There are many different types of worldly authority in Brideshead Revisited and the characters rebel against these societal, familial, and emotional restrictions in a variety of ways. Although these forces may succeed in gaining a temporary hold over the characters, ultimately, they always lose their grip. Waugh, who was a Catholic, suggests that the only true authority in the world is God but that God does not control people—even though he easily could—and, instead, allows them freedom to sin because he loves them unconditionally.
Brideshead Revisited suggests that it is impossible to escape authoritative and restrictive forces in the world. All the characters face restraints of some kind and must reconcile themselves with these restrictions before the novel’s close. During his time at university, for example, Charles struggles against the fact that his father will not give him more of his allowance after he overspends. This experience is one of the novel’s early examples of how people face practical and financial limitations which they must learn to adapt to as they go through life. Charles and Sebastian also come up against prohibitive forces, such as law enforcement, when they are arrested for drunk driving during their second year at university. And, as an adult during World War II, Charles joins the army, a life that involves constant subordination to overarching authority. Although they feel perfectly free with one another, Charles and Sebastian are not literally free to behave any way they want, and they must often adapt their habits around socially-organized rules and restrictions. These social rules are not only literal rules, such as laws or codes of conduct in certain institutions, but “rules” to do with fashion, etiquette, and propriety, which are followed by most people in their social circles. For example, when Charles becomes a successful painter and makes his name in respectable circles, he does not wish to be seen with Anthony Blanche—who arrives unexpectedly at one of his exhibitions—even though he is, secretly, pleased to see Anthony. Charles knows that Anthony would not be approved of in Charles’s social circle and, therefore, would threaten his reputation. This suggests that, as people acclimate to their social surroundings, they not only learn to follow the rules imposed upon them but also learn to place limitations and impositions on themselves so that they will fit in.
However, this kind of restrictive authority is not always an effective way to control people. The novel demonstrates how it can, instead, push people to rebel further against rules and constraints. This is shown in particular through Sebastian and his attempts to “fly” from his family, who seek to control his behavior. It is implied that Lady Marchmain has always exerted a large degree of parental control over Sebastian. He dislikes going home for this reason, and is reluctant to allow his family to meet Charles, as he says his family would “make Charles their friend instead of his.” It seems that Lady Marchmain tries to find out about her children’s friends and only sanctions the ones whom she deems suitable. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Lady Marchmain’s hold on Sebastian is controlling. Lady Marchmain begins to take an interest in Sebastian’s social life after his drinking escalates, and rather than let him live with Charles, she places him in the care of two of her friends at the college, Mgr. Bell and Mr. Samgrass, who spy on Sebastian and report back to Lady Marchmain. Although Lady Marchmain is motivated by her love for Sebastian, this surveillance encourages him to drink more because, for Sebastian, alcohol is a form of escape. Sebastian’s reaction shows that Lady Marchmain’s strategy has backfired; her attempts to control him only push him further out of her control. Lady Marchmain’s attempts to control Sebastian increase as his behavior gets worse, but eventually Sebastian frees himself from his family’s interference altogether and disappears in Europe. This suggests that, although Lady Marchmain means well, her interference in Sebastian’s life and the restrictions she places on his behavior—which are as much to save public face as they are to stop him from drinking—only intensify his destructive behavior because he must always go to greater lengths to avoid her. This suggests that Lady Marchmain’s controlling love for Sebastian, though genuine, doesn't actually make anything better for him.
Waugh contrasts these restrictive versions of authority with God’s permissive authority. The final section of Brideshead Revisited is entitled “A Twitch upon the Thread.” This refers to the idea that, although God is the supreme authority, in terms of Catholic belief, he will nonetheless allow humans to stray from his rules and commandments, if they choose to. This is reflected in the Catholic rites of confession and the idea that, if sins are confessed and repented, they will be forgiven by God. Put simply, God gives people free will and the freedom to choose how they behave. This suggests that God’s love is unconditional and is freeing rather than controlling. This is contrasted with Lady Marchmain’s hold over Sebastian, which has the feeling of a web, or a tight network of threads, rather than a gentle hold. The negative results of her attempts to control Sebastian suggest that human love cannot have the kind of freeing effect that divine love does. Although Charles has always been an agnostic, his conversion at the novel’s conclusion teaches him that, metaphorically, God is able to bring unbelievers back to him with just a “twitch upon the thread,” which represents the unbreakable bond between humanity and God. This implies that God’s creations are connected to him and that this connection cannot be broken, even if they stray, because it is based on forgiveness and unconditional love. God does not try to control Charles or the other characters, and the result is that they end up living by God’s laws of their own free choosing. By showing how God easily achieves what human laws, norms, and restrictions cannot, Waugh suggests that God is the only true authority, even though he does not use that authority to limit humans.
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Authority, Rebellion, and Love ThemeTracker
Authority, Rebellion, and Love Quotes in Brideshead Revisited
We could watch the madmen, on clement days, sauntering and skipping among the trim gravel walks and pleasantly planted lawns; happy collaborationists who had given up the unequal struggle, all doubts resolved, all duty done, the undisputed heirs-at-law of a century of progress, enjoying the heritage at their ease.
I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I.
Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales and Marathon—these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.
In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day; her autumnal mists, her gray spring time, and the rare glory of her summer days—such as that day—when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamor.
Collins and I spent several economical and instructive weeks together in Ravenna. A bleak wind blew from the Adriatic among those mighty tombs. In a hotel bedroom designed for a warmer season, I wrote long letters to Sebastian and called daily at the post office for his answers.
Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.
I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom. But I felt no need for these sophistries as I sat before my cousin, saw him, freed from his inconclusive Struggle with Pindar, in his dark gray suit, his white tie, his scholar’s gown; heard his grave tones and, all the time, savored the gillyflowers in full bloom under my windows. I had my secret and sure defense, like a talisman worn in the bosom, felt for in the moment of danger, found and firmly grasped.
So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.
Strife was internecine during the next fortnight, but I suffered the more, for my father had greater reserves to draw on and a wider territory for maneuver […] He never declared his war aims, and I do not to this day know whether they were purely punitive—whether he had really at the back of his mind some geopolitical idea of getting me out of the country, as my Aunt Philippa had been driven to Bordighera and cousin Melchior to Darwin, or whether, as seems most likely, he fought for the sheer love of a battle in which indeed he shone.
“We’ll have a heavenly time alone,” said Sebastian, and when next morning, while I was shaving, I saw from my bathroom window Julia, with luggage at her back, drive from the forecourt and disappear at the hill’s crest, without a backward glance, I felt a sense of liberation and peace such as I was to know years later when, after a night of unrest, the sirens sounded the “All Clear.”
Anthony Blanche had taken something away with him when he went; he had locked a door and hung the key on his chain; and all his friends, among whom he had always been a stranger, needed him now.
She found Sebastian subdued, with all his host of friends reduced to one, myself. She accepted me as Sebastian’s friend and sought to make me hers also, and in doing so, unwittingly struck at the roots of our friendship. That is the single reproach I have to set against her abundant kindness to me.
He claimed to love the past, but I always felt that he thought all the splendid company, living or dead, with whom he associated slightly absurd; it was Mr. Samgrass who was real, the rest were an insubstantial pageant. He was the Victorian tourist, solid and patronizing, for whose amusement these foreign things were paraded.
And since Sebastian counted among the intruders his own conscience and all claims of human affection, his days in Arcadia were numbered. For in this, to me, tranquil time Sebastian took fright. I knew him well in that mood of alertness and suspicion, like a deer suddenly lifting his head at the far notes of the hunt; I had seen him grow wary at the thought of his family or his religion, now I found I, too, was suspect.
Mr. Samgrass’s deft editorship had assembled and arranged a curiously homogeneous little body of writing—poetry, letters, scraps of a journal, an unpublished essay or two, which all exhaled the same high-spirited, serious, chivalrous, other-worldly air and the letters from their contemporaries, written after their deaths, all in varying degrees of articulateness, told the same tale of men who were, in all the full flood of academic and athletic success, of popularity and the promise of great rewards ahead, seen somehow as set apart from their fellows, garlanded victims, devoted to the sacrifice.
“Well. I’m fond of him too, in a way, I suppose, only I wish he’d behave like anybody else. I’ve grown up with one family skeleton, you know papa. Not to be talked of before the servants, not to be talked of before us when we were children. If mummy is going to start making a skeleton out of Sebastian, it’s too much. If he wants to be always tight, why doesn’t he go to Kenya or somewhere where it doesn’t matter?”
But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.
This was the creature, neither child nor woman, that drove me through the dusk that summer evening, untroubled by love, taken aback by the power of her own beauty, hesitating on the cool edge of life; one who had suddenly found herself armed, unawares; the heroine of a fairy story turning over in her hands the magic ring; she had only to stroke it with her fingertips and whisper the charmed word, for the earth to open at her feet and belch forth her titanic servant, the fawning monster who would bring her whatever she asked, but bring it, perhaps, in unwelcome shape.
And Lady Marchmain saw this and added it to her new grief for Sebastian and her old grief for her husband and to the deadly sickness in her body, and took all these sorrows with her daily to church; it seemed her heart was transfixed with the swords of her dolors, a living heart to match the plaster and paint; what comfort she took home with her, God knows.
No, I said, not what it was built for. Perhaps that’s one of the pleasures of building, like having a son, wondering how he’ll grow up. I don’t know; I never built anything, and I forfeited the right to watch my son grow up. I’m homeless, childless, middle-aged, love-less. Hooper.
