Role of Setting in E.Waugh book 'Handful of Dust'

Role of Setting in E.Waugh book 'Handful of Dust'

Evelyn Waugh's novels are principally comedies of manners or of humours written in the tradition that begins in English with Chaucer and runs through Jonson, Fielding, and Dickens to continue not only with Waugh but Muriel Spark, William Trevor, and still others. Chaucer and Spark, like Waugh, are Roman Catholics; and Jonson is a Catholic of one stripe or another.

Although Waugh's reputation before Brideshead Revisited (1945) is that of a wickedly clever satirist of the daft behaviour of a madly secular world, we should remember that in his very first novel Paul Penny-feather learns about the callous antics of Margot Metroland and her vicious circle; and the experience leaves him a sadder and wiser man. As such it stands apart from Waugh's novels of the 1930s that are only satiric and ironic. So, too, does A Handful of Dust, which is a more ambitious and also a more ambiguous study of the possibilities of moral and spiritual redemption. It provokes as much knowing laughter as Waugh's other satires of manners and humours; but it moves a great distance beyond the early novels toward the deeper and richer comedy of Brideshead, which is finally a divine comedy in the way that Dante's poem is. With A Handful of Dust Waugh begins to write the Catholic comedies of redemption that would most deeply engage him for the remainder of his life as a writer. (Waugh 1934)

Flannery O'Connor observes that Catholicism gives to writers who hold it an assured and confident standard of judgment from which to assess the moral distortions of their characters; in the alembic of their comedy; and satire these writers heighten into laughter the discrepancies between the norm and the actions of their characters. Catholicism also provides a metaphysic by which one may either bring an offending character to moral redemption or allow that character to proceed into moral disaster and spiritual death. (Drewry 2001)

Alec Waugh has called his brother Evelyn a "person for whom religion is the dominant force" and has said that "reception into the Roman Catholic Church . . . involve[d] a complete re-orientation of his inner life." Martin Stannard maintains that Catholicism represents Waugh's only identity as a novelist, an identity that Waugh himself claimed in 1939, acknowledging that "it is a common complaint against Catholics that they intrude their religion into every discussion .... This is, in a way, true; the Catholic's life is bounded and directed by his creed at every turn." Waugh's novels, early and late, do not degenerate into theology-in-fiction, however. Instead Waugh's religious commitment provides the lens through which he sees experience, or defines the perspective from which he views it.

Waugh's description of his intent in Brideshead Revisited is to "trace the divine purpose in a pagan world," to observe "the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse . . . characters." Donat O'Donnell argues that this pattern applies generally to Waugh's other ...