Perfecting the Victorian Construct: Tony Last’s Hetton
© 2009 Sean M. Donnell
Often considered his finest work, Evelyn Waugh’s A
Handful of Dust focuses the majority of the novel’s tension on Tony
Last’s mostly humorous endeavors to keep his anachronistic values in an
increasingly volatile society. Writing
in 1945, Waugh recalls that “A Handful
of Dust . . . began at the end. I
had written a short story about a man trapped in the jungle, ending his days
reading Dickens aloud. . . . Then, after the short story was written and
published, the idea kept working in my mind.
I wanted to discover how the prisoner got there” (qtd. in Cook 133).
Waugh’s quest to “discover” how Tony Last reaches his ultimate fate
creates some interesting commentary on the novel’s protagonist.
Shortly after publishing A Handful of Dust in 1934, Waugh elucidates how Tony’s disposition
led him to the Brazilian jungle in a letter to Henry Yorke: “The scheme was a
Gothic man in the hands of savages—first Mrs. Beaver etc. then the real
ones” (157). “Gothic” in this
sense refers to the Victorian architectural phenomenon known as the Neo-Gothic
revival. Hence, we see in Hetton
Abbey—the ancestral home from which Tony derives great pleasure and in which
he takes even greater pride—the physical manifestation of the protagonist’s
Victorian constitution through the Neo-Gothic medium of Hetton.
Through the Gothic architecture of Hetton, Waugh draws some impressive
conclusions about Tony’s Last’s disposition in A Handful of Dust.
A Handful of Dust is neither
the first nor the only novel in which Waugh uses a piece of architecture to
inform one of his characters’ personalities.
In fact, many of his novels define characters through an architectural
construct. Waugh’s use of
architecture to explain facets of personality is, as Laura Doan asserts in
“Architecture and the Postwar British Novel,” not only ingenious, but also
highly appropriate:
Architecture is, after all, the most
visually pervasive and socially determined of the visual arts.
To quote Balzac: “The events in human life, either public or private,
are so innately connected with the architecture that most observers could
reconstruct nations or individuals in all the verity of their habits, basing
their notions on what remains of their domestic existence.”
(19)
Reconstructing the individual “in all the
verity” of his habits through an architectural medium is exactly what Waugh
attempts to do with Tony Last, and we see within the first few pages of A
Handful of Dust that Hetton is meant to be that architectural medium.
In fact, Waugh carefully creates the impression that Hetton is not merely
a facade for Tony’s persona, but that on some intrinsic level, the Neo-Gothic
manor and its lord are synonymous. Early
in the novel, Mrs. Beaver’s inquiries about her son’s plans for the upcoming
weekend clearly delineate the relationship between Tony and Hetton before we
encounter either in the novel:
“Where are you going for the week-end?”
“Hetton.”
“Who’s
that? I forget?”
“Tony Last.”
“Yes, of course.
She’s lovely, he’s rather a stick.”
(Waugh, Dust 6; emphasis added)1
Mrs. Beaver does not inquire “What’s Hetton?”
or “To whom does Hetton belong?” Instead,
she asks “Who’s that?” emphasizing a connection between Tony and Hetton
that goes beyond mere ownership. By
asking this simple question, she implies that Hetton Abbey and Tony Last are
more than just closely associated with one another, that they are actually
constituent elements of the same entity. In
this sense, the family estate serves not only as an architectural double for
Tony, but Tony also functions as a simulacrum of the mansion’s mawkish
Victorian sentimentality as it is represented through Neo-Gothic architecture.
Hence, historically locating Hetton should help us to form a more concise
understanding of Tony’s sometimes baffling mannerisms in A
Handful of Dust.
Hetton’s historical moment, the Gothic Revival, underscores the fact
that the abbey is, more than anything else, a Victorian construct—both
literally and figuratively. In A Handful of Dust, Waugh takes pains to inform the reader that
Hetton was not merely renovated in 1864, but was completely rebuilt.
Among Tony’s belongings in Morgan le Fay we find “an aquatint of
Hetton, as it had stood until his great-grandfather demolished it” (16).
And later in the novel, Waugh carefully identifies Hetton’s historical
moment when he describes the abbey as “a huge building conceived in the late
generation of the Gothic Revival, when the movement had lost its fantasy and
become structurally logical and stodgy” (44).
The precision with which Waugh situates Hetton within a historical
framework illustrates how important it was for him to identify Tony’s family
estate as a Victorian construct. Kenneth
Clark’s Gothic Revival provides some interesting insight into the
importance of Hetton’s rebuilding as a Gothic mansion: “A Gothic mansion was
[a] . . . country house with just enough of the scenic elements of
Gothic—pointed arches, battlements and towers—to convince the owner that he
lived in an ancestral home. There
were no mediaeval mansions” (132). Because
Hetton Abbey’s architecture is solely a structure of the Victorian period’s
Gothic Revival, the architecture being constructed is a Victorian model, not a
medieval one.
The Victorian poet Coventry Patmore’s assertion that when “the Gothic
style . . . was invented, all others became obsolete” (qtd. in Crook 180),
represents the attitude of many architects from the Gothic Revival, but he
essentializes the philosophies of one in particular: Augustus Welby Northmore
Pugin. During the later years of the
Gothic Revival, Pugin’s appeal for architecture more akin with the true spirit
of the Gothic, rather than simply representative of its style, revolutionized
the movement. As
Gothic [architecture] was fortified
with principles stricter and more comprehensive than those on which classical
buildings was [sic] based; and architects had come to look on Gothic not as a
style, but as a religion. A change
had taken place in the whole nature of the Revival.
The man who brought about this change was Pugin.
(164)
While Pugin is definitely not a household name, his
influence on the Gothic Revival is, ironically, validated by the general
disregard with which the movement has been viewed since it fell into disfavor.
In Romanticism and the Gothic Revival, Agnes Addison qualifies her
declaration that Pugin was “one of the most brilliant, prolific, and
influential architects of the Gothic Revival” by stating:
The last sentence may seem too
enthusiastic to the people who have never heard of Pugin, and few people have
heard his name, although in the past few years he is coming into his own again.
The main reason that Pugin has not been known is that he was a Roman
Catholic and the Gothic Revivalists of the last century had to be very wary of
any connections with the Romish church. The
second reason is that Ruskin followed hard on his heels and took over and
transformed Pugin’s ideas without mentioning him.
Lastly, although Pugin designed hundreds of churches, schools and
colleges, not one of his buildings is beautiful, but they are simple and in
excellent taste, and most are infinitely superior to other Gothic Revival work;
none are impressive or breath-taking. (74)
In her assessment of Pugin’s architecture,
Pugin’s 1843 publication, An
Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England, is undoubtedly
an important tract concerning the Gothic Revival.
As Waugh argues in A Handful of
Dust, until this point in the Gothic Revival, architects had been interested
in creating merely representations of Gothic construction.
In his Apology, Pugin suggests
that the Revival must start creating architecture that not merely represents the
Gothic, but actually captures the spirit of it:
[I]n the name of all common sense,
whilst we profess the creed of Christians, whilst we glory in being Englishmen,
let us have an architecture, the arrangement of which will alike remind us of
our faith and our country—an architecture whose beauties we may claim as our
own, whose symbols have originated in our religions and our customs.
(6)
Pugin readily admits that he is a fanatic for
Gothic buildings, but we see here his desire for the Gothic Revival to construct
something that is uniquely English and Victorian—sentiments that Ruskin will
later adopt and expand upon. Pugin
concludes his Apology by reaffirming
that “We do not want to revive a facsimile of the works or style of any
particular individual, or even a period; but it is the devotion, majesty, and
repose of Christian art, for which we are contending;—it is not a style, but a
principle” (44). This conclusion,
the quintessence of the Victorian concept of the Gothic revival, perfectly
recapitulates Waugh’s description of Hetton as a “building conceived in the
late generation of the Gothic Revival” (44).
Thus through Hetton’s facade, we see manifest the physical construction
of a Victorian, Neo-Gothic aesthetic in A
Handful of Dust. By similarly
examining Tony’s actions in light of his association with the family estate,
we shall clearly see his spiritual construction of a Victorian aesthetic.
Moreover, we will discover, as Ann Slater did in “Waugh’s A
Handful of Dust: Right Things in Wrong Places,” that the novel’s central
theme is “embodied in the anachronistic, misplaced values of Hetton Abbey”
(53).
One Victorian value conspicuous in Tony’s aesthetic that, like Gothic
architecture, fell into disrepute by the time Waugh wrote A
Handful of Dust is his love for reclusiveness.
Waugh meditated at length on this subject in his essay, “The Philistine
Age of English Decoration”:
The mid-Victorian householder . . . did
not want to entertain on any spectacular scale; he had no use for the
communicating suites of apartments beloved of his grandfather; he preferred a
series of substantially constructed retreats. . . .
These requirements determined the plan of the house.
For elevation he cared very little. He
was not disposed to spend much on what was, after all, primarily for the
enjoyment of strangers outside. (219)
The Victorian gentleman viewed his mansion as a
safe haven from life’s hardships. He
desired nothing more than to retreat into his home and immerse himself in the
private facade that he had paid so handsomely to create.
Waugh furthers this idea by stating that the “Victorian home was the
retreat of the business man; he wanted something snug and private”
(“Philistine” 220).
His desire for solitude as keen as any Victorian gentleman’s, Tony
looks upon Hetton as the ultimate refuge of repose.
When Brenda vents her frustration at their relative isolation at Hetton,
Tony finds it literally impossible to conceptualize her perspective:
“Well it sometimes seems to me rather pointless keeping up a house of
this size if we don’t now and then ask some other people to stay in it.”
“Pointless? I can’t think
what you mean. I don’t keep up
this house to be a hostel for a lot of bores to come and gossip in.
We’ve always lived here and I hope John will be able to keep it on
after me. . . . It’s a definite
part of English life. . . .” (19)
Tony is so immersed in his Victorian aesthetic that
he fails to connect with Brenda’s position.
Like the “mid-Victorian householder,” Tony Last can only
conceptualize his mansion as a retreat, not a focal point for entertainment. For
Brenda, on the other hand, Hetton’s sole purpose is to serve as a forum for
merriment. The tension of this
scene, like so many others between Brenda and Tony, arises from the couple’s
failure to understand the other’s viewpoint.
Tony cannot abandon his fixation for the Gothic aesthetic, and Brenda
cannot adopt it. The couple’s
failure to understand one another in the novel is also conspicuous in their
views of Hetton itself. For Tony,
Hetton is the idealized environment: “There was not a glazed brick or
encaustic tile that was not dear to Tony’s Heart” (13).
While for Brenda, little else could be more repugnant: Tony is “madly
feudal” (49), and the house is ghastly. As
she reveals to Beaver, “I detest it [Hetton]. . . .
I do wish that it wasn’t all, every bit of it, so appallingly ugly”
(45).
In this scene we see Tony’s Gothic aesthetic challenged by Brenda.
This becomes a recurrent theme throughout A
Handful of Dust. Just like Pugin
and the Gothic Revival, Tony’s views are—for the particular historical
moment in which Waugh’s novel is set—repudiated as anachronistic.
Both Clark, writing in 1928, and Addison, writing in 1938, exhibit to
varying degrees the same distaste for the aesthetics of the Gothic Revival that
Brenda and her coterie do. Throughout
A Handful of Dust, Tony’s
construction of a Victorian aesthetic is constantly challenged by intrusions
from the Modern era, and as the novel progresses, we shall see Tony retreat
further from the Modern era as he attempts to keep his Victorian aesthetic
viable.
Another of Tony’s Victorian ideals is his adoption of the mannerisms of
the landed gentry. Waugh indicates
that the Victorian gentleman “liked to overlook the most extensive possible
landscape, much of which he owned, most of which he ruled, and all of which he
regarded himself and his house as the principal ornaments.
He liked to see and be seen” (“Philistine” 219-20).
Like his Victorian predecessors, Tony also enjoyed playing the part of
sovereign with his people. After
Tony attends church, he meanders about his estate as if he were surveying his
chattel:
When the service was over he stood for
a few minutes at the porch chatting affably with the vicar’s sister and the
people from the village. Then he
returned home by a path across the fields which led to a side door in the walls
garden; he visited the hot houses and picked himself a button-hole, stopped by
the gardeners’ cottages for a few words (the smell of Sunday dinners rising
warm and overpowering from the little doorways) and then, rather solemnly, drank
a glass of sherry in the library. That
was the simple, mildly ceremonious order of his Sunday morning . . .
he adhered to it with great satisfaction.
Brenda teased him whenever she caught him posing as an upright,
God-fearing gentleman of the old school and Tony saw the joke, but this did not
at all diminish the pleasure he derived from his weekly routine, or his
annoyance when the presence of guests suspended it.
(35-36)
Just like the Victorian gentleman’s impersonation
of the country lord, Tony likes “to see and be seen.”
His visit to the gardeners’ homes affords Tony the opportunity to
become the object of the gaze while simultaneously aspiring toward it.
One of the most important Victorian motifs in A
Handful of Dust is Tony’s relationship with the Anglican Church.
This theme takes on added significance when we remember that Waugh was a
Catholic and that he privileged Catholicism over the Anglicism.
Waugh’s preference for the Catholic Church comes to the forefront in
his essay, “Come Inside”: “
Catholicism became a refuge into which
he [Waugh] could flee from the spectacle of the present.
For Waugh did not love the doctrines of the Church so much as he did its
historical continuity, which seemed to assuage his “‘hunger for
permanence.’” To Waugh that very
continuity seemed to guarantee the truth of Church doctrine.
Its ability to withstand the ridicule of nineteen hundred years seemed a
test of its truth; having stood so long it could, presumably, stand against both
his own laughter and the forces that were making the other official beliefs of
his society dissolve. (213).
It seems no small wonder, therefore, that Waugh
should hold considerable animosity for the Church of England.
After all, since the time of Henry VIII, Catholics in
Like other secularly owned British
residences called “Abbey” or “Priory,” its [Hetton’s] name goes back
to before what Waugh, as a staunch Catholic, would have regarded as one of the
great disasters in English history—the “dissolution of the monasteries,”
when Henry VIII broke the bond between the English Church and Rome.
The property of these institutions, often richly endowed through bequests
by devout individuals over the centuries, was confiscated and either devoted to
the uses of the Crown or donated to loyal supporters of Henry and his policies.
(1)
By juxtaposing Tony’s Victorian aesthetic with
Hetton’s historic usurpation of the Catholic abbey, Waugh aligns Tony with the
Church of England. Consequently, we
see in Tony’s relationship with his provincial church and the vicar, Mr.
Tendril, Waugh’s tacit commentary on the Anglican Church as a function of the
state. With but a few bloody
exceptions, since Henry VIII established it, the Church of England has suffered
the vagaries of, and occupied a position secondary to, the crown.
In A Handful of Dust, we see
this in Mr. Tendril’s appointment to the local church: “Tony’s father had
given him [the vicar] the living at the instance [sic] of his dentist” (38).
Ostensibly, the vicar still owes his livelihood to the Last family, and
his parish’s attitude toward Tony reflects this:
He [Tony] went to church, where he sat
in a large pitch pine pew, put in by his great-grandfather at the time of
rebuilding the house, furnished with very high crimson hassocks and a fireplace,
complete with iron grate and a little poker which his father used to rattle when
any point in the sermon attracted his disapproval.
Since his father’s day a fire had not been laid there; Tony had it in
mind to revive the practice next winter. (35)
Tony’s father rattling the grate whenever he
disapproved of the sermon reinforces the image that the church is functioning in
the service of the state, or in this case, the aristocracy.
Tony’s wish to revive the “practice” of lighting the fire in his
church pew indicates his desire to assume his father’s role as the countryside
sovereign. It is not a huge leap to
imagine Tony rekindling more than just his father’s fireplace.
Already the countryside church occupies a subordinate position to Tony by
not beginning until he arrives:
The bell had stopped and the organist
was watching from behind his curtain for Tony’s arrival.
He walked ahead up the aisle . . . [and] occupied one of the armchairs. .
. . He leant forward for half a
minute with his forehead on his hand, and as he sat back, the organist played
the first bars of the hymn. (38)
By waiting until he arrives and prepares himself,
the church preferences Tony’s agenda over its own.
In mock-allegory of Henry VIII’s own power over the Church of England,
Tony governs his local parish completely. In
a final allusion, Waugh conjures a stark image of the ubiquitous
“. . . And so we stand here
bareheaded at this solemn hour of the week,” he read, his powerful old voice
swelling up for the peroration, “let us
remember our Gracious Queen Empress in whose services we are here and pray that
she may long be spared to send us at her bidding to do our duty in the uttermost
parts of the earth; and let us think of our dear ones far away and the homes
we have left in her name, and remember
that though miles of barren continent and leagues of ocean divide us, we are
never so near to them as on these Sunday mornings, united with them across dune
and mountain in our loyalty to our sovereign and thanksgiving for her welfare;
one with them as proud subjects of her
sceptre and crown.” (39;
emphasis added)
While at once comic for its obvious displacement,
the “Gracious Queen Empress” reinforces the idea that Tony is constructing a
Victorian aesthetic, for Tony is unequivocally a proud subject “of her sceptre
and crown.”
Another function that Hetton serves as a former abbey is to fortify the
anti-Catholic sentiments that were so prevalent from the beginning of the Gothic
Revival. As was stated earlier,
Ruskin adopted many of Pugin’s positions but failed to acknowledge his
indebtedness to Pugin. One of the
main reasons for this is that Pugin was a Roman Catholic.
Partly as an apology for writing The
Stones of Venice, Ruskin effectively repudiates Pugin’s appeal for a
Catholic as well as Gothic Revival in
Ruskin succeeded in disinfecting Gothic
architecture [of its Catholic influence]; and it is because he was the first
person consciously to attempt this, because his work could be read without fear
of [popish] pollution, that he is remembered as the originator of Gothic Revival
doctrines. The dissociation of
Gothic architecture and
Through works like The
Stones of Venice and The Seven Lamps
of Architecture, Ruskin reaffirmed Pugin’s entreaty for a Gothic Revival
that captured the essence of the original, while at the same time he rejected
any claims that Pugin might have made for a Catholic Revival.
While helping to explain Pugin’s demotion in the Gothic Revival, this
passage more importantly illustrates the desire of Ruskin and the
Ecclesiological Society to create a uniquely “English” revival of the
Gothic.
Hetton’s final role in defining Tony’s relationship with the Anglican
Church in A Handful of Dust is that
the abbey emphasizes the lack of religion prevalent at the inception of the
Gothic Revival. In fact, the
beginning of the Neo-Gothic period is characterized as one of
We can barely realize what a state of
perfunctoriness the Church of England was in at the beginning of the
[nineteenth] century. The services
were performed with apathy and the buildings were neglected.
Cathedrals were turned into museums or shut up completely. . . . In 1832,
Tony’s lack of “serious” religion in the
novel mirrors that which was present at the beginning of the Gothic Revival.
According to Martin Stannard in his introduction to Evelyn
Waugh: The Critical Heritage, “his [Waugh’s] early novels,” of which A Handful of Dust is usually considered the best, “represent a
‘serious’ Catholic apologetic by negative suggestion.
The world depicted is the humanist reductio ad absurdum, life without
(or, at least, in ignorance of) God” (5).
Returning to Tony’s earlier attendance in church, we find that while
Tony goes through the motions, he is not really performing the religious
ceremony seriously:
The service followed its course.
As Tony inhaled the agreeable, slightly musty atmosphere and performed
the familiar motions of sitting, standing, and leaning forward, his thoughts
drifted from subject to subject, among the events of the past week and his plans
for the future. Occasionally some
arresting phrase in the liturgy would recall him to his surroundings, but for
the most part that morning he occupied himself with the question of bathrooms
and lavatories, and how more of them could best be introduced without disturbing
the character of his house. (38)
Instead of turning his thoughts heavenward in
church, Tony concerns himself with installing new bathrooms into Hetton in such
a way that they will not disturb the Gothic “character of the house.”
Tony’s fascination with toilets underscores a scatological
preoccupation with the basest of bodily functions: the excretion of human waste.
The sheer incredulity of Tony’s thoughts in church delineates his lack
of faith in the established church.
Tony poignantly reflects his irreligious sentiments to Mrs. Rattery after
the vicar has paid him a visit on the occasion of John Andrew’s death: “I
only wanted to see him [Mr. Tendril, the vicar] about arrangements.
He tried to be comforting. It
was very painful . . . after all the last thing one wants to talk about at a
time like this is religion” (158). Tony’s
ritualistic life revolving around Hetton abbey has the trappings of religion,
but in a moment of true crisis—when one usually looks toward a higher
power—Tony finds the notion of religion distasteful.
Hence, Tony’s lack of true religious faith is, perhaps, symptomatic of
his Victorianism.
Another facet of Tony’s Victorian aesthetic is evident in his outdated
treatment of women. While it would
be problematic to conceptualize men as “enlightened” in the 1930s, they were
certainly bound—legally, if not morally—to treat women differently than they
did during the Victorian age. Tony
often behaves toward Brenda as if he were actually living in Victorian times.
In short, he places her in the role of the privileged object.
As Susan Kingsley Kent posits in Sex
and Suffrage in
Nineteenth-century ideology eliminated
the economic function of middle-class women and created the notion of the
perfect wife and mother, or “the angel in the house,” as she was described
by Coventry Patmore. In the
competitive, unsettling, and sometimes brutal world of nineteenth-century
industrial society, it fell to women to provide a haven of peace and security, a
repository of moral values. (33)
Saying that “the angel in the house” model was popular during this
time period would definitely be an understatement.
According to J. Mordaunt Crook, Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House sold more than 250,000 copies during the
author’s lifetime (172). When
writing about the sanctity of the home and the woman’s privileged position
within this sanctuary, Ruskin held that this was of paramount concern to the
Victorian man:
[The] man . . . must encounter all
peril and trial; to him, therefore, must be the failure, the offence, the
inevitable error; often he must be wounded or subdued; often misled, and always
hardened. But he guards the woman
from all this; within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought
it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offense.
This is the true nature of the home—it is the place of Peace; the
shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division.
(qtd. in
Part of Tony’s problems with Brenda stem from his
adoption of this Victorian model for female behavior.
Left to his own devices, Tony would never leave the grounds of Hetton.
Throughout A Handful of Dust (at least in the parts where Tony and Brenda are
still a couple), whenever Brenda suggests that she and Tony go on a trip, Tony
almost always either completely disregards her entreaty or simply tells her to
go alone. Yet he cannot fathom the
depth of Brenda’s boredom except in a drunken stupor: “I believe she got a
bit bored there [at Hetton] sometimes. I’ve
been thinking it over and that’s the conclusion I came to” (86).
When Brenda later begins cheating on Tony, he is totally oblivious; it is
practically impossible for Tony to conceive that his “angel in the house”
would do such a thing. When Tony
examined how he had been so fooled by Brenda, he came to the conclusion that he
“had got into the habit of loving and trusting Brenda” (172).
Tony’s attitude toward Brenda’s infidelity seems at first glance
perplexing, but his incomprehension makes perfect sense if we consider that
Tony’s ideals of womanhood and matrimony are based on Victorian models.
For instance, before the passage of the Married Women’s Properties Acts
in 1870 and 1882 (Hetton was rebuilt in 1864), any property that a woman brought
to a marriage—including herself—became the property of the woman’s husband
(Kent 28). If this is the model from
which Tony is operating, and such would be the case if he is indeed occupying
Hetton’s historical moment, no wonder he cannot fathom Brenda’s infidelity.
From his viewpoint, Brenda is his chattel.
This is definitely the perspective that Tony adopts when Brenda leaves
Tony for Beaver. Everyone keeps
telling Tony that Brenda will return, but he keeps insisting that he no longer
wants her:
“You just wait a few weeks,” he [Tony’s brother-in-law, Allan] had
said. “Brenda will come back.
She’ll soon get sick of Beaver.”
“But I don’t want her back.”
“I know just how you feel, but it doesn’t do to be so medieval about
it.” (174)
What is “so medieval” about Tony’s attitude
is that he is acting as if she were his property, and that she is damaged goods.
Naturally, Tony no longer wants his “angel in the house” if she can
no longer function in this capacity for him; one no longer keeps a watch dog
that has fallen out of the practice of guarding the valuables.
The way that Tony treats the whole divorce is another interesting example
of how his Victorian construct colors his views.
If we assume that the time frame for A
Handful of Dust corresponds roughly with 1934, the year in which the novel
was published, then Brenda had as much legal recourse to sue for divorce as Tony
did:
Women obtained some amelioration even
from the law that most symbolized their status as property of men—that of
divorce. Until 1857, divorce could
be obtained only by Act of Parliament and was available only to the wealthy
elite. The Matrimonial Causes Act of
1857 created a court for divorce and established the grounds for this procedure.
Men could divorce their wives, as before, on the basis of adultery alone;
women, however, had to prove their husbands’ adultery in addition to cruelty,
desertion, incest, rape, sodomy, or bestiality.
The Royal Commission in Divorce, reporting in 1850, had recommended that
adultery was much more serious on the part of the wife than on the part of the
husband. . . . The Matrimonial
Causes Act, however inequitable, did allow divorce for women, and women
continued to challenge the double standard until the Matrimonial Causes Act of
1923 established a single standard for divorce for both sexes.
(
Tony allows Brenda to play the victim because it
“was thought convenient that Brenda should appear as the plaintiff” (176).
The only way that Tony’s actions can be viewed as remotely sane in this
circumstance is if Tony is acting from the viewpoint of a Victorian model.
Since Tony has not cheated on Brenda, she has no grounds for divorce in
this situation; only he can sue for divorce in this instance.
This divorce is only “convenient” for Brenda, yet Tony still operates
in the role of the magnanimous Victorian lord of the manor, going so far as to
construct a sordid “affair” so that Brenda will be able to bring her suit.
By sheer luck his tryst is botched and he is able to keep Brenda from
forcing him to sell Hetton. Still,
only when his Victorian ideal becomes threatened does Tony break from his
character. As Jacqueline McDonnell
asserts in Waugh on Women, “Tony is
completely passive about losing Brenda. He
only becomes active when her actions threaten him with the loss of Hetton”
(112).
When Brenda’s brother, Reggie St. Cloud, comes to discuss with Tony the
terms of her divorce, he mentions that Brenda will be suing for two thousand
pounds a year instead of the five hundred that she and Tony had agreed upon
before proceeding with the divorce (206).
Despite Tony’s pleas that “It would mean giving up Hetton” (206),
Reggie’s assurances of Brenda’s earnestness coupled with a phone call to
Brenda force Tony to realize that they propose he “give up Hetton in order to
buy Beaver for Brenda” (207). It
is only at the point when Tony realizes that his Victorian aesthetic is
seriously in danger of collapsing that he breaks character: “A whole gothic
world had come to grief . . . there was now no armour, glittering in the forest
glades, no embroidered feet on the greensward; the cream and dappled unicorns
had fled” (209).
Faced with the prospect of losing the physical trappings of his Victorian
ideology, Tony drops the persona of the Victorian gentleman and launches a
counterattack on Brenda as vicious as any he had received from either her or her
circle:
Brenda is not going to get her divorce.
The evidence I provided at
In stunned disbelief, Brenda and her coterie are
forced to accept Tony’s decision to fight the divorce.
Veronica’s comment, “Now I understand why they keep going on in the
papers about divorce law reform” (210), humorously summarizes Tony’s one
instance of rebellion while underscoring Waugh’s awareness of current events
in A Handful of Dust.
Gorra finds Tony’s break with his character “an appropriate irony
[since] Tony can keep Hetton only by sacrificing his idealized concept of it,
[he] can preserve either the house or the refuge but not both” (216).
Instead of becoming more aligned with the Modern era after Tony’s one
break from his Victorian aesthetic, he retreats further from it.
Good to his word, Tony goes on the trip abroad that he has told Reggie
about. Tony’s reasons for going
abroad, however, exemplify his retreat into the Victorian aesthetic he has
constructed. It is almost as if
Tony, frightened by the brief glimpse of what he could become, if given more
time around Brenda’s crowd, beats a hasty retreat—both literally and
figuratively. He physically leaves
on his expedition to
It had been an uneventful excursion.
Not for Tony were the ardours of serious travel, desert or jungle,
mountains or pampas; he had no inclination to kill big game or survey unmapped
tributaries. He had left
One of the reasons that Tony leaves his beloved
Hetton—something that he was loath to do throughout the entire novel—is that
he sees it as obligatory if he is going to maintain his Victorian construct.
The Victorian man went abroad when spurned in love.
Perhaps more telling, however, is that for Tony, his overseas trip to
find a fabled Brazilian city becomes a symbolic quest to find a “transfigured
Hetton.” Like the Fisher King,
Tony is wounded, and only the quest can heal his wounded Victorian ideology.
As Richard Wasson asserts in “A
Handful of Dust: Critique of Victorianism”:
The Victorians and Tony Last . . .
mistook picturesque settings for monuments of the living past.
Tony, who accepts the mask and can draw sustenance only from Hetton and
what it represents, has no forces to pit against the mechanical and
materialistic faithlessness of modern society except those transmitted to him by
the Victorian imagination. Betrayed
by his time, he goes on a quest for salvation, but so conditioned is he by
Victorian Gothic forms that his imagination can conceive only of a romantic
quest, not a truly religious one. “The
City” he seeks is not the
Since it was first through Hetton’s Gothic
structure that Tony constructed his Victorian aesthetic, it seems only logical
that he must find a new Hetton, one even more withdrawn, even more impregnable,
more inscrutable than his original Hetton. Dr.
Messinger’s legendary city serves as the perfect model for this:
“But what do you suppose the city will be like?”
“Impossible to say. Every
tribe has a different word for it. The
Pie-wie’s call it the ‘Shining’ or ‘Glittering,’ the Arekuna the
‘Many Watered,’ the Patamonas the ‘Bright Feathered,’ the Warau oddly
enough, use the same word for it that they use for a kind of aromatic jam they
make. (220-21)
Since first hearing about the legendary city, Tony
has allowed its potential for the construction of a new Victorian aesthetic to
dominate his thoughts so entirely that he forgets the recent events of his past.
Tony uses the conspicuous lack of description associated with the fabled
city to create his own city, the one he has been searching for since leaving
Hetton:
For some days now Tony had been
thoughtless about the events of the immediate past.
His thoughts were occupied with the City, the Shining, the Many Watered,
the Bright Feathered, the Aromatic Jam. He
had a clear picture of it in his mind. It
is Gothic in character, all vanes and pinnacles, gargoyles, battlements,
groining and tracery pavilions and terraces, a transfigured Hetton, pennons and
banners floating on the sweet breeze, everything luminous and translucent; a
coral citadel crowning a green hill top sewn with daisies, among groves and
streams; a tapestry landscape filled with heraldic and fabulous animals and
symmetrical, disproportionate blossom. (221-22)
It is indeed small wonder that Tony’s imaginary
city becomes a “transfigured Hetton.” His
quest for a new ideal with which he can reconstruct his Victorian aesthetic
would demand no less.
Throughout the ending of A Handful
of Dust, Tony exhibits an obsessive fear that he will fail in his quest,
that he will completely lose his Victorian ideology.
In the delusional visions that Tony suffers before encountering Mr. Todd,
this fear manifests itself in the form of Mrs. Beaver and her chromium plating.
Before Brenda left Tony, she contracts Mrs. Beaver to redo Hetton’s
morning room, and almost as a matter of course, Mrs. Beaver suggests that
chromium plating would add the perfect touch to the morning room.
Tony reviles the idea:
“Do you really want Mrs. Beaver to do up the morning room?”
“Not if you don’t sweet.”
“But can you imagine it—white chromium plating?”
(106)
The chromium plating on the walls of Hetton became
for Tony a physical manifestation of the Modern era’s encroachment into his
Gothic domain. Later, when Tony is
in the jungle and delusional, Mrs. Beaver and her chromium plating exhibit her
symbolic infestation into Tony’s Victorian ideal: “I will tell you what I
have learned in the forest, where time is different.
There is no City. Mrs. Beaver
has covered it with chromium plating and converted it into flats” (288).
Tony’s disillusionment with his Victorian construct becomes Mrs.
Beaver, plating his interior aesthetic with the trappings of Modernism.
Finally, in a delusional stupor, Tony comes to Mr. Todd’s house.
Ailing both spiritually and physically, Tony has now reached his
destination. Waugh satisfies his
curiosity about how a “Gothic” man came to be with the “savage” Mr. Todd
by depicting Tony as a person who relies upon a Victorian construct based on the
aesthetics of the period’s Gothic Revival to function in society.
Yet now that Tony has reached his ultimate destination, Mr. Todd’s
house, we must determine whether Tony’s final fate is a just end for the
protagonist of A Handful of Dust. After
dispatching Tony’s would-be rescuers, Mr. Todd makes no qualms about what the
future will hold for Tony:
I have been quite gay while you were
asleep. Three men from outside.
Englishmen. It is a pity you
missed them. . . . They had come all
the way to find you. . . . I gave
them a little souvenir, your watch. They
wanted something to take back to
Tony shall read Dickens to Mr. Todd indefinitely.
A Handful of Dust ends with
Tony stranded in the center of an interminable Victorian limbo.
He is Mr. Todd’s prisoner and has no hope of reprieve.
Yet must we necessarily view this as a sad ending?
Tony, it could be argued, has been imprisoned in an interminable
Victorian limbo since the beginning of the novel.
Is not Mr. Todd’s house the fabled city, an impregnable fortress
withdrawn from all the threats of the Modern age?
Tony can now live out his life not only immersing himself in a Victorian
aesthetic, but also being encouraged daily to do so.
Essentially, Tony no longer has anything to anchor him in
1
Page numbers only shall be cited for all future
references to A Handful of Dust.
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