From Satire to Salvation: Exploring Waugh’s Masterwork of Catholic Transformation
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Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) began his career writing satirical novels in the 1920s and 30s, including Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934). His early work was marked by a biting, cynical wit that skewered British upper classes and their hedonistic lifestyles. His conversion to Catholicism in 1930 significantly influenced his later works, particularly Brideshead Revisited which calls out what might be called “aristocratic Catholicism” – a fusion of social power and religious authority that often obscures true faith. In this book, and through the characters, Waugh expands on his satirical history with a critique, not of Catholicism itself, but its corruption by worldly power and social convention.
This last book evidences how Waugh’s writing style evolved from pure satire to what critics have called “theological satire” combining his sharp observational humor with serious religious and moral themes.
Structurally, Brideshead uses a “frame narrative,” beginning and ending during WWII with Captain Charles Ryder stationed at Brideshead Castle. The main narrative is told in flashback, divided into three major sections:
“Et in Arcadia Ego” – Charles’s Oxford years and friendship with Sebastian
“Brideshead Deserted” – Charles’s relationship with Julia
“A Twitch Upon the Thread” – The final section dealing with Lord Marchmain’s death and conversion
Thematically, the novel follows Charles Ryder’s entanglement with the Catholic aristocratic Flyte family, particularly through his relationships with Sebastian and later his older sister, Julia.
The central themes include:
- Catholic faith and divine grace
- The decline of the British aristocracy
- Memory and nostalgia
- The conflict between secular and religious love, and the nature of conversion
Critical Reception:
Initial reception was mixed. While many praised its lush prose style, others criticized what they saw as excessive nostalgia for the aristocratic way of life. Edmund Wilson, writing in The New Yorker, famously criticized the novel’s religious themes as “more appropriate to a sermon than to a work of art.”
In his defense, Waugh had always written about the “aristocratic way of life” and its excesses and to miss that he was doing the same here is to be obtuse about the obvious. The lavish descriptions of meals and wines in Brideshead emerge from a context where Britain was under strict rationing. Basic items like eggs, meat, and sugar were severely limited. The magnificent dinners at Brideshead and Oxford – the plovers’ eggs, the vintage wines, the elaborate multicourse meals – were written when Waugh, like most Britons, was surviving on meager portions of basic foods.
Similarly, the loving descriptions of architecture, particularly of Brideshead Castle itself, come as German bombs were literally destroying Britain’s great houses and churches. Waugh was witnessing the physical dismantling of the world he knew. The novel’s architectural detail becomes almost documentary in nature – preserving in words what was being lost in stone.
By the 1960s, Brideshead reputation grew substantially. Graham Greene considered it Waugh’s finest achievement, though Waugh himself later criticized aspects of its style as too ornate, calling it a product of the austere conditions (as mentioned above).
Today, Brideshead Revisited is considered one of the great English novels of the 20th century. Its influence can be seen in later works dealing with themes of class, Catholicism, and nostalgia. The 1981 Granada Television adaptation starring Jeremy Irons helped cement its place in popular culture.
Our Humanity. Our Creations:
As anyone who studies The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker knows, we cannot help infuse our work with ourselves. Even fiction. In fact, it’s suggested that our ego state at the time we write literally inform every character created (making the case to deepen self knowledge STAT as writers in order not to be held hostage in our stories by the darker shadows of our unknown nature). Waugh’s own awareness of his slipping into his hungers and sorrows at the time of writing Brideshead, and calling it out later, is a cautionary tale reminding writers that we are not machines, but humans with hearts that connect to things like access to enough food as well as the foundations stones of our culture. The very “flaws” critics pointed out – the overwrought descriptions, the nostalgia, the lingering over lost pleasures – reveal the human being behind the work. Waugh wasn’t writing from some detached artistic perspective but from the very human place of loss and longing.
This serves as a powerful lesson to us about authentic writing. Great literature often emerges not from trying to be clever or original, but from our deepest human responses to our circumstances. Waugh’s excesses in Brideshead aren’t failures of artistic control but rather evidence of art’s connection to lived experience. The novel’s famous line “My theme is memory” takes on additional resonance in this context. It’s not just Charles Ryder remembering his youth – it’s Waugh himself preserving a vanishing world through the act of writing. The novel’s “flaws” are inseparable from its power.
🧐 Your Own Writing Journey
- When have you written from a place of personal experience or loss?
- What is the relationship between autobiographical elements and fiction?
- Have your own artistic “flaws” enhanced a work’s meaning and impact?
Is Brideshead a Tragedy?
On the surface, it might seem so. A man close to this intensely dysfunctional and grossly wealthy family is left bereft and alone, spit out by Julia who he loved. But this is where Waugh makes a brilliant turn and shows us, instead either a Voyage and Return plot, or potentially Rebirth. Go read through your plots as you take in this lesson and let’s discuss this in class. But to lay out the case for the upturn, here is my argument against what seems tragic. Remember, plots that go the distance are transcendent and that means “going beyond the egoic.” At the level of the romantics, yes, getting Julia’s love and securing it would be the obvious “happy ending.” But it falls grossly short of transcendent.
The crucial moment is when Ryder is jilted by Julia (unforgiven by her) for saying one thing at the deathbed of the father, that he later turns around in the form of a full conversion. Julia, seemingly clueless of the power of that conversion and all it entails, becomes what she once despised, embodying the same rigid, unforgiving Catholic stance that drove Sebastian to alcoholism and exile.
That deathbed scene is lull then before the crossing over moment. Charles, who has been the skeptic throughout, finds himself saying “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” at Lord Marchmain’s death. This moment of grace – which should be triumphant in a Catholic novel – leads not to union but to separation. Julia’s response is paradoxical: his movement toward faith becomes her reason for rejecting him, suggesting she’s more aligned with her mother’s legalistic Catholicism than with genuine mercy and grace.
This creates a complex theological and narrative tension. While the novel’s frame suggests Charles ultimately finds peace with Catholicism (praying in the chapel in the wartime opening/closing), the central love story ends in what appears to be unnecessary tragedy. Julia’s rejection of Charles mirrors her mother’s rejection of her father – a pattern of spiritual pride masquerading as religious principle.
The plot structure thus becomes deeply ironic: Charles’s conversion, which should represent spiritual fulfillment, costs him human love but what does it matter now that he awakens to a greater love. Thus, in the end, he transcends the rotten human love he cultivated with Julia (sexual outside the sacrament of marriage done to spite tradition by Julia, and him cheating on his wife) making Ryder a mirror of St. Augustine. Initially, Ryder’s wrapped, held, ruined by appetite and potentially lost due the cold, controlling version of Catholicism show him via Lady Marchmain but then…voila…freed. Julia in fact “saves” him by her rejection and when we start the story he is referring to a man who has “fallen out of love” with a woman he once deeply loved (though at the point of writing this it is falling out of love with the military).
The structure of Charles’s spiritual journey could be mapped as:
- Initial innocent friendship with Sebastian (a kind of prelapsarian state)
- Fall into sensual pleasure and aesthetic worship
- Seemingly sophisticated but spiritually bankrupt affair with Julia
- The shock of grace at Lord Marchmain’s deathbed
- Final redemption through loss and suffering
Julia’s rejection, seen this way, becomes an instrument of divine grace rather than a personal tragedy. She unknowingly serves God’s purpose by forcing Charles onto the “narrow path”. It’s reminiscent of how God often works through seemingly negative events in conversion narratives – what appears as loss becomes the path to salvation.
You, Your Busy Lives & Storytelling:
How can we, now, in this modern era, seemingly so far from WWII era Evelyn Waugh, see such deeper patterns when caught up in our own “existential crisis of busy-ness”? Waugh was writing about a world being destroyed by war and modernization, while today’s students navigating their own era of profound change and uncertainty.
The answer is that some literary insights can only come with life experience and spiritual maturity. While you might not be able to fully grasp the redemptive reading of Charles’s journey, you might be able to connect with the novel’s themes of loss, change, and the search for meaning in a world that seems to be falling apart.
Let’s start with something you might all relate to: Have you ever had your phone die completely – maybe for a day or two? That moment when you realize you can’t instantly connect, can’t check social media, can’t get that quick dopamine hit of likes and messages? There’s panic at first, right? But sometimes, in that forced disconnection, you might notice things you usually miss. The way light falls through trees. The sound of birds. The face of someone sitting across from you.
Now imagine that multiplied by a thousand. Charles Ryder lives through the destruction of an entire way of life. The grand houses, the elaborate dinners, the certainty of his place in the world – it’s all crumbling. Just like you might feel when your familiar world shifts – maybe when a relationship ends, when you move away from home, when things you took for granted suddenly vanish.
But here’s where it gets interesting: What if loss isn’t always just loss? What if, like when your phone dies, the disappearance of one thing allows you to see something else? Charles loses Julia – and it feels devastating. But in that loss, he finds something he wasn’t even looking for. It’s like those moments when what seems like the worst thing turns out to be a doorway to something unexpected.
🧐Think about your own lives. When have apparent disasters turned into different kinds of opportunities? When has losing one thing opened up space for something else?
✍️ Your turn:
Do a free-write on the above questions, and bring to class to share. Or go up earlier in the teaching and take on the list from earlier
- When have you written from a place of personal experience or loss?
- What is the relationship between autobiographical elements and fiction?
- Have your own artistic “flaws” enhanced a work’s meaning and impact?
- How does your own relationship with tradition (religious, cultural, or family) influence how you read Charles’s journey?
Next teaching we’ll look closer at two terms: Metaphor and Simile and apply both to Waugh’s writing style. See you in class!
