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THE CASE FOR LADY MARCHMAIN
One critic calls her a "kindly mother figure who has the best and kindest of intentions."1 Another calls her a "tyrant."2 There is surely room for interpretation of Lady Teresa Marchmain's character, because Waugh himself called her an "enigma,"3 and a close friend of Waugh's wrote to him following the publication of Brideshead Revisited, asking, "Are you or are you not on Lady Marchmain's side? I cannot make it out."4 The answer Waugh gave her, that if he was not on Lady Marchmain's side, God was and that the book was about God,5 supports the thesis of this paper, which is that Lady Marchmain is really one of the few good Catholics in the novel in terms of her Christian conduct toward and concern for her family and ought therefore to be treated as a heroine of the novel. We also shall see how she may favorably be compared with the very pillars of the Church, God and Jesus.
I will take Diana Trilling as representative of those who blame Lady Marchmain for everything and everyone in the novel that goes wrong. Trilling condemns Lady Marchmain for "an unfeeling self-righteousness that has driven her husband into social ostracism on the continent, her son Sebastian to drunkenness, her daughter Julia to despair, her older son Brideshead to oafishness, and her younger daughter Cordelia to a spinster's life of good works."6 Let us examine these charges of Trilling's and each of Lady Marchmain's "victims" and see if there is not some way we can acquit Lady Marchmain of Trilling's accusations.
It is odd how Trilling and others dare to talk about the way Lady Marchmain supposedly drove her husband into apostasy, adultery and exile since there is nothing in the novel to imply that the responsibility for the failure of the marriage is hers. All we are told, by Anthony Blanche, isthat Lord and Lady Marchmain "were married for 15 years or so, and then Lord Marchmain wenttothe war; he never came back but formed a connection with a highly talented dancer. There are athousand such cases."7 Cousin Jasper states the same facts in a similar manner: "The Marchmains have lived apart since the war, you know. An extraordinary thing;...