Brideshead critical quotes Flashcards
Donat O’Donnell on the rise of Hooper
“Captain Ryder’s enchanted garden is trampled by the mechanized Hooper.”
Donat O’Donnell on religion and class
“Brideshead breathes […] a loving patience with the mortal sin of the aristocracy and an unchristian petulance towards the minor foibles of the middle class”
David Rothstein on Charles’ social climbing
“we see him as the outsider trying successively in different ways to get inside of Brideshead.”
Patricia Corr on what leads Charles to religion
“His love of Sebastian and Julia lead to his love of God”
Donat O’Donell on Waugh’s Catholicism
“Hardly separable from a personal romanticism and a class loyalty”
Christopher Hitchens on Waugh’s perceptions of class in the novel
“Waugh had known that he was writing an elegy for a dying class and also a warning against the disillusionments that would accompany “the century of the common man.”
George Wiegal on Rex and men like him
“Rex is the Modern Man”
Douglas Patey on homosexuality in the novel
“homosexuality is merely a stage in a process of maturation”
Jeffery Heath on Charles’ relationship to his father
“he escapes the tyranny of his earthly father by responding to the reins of a heavenly one”
Review in the New Yorker on class and religion
“the cult of high nobility is […] the only real religion in the book”
Damon DeCoste on fathers
“in rejecting his children, Charles is re-enacting his own father’s wounding indifference”
Ann Slater on Charles and Celia’s sex
“sterile sex in a marriage without love”
Peter Christensen on overlooked homosexuality in the novel
“the novel’s neglected message of how little we are to value heterosexual pairings and the fetishism of procreative marriages”
Waugh on what the novel is about
“the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters”
