Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Beauty that Saves: Brideshead Revisited as a Counter- Portrait of the Artist

2006; University of St. Thomas; Volume: 9; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/log.2006.0018

1533-791X

Dominic Manganiello,

Medieval Literature and History

The Beauty that Saves:Brideshead Revisited as a Counter-Portrait of the Artist Dominic Manganiello (bio) Upon completing his first Catholic novel in 1945, Evelyn Waugh remarked that he had never before realized "how specially Epiphany is the feast of artists."1 He probably owed this belated insight to the modern writer who gave the Christian holy day wide currency as a literary term. James Joyce had famously defined "epiphany" as a "sudden spiritual manifestation" that functions as an aesthetic equivalent to the mysterious action of grace.2 As a substitute for the experience of the numinous, the epiphany represents, in Walter Benjamin's phrase, a profane illumination of everyday reality without reference to an otherworldly dimension.3 In a climactic scene from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that recasts Dante's epiphanic meeting with his beloved Beatrice, Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce's novel, discovers his artistic vocation when he sees a young girl wading on a beach. This defining moment triggers his conversion (contra Dante) to "mortal beauty." I want to examine the radically different trajectory the artist-figure follows in Brideshead Revisited. Although Waugh's novel has been referred to as a counter-Portrait of the Artist,4 the suggestion, to my knowledge, has never been taken up. I propose to fill this critical gap by focussing on the [End Page 154] progress of Charles Ryder, who, like his Irish predecessor, initially sets out to create beauty for himself, but whose "aesthetic education" at Brideshead estate leads him to the first Author of beauty. Stephen's aesthetic education begins with a childlike appreciation of pretty flowers: "White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of."5 Later, as an adolescent, he learns to associate these floral hues with opposing types of beauty—one conducive to eternal salvation, the other detrimental to it. A preacher's fiery sermon during a religious retreat awakens Stephen's moral sensibility and stirs him to feel compunction for having entertained lustful thoughts of his girlfriend, Emma. Despite this transgression, the retreatant imagines the Virgin Mary showing the young couple clemency: "Their error had offended deeply God's majesty, though it was the error of two children, but it had not offended her whose beauty is not like earthly beauty, dangerous to look upon, but like the morning star, which is its emblem, bright and musical" (AP, 116). Whereas the red rose of earthly beauty can divert the human gaze away from its transcendent focal point, the stellar beauty of Mary reorients the aspiration of the soul toward heaven. Stephen's recourse to her maternal intercession recalls Dante's contemplation of the mother of God as tota pulchra, the "beauty that was joy in the eyes of all the other saints."6 Buoyed up with the hope of receiving pardon for his sins, Stephen accordingly conveys his experience of repentance through the image of the Virgin's flower: "his prayers ascended to heaven from his purified heart like perfume straining upwards from a heart of white rose" (AP, 145). His radical change of heart—symbolized by the purity of the white rose—generates a new epiphany of beauty: "How beautiful must be a soul in the state of grace when God looked upon it with love!" (AP, 140). This rose-colored vision soon fades, however, into the light of common day. Unlike Dante, Stephen decides to stop invoking the Marian name of the "fair flower" that had so absorbed his mind with thoughts of heavenly paradise (Par. XXIII, 88–93). Instead, he comes [End Page 155] to believe that the innocent soul, once ensnared by the ways of sin, lapses irreversibly since "not to fall was too hard, too hard" (AP, 162).The seemingly irresistible power of sin mars the beauty of the soul that closes itself to the promptings of grace. An "envoy from the fair courts of life" rouses Stephen from his dark night of fatalism by throwing open before him "the gates of all the ways of error and glory" (AP, 172). In sharp contrast to Dante, who described himself as no "timid friend [of] truth" (Par. XVII, 118), Joyce's hero...