia says that he is too weak to ever do this, but the monks will let him live at the monastery.
Kurt has been indoctrinated by nationalistic Nazi ideology, but his experience of real love with Sebastian helps him overcome this. This suggests that love is healing and redemptive, and is more powerful than destruction and conflict. The Nazi party was a totalitarian regime—deserters and people who spoke out against the ideology were imprisoned in labor camps. Later in World War II, these camps were used as death camps for Jewish, homosexual, and disabled people, among other minorities.
Themes
Innocence, Experience, and Redemption Theme Icon
Suffering, Persecution, and Martyrdom Theme Icon
Authority, Rebellion, and Love Theme Icon
War and Peace Theme Icon
Charles asks Cordelia if she has told Julia. Cordelia says that she has but that Julia never loved Sebastian the way that she and Charles do. Cordelia predicts that Sebastian will stay with the monks for the rest of his life. Charles says that he hopes he doesn’t suffer, but Cordelia says that he suffers immensely, and that this is what makes him holy. She knows that Charles will not understand and teases him because she knows he thinks she is plain and has wasted her life. She tells him that she feels the same about him and Julia, and that she thinks they share a “thwarted passion.”
Cordelia understands that Charles loved Sebastian unconditionally. Cordelia believes that God loves those who suffer more than those who do not, and therefore Sebastian’s suffering makes him holy. Cordelia is open-minded and feels that there are many different types of love. She knows that Charles truly loved Sebastian and does not feel that he has recaptured this with Julia.
Themes
Innocence, Experience, and Redemption Theme Icon
Suffering, Persecution, and Martyrdom Theme Icon
Authority, Rebellion, and Love Theme Icon
That night, as Charles watches Julia get ready for bed, he thinks that she looks sad: the way she did when he met her on board the ship. As he lies in bed, he sees a vision of a man in a hut on a snowy hillside. An avalanche builds outside the hut and, eventually, the pressure destroys the hut and sends the man tumbling down the mountain.
Charles realizes that he no longer makes Julia happy. He realizes that their affair was just a brief  escape from the realities and pain of life and cannot sustain them much longer. He feels that their relationship will be destroyed soon, by the pressures of the outside world.
Themes
Innocence, Experience, and Redemption Theme Icon
Authority, Rebellion, and Love Theme Icon