Evelyn Waugh and personal prejudices

[mme_hardy]

There's a lot to critique about Brideshead Revisited when viewed from the social context of the 21st century, most obviously the suggestion that it is primarily Sebastian's descent into overt homosexuality, rather than the severe alcoholism that is present from his introduction, that destroys his life. There's also Waugh's insistence, in an out-of-canon letter, that Julia must be punished for her life of sin. Quoting Waugh's letter in the link:

Charles has now become a successful painter, largely through the help of a socially established wife. Whether this wife appears in the film or not does not seem to me essential, but there must be an impediment to the marriage of Julia and Charles. Otherwise since Julia’s marriage to Rex has never been ecclesiastically valid, there is no reason why she should not marry Charles and provide a banal Hollywood ending. I regard it as essential that after having led a life of sin Julia should not be immediately rewarded with conventional happiness. She has a great debt to pay and we are left with her paying it.
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But those aren't why I'm calling you today. The first thing that threw me, as a 21st-century reader, out of BR was the insistence that what sounds like a beautiful Arts and Crafts chapel is vulgar and ugly. That, Mr. Waugh, is a bridge too far. I wonder when the revival of Arts and Crafts happened, and whether it was already in motion before 1950. Not that that would have mattered to Mr. Waugh, far from it.

Comments

[recessional]

My favourite story is the deliberate dark shading that many imitation-gothicky-places put in all the corners of stained glass etc with many theology-based theories about why the mediaevals had done that . . . .

. . . to discover when we started properly caring for the original Gothic cathedrals and cleaning them, that this was dirt, and actually the mediaevals liked BRIGHT PURE COLOURS in their stained glass.

[kore]

Yeah, I heard many, many horror stories in art history and drawing classes about how old paintings were "preserved" -- i.e. dirt and smoke residue and grime scraped off, and canvases washed with bleach or lye, and then varnished, and then the varnish getting stripped off later, and then overpainting to "fix" the abrasion from stripping...I had one painting teacher who would get all worked up when she talked about it. I really wanted to be in art conservation when I was younger (not least because you could go study in Italy).