Brideshead Revisited spans the 1920s to the early 1940s and reflects a period of intense cultural change in Europe. The impact of two World Wars, increased social mobility, and the influence of new global powers such as the United States, led to a feeling of instability in Europe. Although Brideshead Revisited is told from the perspective of Charles Ryder, a deeply conservative man who believes that British society is in decline, Waugh’s novel makes it clear that it is impossible to ignore change and that, ultimately, the instability of modernity may also provide new opportunities.
Charles feels that modernity and globalization are threats to traditional and, in his view, superior ways of life. Charles is conservative and admires the English aristocracy. Charles is middle-class and, when he arrives at Oxford, finds himself thrown together with other middle-class students. Charles, however, looks down on them and, after he meets Sebastian, begins to emulate the lifestyle of the upper-class students; he drinks champagne in the afternoons and tries to cultivate eccentricities associated with those who do not need to work. This demonstrates that Charles admires the luxury and excess of the upper classes, even though he himself is middle-class. The privileged world of Sebastian and the Marchmains is, in Charles’s view, threatened by the presence of Rex Mottram, a Canadian entrepreneur who becomes engaged to Sebastian’s sister Julia. Rex is associated with modernity and globalization; he is a businessman and grew up abroad. Rex represents new money (earned rather than inherited), as well as vulgarity and materialism. This is demonstrated particularly vividly when Rex buys Julia a live tortoise with a jewel-encrusted shell, a present which Charles thinks is grotesque and cruel. Rex seems to think he can buy and dominate anything, provided he has enough wealth. Meanwhile, Charles’s reaction shows his distrust of modernity and of the new wealth produced by capitalism. Rex also differs from the Marchmains in terms of his interests, which are practical and specific—he is interested in how to make and use money—rather than broad and artistic. Charles views education as something which should be undertaken for its own sake, rather than something to build wealth on. He feels that Rex’s greed reveals an incompleteness in his soul, and Julia also suggests this when she says that Rex is not “a whole person at all.” Through Rex’s character, Waugh suggests that the modern world is primarily materialistic, rather than spiritual or moral, and Charles is anxious about a future in which men like Rex have large amounts of influence.
Charles is also aesthetically conservative, and dislikes modern art. Charles becomes a successful painter and his work is popular among the upper classes. Charles is aware of modern artistic movements—such as Futurism—which is discussed in Paris while he is a student, and which seeks to deconstruct conventional artistic forms. These modern artistic movements are also associated with extreme political positions, such as fascism and communism, which seek to deconstruct old social orders. Charles’s work, however, is literally the opposite of modern art: he paints the constructions (old country homes which belong to the aristocracy) that modernity wishes to deconstruct (these houses are being demolished). Charles’s perspective on art again suggests that modernity is destructive. However, although Charles views modernity as the destruction of valuable old social systems, it also results in the removal of boundaries. This is reflected in the character of Anthony Blanche. Anthony is like Rex in that he has travelled the world. However, unlike Rex, Anthony shares values with Charles; he is interested in aesthetics and culture. Anthony is associated with the breakdown of boundaries throughout the novel and likes to shock those around him by breaking social taboos. He is associated with homosexuality and gender fluidity; at one point he reads a passage from T. S. Eliot’s modernist poem, The Waste Land, which is written from the perspective of the Greek prophet, Tiresias, who was both male and female. Anthony symbolizes the breakdown of traditional concepts, such as gender and propriety, but at the same time, he also shows how this breakdown can lead to greater personal liberation and new aesthetic perspectives. Although Charles is uncomfortable with Anthony, he is curious about him and respects Anthony’s aesthetic opinion when Anthony tells him that his paintings are dull and pedestrian. This demonstrates that, while Charles dislikes modern art, he realizes that his own work, and his perspective more generally, is gradually becoming irrelevant.
Charles comes to realize that change is inevitable and cannot be prevented. The availability of new wealth, due to the birth of modern capitalism in the early-20th century, improved living standards and meant that ordinary people expected more for their labor. Charles opposes this type of social change, as is shown when he works against protestors in the General Strike (a large-scale protest over British mine closures in 1926) because it symbolizes the dissolution of the class system. However, although Charles wishes to preserve the old world, it is already on the verge of extinction. This is demonstrated when Rex tells Charles that the Marchmains are essentially bankrupt because they have not invested their money wisely. This suggests that new wealth must replace old, just as social values change and new ideas replace outdated ones. Charles’s fetishization of the aristocracy is, in many ways, outdated. At the end of the novel, Charles accepts that he cannot judge the present or predict the future, and that the changes which have been wrought on society may be for the best. He comes to this conclusion after he revisits the chapel at Brideshead, which is now used by the lower-class soldiers on the army base. This setting suggests that, although the Marchmain family is a relic of an older time, they have contributed things of value to the world—the chapel, the beautiful country house, the preservation of artistic culture—which can now be enjoyed by ordinary people and may, in the future, inspire them to create something new. Despite Charles’s hesitations, the novel ultimately suggests that the inevitable changes of modernity do have their benefits.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Globalization, Culture, and Modernity ThemeTracker
Globalization, Culture, and Modernity 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.
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.”
Here under that high and insolent dome, under those coffered ceilings; here, as I passed through those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones, was indeed a life-giving spring.
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.
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.
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?”
Foreigners returning on post from their own waste lands wrote home that here they seemed to catch a glimpse of the world they had believed lost forever among the mud and wire, and through those halcyon weeks Julia darted and shone, part of the sunshine between the trees, part of the candle-light in the mirror’s spectrum, so that elderly men and women, sitting aside with their memories, saw her as herself the blue-bird.
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.
He had stepped straight from the underworld into the world of Brenda Champion who was herself the innermost of a number of concentric ivory spheres. Perhaps Julia recognized in Brenda Champion an intimation of what she and her friends might be in twelve years’ time; there was an antagonism between the girl and the woman that was hard to explain otherwise. Certainly the fact of his being Brenda Champion’s property sharpened Julia’s appetite for Rex.
For nearly ten dead years after that evening with Cordelia I was borne along a road outwardly full of change and incident, but never during that time, except sometimes in my painting—and that at longer and longer intervals—did I come alive as I had been during the time of my friendship with Sebastian. I took it to be youth, not life, that I was losing.
The financial slump of the period, which left many painters without employment, served to enhance my success, which was, indeed, itself a symptom of the decline. When the water-holes were dry people sought to drink at the mirage. After my first exhibition I was called to all parts of the country to make portraits of houses that were soon to be deserted or debased; indeed, my arrival seemed often to be only a few paces ahead of the auctioneer’s, a presage of doom.
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.
