Many of the characters in Brideshead Revisited are nostalgic for a time in their lives when they felt they were truly happy. The novel is narrated by Charles Ryder, a Captain in the British Army during World War II, who believes the happiest period in his life was his time spent at Brideshead, a large country house which has been turned into an army barracks during the war and which Charles rediscovers by accident when his company is diverted there. Charles remembers his time at Brideshead nostalgically because he was in love with Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of the Marchmain family who owns Brideshead, and because he was young at that time and innocent compared with his older, more cynical self. Charles, and many other characters in the novel, crave a return to innocence and a cleansing of the sins they feel they have gained through their life experiences. Waugh, who was a devout Catholic, uses Brideshead Revisited to suggest that, as badly as people may want to regain their innocence, it’s not actually possible to recover it during earthly life. Rather, the novel indicates that recovering innocence is only possible through a return to God and a belief in redemption after death.
The characters in Brideshead Revisited frequently idealize the past. Sebastian is “in love with his childhood,” the only time in his life when he remembers feeling happy, and tries to present himself to the world as a boy; he carries around a large teddy bear and maintains an air of innocent irresponsibility well into his late teens. Sebastian romanticizes his childhood just as Charles idealizes the time in his life when he was in love with Sebastian. These characters’ devotion to implausibly perfect memories suggests that our memories of the past are unreliable and may make the past appear brighter than it really was. Charles thinks of his relationship with Sebastian as a period of innocence and childish pleasure. He feels that he was “close to heaven” and refers to the period as “arcadia,” a Greek term which suggests paradise on Earth. Although they are already young men when they meet, Charles claims that, because the experience of love is so new to them, there is a “nursery freshness” to their relationship, which suggests an idealized sense of childhood, play, and carefree fun. However, although Charles feels like he is in heaven with Sebastian, their paradise is an earthly one and is, therefore, doomed to be impermanent. This is represented by a skull which Charles keeps in his room and which has written on it the slogan “Et in Arcadia Ego,” which translates to “In Arcadia I am.” The skull represents death and suggests that, when paradise is found on Earth instead of in heaven with God, it cannot last, because death and decay are always present in even the most idyllic places. This symbol also foreshadows the end of Charles and Sebastian’s relationship, suggesting that even the most seemingly perfect experiences on Earth must eventually come to an end.
Characters try to recapture and recreate their pasts, but these attempts are unsuccessful because the characters have become too experienced. Sebastian’s attempts to prolong his childhood end in disaster and he becomes an alcoholic; he drinks to avoid responsibility and to escape his adult life. As his drinking escalates, Sebastian is plunged into what Waugh calls “midwinter” and loses his childish qualities; his drinking drives him away from Charles, and ultimately turns him into a tragic figure. The metaphorical description of Sebastian’s decline as “midwinter” links his life to the passage of the seasons, suggesting that the bright, fresh phases of human life (like Sebastian’s relationship with Charles) must always fade, just as spring and summer gradually fade to winter. Charles tries to recreate his love for Sebastian later in life, with Sebastian’s sister Julia, whom he meets again by chance as an adult. However, although Julia and Charles do fall in love, their relationship is marred by the trappings of adult life, which they ultimately cannot escape. They are both married by the time they meet, and although both separate from their spouses, these concerns place obstacles in their way which cool their passion. These challenges suggest that adult experience cannot simply be forgotten or ignored. Charles and Julia have both been changed by their experience and no longer find it easy to lose themselves in love, the way that Charles and Sebastian once did. Julia is described as “much sadder,” and Charles has become so detached from his own feelings that he thinks about their relationship as though it were a play or a novel. These changes suggest that the past, and innocence and youth especially, cannot be recreated once a person is grown up.
The only one can to return to innocence, Waugh suggests, is through reunion with God. Waugh uses the plot of Brideshead Revisited as an allegory for Catholic conversion—something which Waugh himself experienced—and the Catholic belief that, if a person repents for their sins, God will redeem them. This is represented through rites such as baptism, which is symbolized in the novel by the fountain outside Brideshead. Although Charles has become disillusioned with his life, he is redeemed at the novel’s end when he prays in the chapel at Brideshead and, it is implied, experiences a religious conversion. Since the end of his relationship with Sebastian, Charles has felt that he has been cast out of paradise, because he believed that paradise was an earthly state—his youth—which he could never recover. This represents Catholic belief in the fallen state of humanity, which was separated from God when humans disobeyed him in the biblical story of the Garden of Eden and fell from grace. Charles’s religious conversion at the novel’s end suggests that it is possible to return to paradise, but that paradise is not a physical place or a period of earthly happiness. Instead, Waugh suggests, true paradise is union with God and genuine belief in religious faith. This is Charles’s revelation at the novel’s end, and signifies the return of hope and joy into his life.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Innocence, Experience, and Redemption ThemeTracker
Innocence, Experience, and Redemption Quotes in Brideshead Revisited
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.
He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long forgotten sounds: for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror’s name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.
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.
“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.”
“This is no way to start a new year,” said Sebastian; but this somber October evening seemed to breathe its chill, moist air over the succeeding weeks. All that term and all that year Sebastian and I lived more and more in the shadows and, like a fetish, hidden first from the missionary and at length forgotten, the toy bear, Aloysius, sat unregarded on the chest-of-drawers in Sebastian’s bedroom.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
