It is time to speak of Theresa

TThe Season of Brideshead
Brideshead deserted, chapter 2
Because the story about Julia is pretty straightforward without her mother just as the story of Sebastian would be straightforward without his mother.

Let's flash back to the first things that Charles says about Lady Marchmain.

She accepted me as Sebastian's friend and sought to make me hers also, and in doing so, unwittingly struck at the roots of our friendship. That is the single reproach I have to set against her abundant kindness to me.

Looking back from the end of this chapter that doesn't quite seem adequate anymore does it? Charles, unfailingly chivalrous as he always is, says what a gentleman ought to say and no more. Perhaps we should say more.

In this chapter, Rex makes a number of astoundingly crass remarks, the very crassest of which is the following remark in response to being told that a mixed marriage is a low key affair:

'How d'you mean "mixed"? I'm not a nigger or anything.'

And we are shocked, not least because he uses what is for us the only truly unspeakable word anymore. But poor Rex, who has only made the point rhetorically, does not realize that Mady Marchmain has raised it in a literal way:

'We know nothing about him. He may have black blood—in fact he is suspiciously dark. Darling the whole thing's impossible. I can't see how you can have been so foolish.'

And note how little heed she pays to her daughter's thoughts. Theresa Marchmain treats her twenty-year old daughter like a child. Charles and Cordelia try so hard to love Lady Marchmain, as they should, but she is not easy to love.

I had a girlfriend once who treated me very badly. It took me years to forgive her because it took me years to actually blame her for for what she did to me. I kept thinking of ways to excuse or explain away what she had done. It was only when I finally said out loud that it really was her fault that I could begin to forgive her. Lady Marchmain has that effect on us. We need to say out loud what she has done.

We might pause and remember how she tries to deflect responsibility for the suggestion that Sebastian stay with Msgr. Bell away from herself and then compare that with the ruthlessly manipulative way she behaves in this chapter. And, given her remark above, we might wonder whether Bridey is solely responsible for the awful affront of hiring a private detective.

Julia's sin, which I will get to in a moment, is essential to understanding the story but we might wonder if it isn't somewhat forced on her by Lady Marchmain's constantly manipulative behaviour. She tells Julia that she is concerned with her happiness but she doesn't seem to think that Julia herself should have any input into this. In the extreme, we might wonder if Lady Marchmain would be as happy achieving her daughter's happiness through electroshock therapy.

Compare that approach to Lord Marchmain's response:

Lord Marchmain did not concern himself with the finer points of Rex's character; those, he believed, were his daughter's business. Rex seemed a rough, healthy, prosperous fellow whose name was already familiar to him from reading political reports; he gambled in an open-handed but sensible manner; he seemed to keep reasonably good company; he had a future; Lady Marchmain disliked him. 

That is far from sufficient but, on the whole, it's about as much as an absent father might do. It is definitely better than what Lady Marchmain manages. And, in it, we can see powerful hints of why Lord Marchmain left his manipulative wife to begin with. Not enough, in my view, to justify what he does, but there are always some good reasons to sin aren't there?

Julia's sin
In modal logic we might say the reasons to sin are often compelling in that we have necessary but never quite sufficient cause to sin.

Right from the beginning, Julia's pursuit of Rex is a little dubious.

Perhaps Julia recognized in Brenda Champion an intimation of what she and her friends might be in twelve years' time; there was an antagonism between the girl and the woman that was hard to explain otherwise. Certainly the fact of his being Brenda Champion's property sharpened Julia's appetite for Rex.

By the way, that paragraph makes every bit as much sense if you replace Julia and Brenda with Charles and Rex for there is an antagonism that is otherwise hard to explain and Julia being Rex's property certainly sharpens Charles appetite for her.

But back to the main question: what is Julia's sin? This may elude non-Catholics but that Julia would refuse confession is a big thing. We have had a lot of talk about grave sins and mortal sins but by leaving the confessional the way she does, Julia commits the only certifiable mortal sin in the book. She doesn't just do something wrong or even knowingly do something wrong, she decides that what she wants is more important than maintaining her relationship with God.

Now non-Catholics are maybe thinking now is the time to click away and find some more reasonable and secular approach to the book. I don't blame you but remember, Julia is a Catholic. You may think this is the wrong way to approach these questions but they are the approach she takes.

Waugh, by the way, has embedded the reasoning right in the text when he has Charles comment on Julia's thinking it unfair that her protestant friends can do what they want because their ignorance renders them innocent.

So what makes her do it? Is it sex?

I know, here Jules goes again. Always back to the sex, you'd think I thought of nothing else (and you wouldn't be far wrong some days). But what are we to make of this?

Well, we have some hints.

Rex awakens real passion in Julia and that attracts and frightens her. She has done "things" we have no idea what they are, with "uncertain and sentimental boys"before (and who might they have been?) but she never responded before. Now she has. So even if you think it was just kissing, it was kissing that got her ... well, I don't have to delve into the facts of a woman's physical response to sexual arousal do I?

The second hint we get is that whatever it is that they are doing, it's enough to provide Rex with sufficient compensation to give up what he was getting from Brenda Champion. It is only when Julia puts a stop to it that he returns to his former mistress for, what shall we say, "relief?"

The final hint is that when Charles asks Julia why she told her mother she was Rex's mistress, she says that it is because she sort of believed it. Whatever was happening was pretty intense. And, much as I hate to make poor Charles squirm at the thought, it was intense for Julia.

It's not hard to imagine her situation is it? "Wouldn't it be nice if we were old and married, then we wouldn't have to wait so long," as Brian Wilson said. Except that they both are old. Rex is definitely so and Julia is "old enough".

Okay, let me let all the non-Catholics in on the logic of the thing. Julia could go on committing all sorts of sins. She could go home with those uncertain boys and make things they didn't even have the courage to dream of come true, she could get drunk and get scooped up by an evil man who took her home and photographed her having sex, or she she could have sixteen lesbian love affairs and never once do anything that   would separate her from God so long as she continued to repent for her weaknesses. She might even convince herself that having sex with Rex isn't really a sin and, so long as she really believed what she said she believed, she would be redeemable. But she doesn't do any of that.

What she does do is decide that what she wants is worth more than doing what she believes God wants for her. So she shuts the doors. And my litany of "grave sins" above is not just prurience here. Even though what she and Rex are doing is nothing more than what used to be called "petting" it is the most serious sin in the whole book not because of the actual acts but because of what the act means in the context of Julia's relationship with God.

Okay, but what did they actually do?
Don't be so prurient says Sebastian. In any case, I don't know.

But we should not be like baby boomers here. As some snide critic said back in the 1980s, baby boomers tend to think they were the only people to really have childhoods, loves and become parents. Most of all, baby boomers had and have a hard time imagining that other generations really had sex.

This is all digression from here on down and had nothing to do with Brideshead but I was reading Christian Rossetti the other night and came across a poem I'd never read before called "The Convent Threshold". In it, Rossetti takes on the persona of a young woman who has "sinned a pleasant sin" with a young man and now has decided to enter the convent and wants her lover to accept this choice because:

Lo, stairs are meant to lift us higher:

Mount with me, mount the kindled stair.

It is the night before her entry and he visits and she turns him away. But she has a dream. She has lots of dreams. Here is how she recounts part of what she dreamed:

I tell you what I dreamed last night:

A spirit with transfigured face

Fire-footed clomb with infinite space.

I heard his hundred pinions clang,

Heaven-bells rejoice and clang,

Heaven-air was thrilled with subtle scents

Words spun upon their rushing cars:

He mounted shrieking: 'Give me light.'

Still light was poured on him, more light;

Angels, Archangels he outstripped

Exultant in exceeding might,

And trod the skirts of Cherubim.

Still 'Give me light,' he shrieked; and dipped

His thirsty face, and drank a sea,

Athirst with thirst it could not slake.

There is a nice bit of ambiguity in the last line don't you think? I mean the way the sea itself seems to be just as thirsty as the one drinking. As Charles might say, "What can you mean?

Somewhere along the line, the spiritual goal gets mixed up with the sensual one. But, and this is my main point here, Christina Rossetti, who was as high Anglican as high Anglican gets and never married is rather knowing here. At some point her spirit with transfigured face stops mounting the ladder and does his mounting elsewhere. And when he dips and drinks it is impossible not think of another specific act and dear Christina seems to know exactly what it is like to feel "athirst with thirst" that cannot be slaked. In our crass way we'd say "insatiable".

Anyway, Christina Rossetti also wrote the words to the following so I'll leave you with it.




The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.