Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is a novel by English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945. It follows, from the 1920s to the early 1940s, the life and romances of the protagonist Charles Ryder, including his friendship with the Flytes, a family of wealthy English Catholics who live in a palatial mansion called Brideshead Castle. Ryder has relationships with two of the Flytes: Sebastian and Julia. The novel explores themes including nostalgia for the age of English aristocracy, Catholicism, and the nearly overt homosexuality of Sebastian Flyte's coterie at Oxford University. A faithful and well-received television adaptation of the novel was produced in an 11-part miniseries by Granada Television in 1981.

Year:
1981
1,998 Views

[Bridey has just deeply offended Julia by referring to her affair with Charles as "living in sin"]

Charles Ryder:
Darling, what is it? Why do you mind? What doe it matter what the old booby says?

Julia Mottram:
[sobbing] I don't. It doesn't! It's just the shock. Don't laugh at me.

Charles Ryder:
How *dare* he speak to you like that? Cold-blooded old humbug.

Julia Mottram:
No it's not that. He's quite right. They know all about it, Bridey and his widow - they bought it for a penny at the church door. All in one word - one little flat word that covers a lifetime. "Living in sin". Not just "doing wrong", as I did when I went to America, doing wrong, knowing it's wrong, stopping doing it, forgetting it. That's not what they mean, that's not Bridey's pennyworth. [distraught] He means just what it says. *Living* in sin - every hour, every day, year in, year out. It's always the same. It's like an idiot child, carefully nursed, guarded from the world. "Poor Julia," they say, "She can't go out. She's got to take care of her little sin. It's a pity it ever lived, but it's so strong. Children like that always are. Julia's so good to her little mad sin." All those years when I was trying to be a good wife, in the cigar smoke, when I was trying to bear his child, torn in pieces by something already dead. Putting him away, forgetting him. Finding you - the past two years with you, all the future with you or without you. It's a word from so long ago - Nanny Hawkins stitching by the hearth and the nightlight burning before the Sacred Heart. Me and Cordelia with the Catechism in Mummy's room before luncheon on Sundays. Mummy carrying my sin with her to church, bowed under it. Mummy dying with my sin, eating her more cruelly than her own deadly illness. Mummy dying with it. Christ dying wit,h it nailed hand and foot, high among the crowds and soldiers. No comfort except a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief. Hanging forever, over the bed in the night-nursery. There's no way back - the gate's barred. All the saints and angels posted along the wall. Thrown away, scrapped, rotting down. Nameless and dead. Like the baby they wrapped up and took away, before I had chance see him.

[she dries her tears on Charles's handkerchief and walks away]

[Lord Marchmain has just died]

Charles Ryder:
[voiceover] Thus I come to the broken sentences which were the last words spoken between Julia and me - the last memories. When at last we met alone, it was by stealth, like young lovers.

[Charles and Julia hug]

Julia Mottram:
Here on the stairs, a minute to say goodbye.

Charles Ryder:
[wistfully] So long to say so little.

Julia Mottram:
You knew?

Charles Ryder:
Since this morning. Since before this morning. All this year.

Julia Mottram:
I didn't know till today. Oh, my dear, if you could only understand, then I could bear to part - or bear it better. I'd say my heart were breaking, if I believed in broken hearts. I can't marry you, Charles. I can't be with you ever again.

Charles Ryder:
[flatly] I know.

Julia Mottram:
How can you know?

[long pause]

Charles Ryder:
What will you do?

Julia Mottram:
Just go on. Alone. How can I tell what I shall do? You know the whole of me. You know I'm not one for a life of mourning. I've always been bad. Probably I'll be bad again - punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That *is* what it would mean, starting a life with you - without Him. One can only see one step ahead. But I saw today there's one thing unforgivable, like things in the school-room, so bad they're unpunishable, that only Mummy could deal with. The bad thing I was on the point of doing that I'm not quite bad enough to do - to set up a rival God to God. It may be because of Mummy, Nanny, Sebastian, Cordelia, perhaps Bridey and Mrs Muspratt - keeping my name in their prayers. Or it may be a private bargain between me and God. That if I give up this one thing I want so much, how ever bad I am He won't quite despair of me in the end. Now we shall both be alone. And I shall have no way of making you understand.

Charles Ryder:
I don't want to make it easy for you. I hope your heart may break. But I *do* understand.

[Julia gets up and walks away, leaving Charles staring blankly into empty space]


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