Brideshead Revisited is one of those novels which can be read on various levels — at its deepest, it is ultimately concerned with conversion.
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead and Conversion
Brideshead Revisited is one of those novels which can be read on various levels. At one level it is a story of a family, told through the eyes of a family friend, Charles Ryder, (a pseudonym for Waugh himself) with a touch of romance. At another it is a story of a Catholic family in decline in the years between the First and Second World War and of how they are drifting away from the ancient Faith. Then there is a third reading, less often perhaps made, that the novel is ultimately concerned with conversion.
Lord Marchmain, the owner of Brideshead, has gone away from the old Faith and through almost the whole of the novel seems to be a non-believer. He leads a restless, peripatetic existence far away from Brideshead, set in Worcestershire, but returns to his ancestral home to die. Lying in a bed set up in the Chinese drawing room, as he cannot climb the stairs to his bed, his life ebbs away and the family debate whether to send for a priest. When the local priest, Father Mackay, comes Lord Marchmain roughly dismisses him saying: "I am not in extremis and I have not been a practising member of your church for twenty-five years". Ryder, apparently a militant atheist, and who is passionately in love with one of Marchmain's daughters, Julia, rejoices in this by telling Julia that "The witch doctor has gone".
Lord Marchmain lives on, slowly getting worse, and Julia suddenly says: "I'm going for Father Mackay". He comes and at the moment when the priest is giving Marchmain absolution, whilst Julia prays silently at the foot of his bed, Ryder "suddenly felt the longing for a sign, if only out of courtesy, if only for the sake of the woman I loved, who knelt in front of me, praying for a sign". His prayer is answered for the hand "moved slowly down his breast, then to his shoulder, and Lord Marchmain made the sign of the cross".
Then as Waugh puts it: "I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood about the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom".
Ryder never does marry Julia but in the final scene, when the old house is now used by the military in the Second World War and Ryder returns, now as Captain Ryder, he visits the chapel, and says a prayer, "an ancient newly-learned form of words". The miracle which he prayed for has occurred, but it is not Lord Marchmain's conversion, but his own.
Anne and John Duddington