Disruption and disappointment: relationships of children and nostalgia in British interwar 【翻译】

2011 Elspeth Anne Taylor
This thesis is available at Iowa Research Online: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1090
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Part of the English Language and Literature Commons
Recommended Citation
Taylor, Elspeth Anne. "Disruption and disappointment: relationships of children and nostalgia in British interwar fiction." MA (Master
of Arts) thesis, University of Iowa, 2011.
https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1090. https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.geskufcm
DISRUPTION AND DISAPPOINTMENT:
RELATIONSHIPS OF CHILDREN AND NOSTALGIA
IN BRITISH INTERWAR FICTION
by
Elspeth Anne Taylor
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the Master of Arts degree
in English (Literary Studies)
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
May 2011
Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Linda Bolton
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
__________________________
MASTER’S THESIS
_____________
This is to certify that the Master’s thesis of
Elspeth Anne Taylor
has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Master
of Arts degree in English (Literary Studies) at the May 2011 graduation.
Thesis Committee: ______________________________________________________
Linda Bolton, Thesis Supervisor
______________________________________________________
Lara Trubowitz
______________________________________________________
Michael Hill
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. INTRODUCTION: LOCATING THE CHILD AND NOSTALGIA .........1
II. NOSTALGIA DISRUPTED: A HANDFUL OF DUST ............................17
III. SEPARATION STORIES: THE WAVES ..................................................32
IV. POSING AND POSITIONING: THE APES OF GOD.............................48
V. CONCLUSION..........................................................................................66
BIBLIOGRAPHY..............................................................................................................69
1
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION: LOCATING THE CHILD AND NOSTALGIA
The 1930’s were a fruitful decade in British literature: modernism was
flourishing, with the publication of novels by Aldous Huxley, Jean Rhys, and James
Joyce, and poetry by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W.H. Auden. On a historical level, the
people of Britain were still dealing with the disruptive aftereffects of the Great War and
were, although they did not realize it at the time, nearing the end of their interwar period:
a time that divided the Great War from what would become World War Two. Among the
modernist authors producing major work during the interwar period were Virginia Woolf,
Wyndham Lewis, and Evelyn Waugh. During the first half of the 1930’s, each of the
three authors published a novel that would become one of their most notable works.
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) was a wildly experimental exploration of aging and
memory; Wyndham Lewis’s satirical The Apes of God (1930) would instigate
controversy within Britain’s modernist set, particularly in its depiction of a family of
adult-children; Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934) focused on a man’s fondness
for his home and the past.
The novels’ aesthetic and thematic differences were indicative of each author’s
individuality under the broad scope of modernism, which differed wildly in the Thirties.
Evelyn Waugh deviated from the “high” modernism of Lewis and Woolf through his
novels’ absence of outstanding formal or thematic experimentalism. Waugh’s lack of
explicit collaborative ties to other modernist writers also positioned him as a virtual
outsider to more experimental or controversial forms of modernist writing. In stark
contrast to Waugh, Virginia Woolf is among the first names that come up when artists,
2
students, or critics address Modernism. Her textual form and content are often wildly and
obviously experimental, and her affiliation with the Bloomsbury group—a collective of
artists, writers, and other thinkers—placed her within a sort of artistic commune. In
comparison to Lewis and Waugh, Woolf was the most clear-cut Modernist, at least to
twentieth and twenty-first century readers and scholars. Finally, Wyndham Lewis was a
talented and extremely prolific writer who moved through several schools of modernist
thought. The most notable of these movements was Vorticism, an anti-Futurist avantgarde
manifestation of literary and visual art that Ezra Pound also espoused. Lewis is
still considered a significant figure in the world of art and art history, but was virtually
written out of the literary canon due to the pro-fascist, pro-Hitler beliefs that he held prior
to World War II—and during his writing of The Apes of God. But Lewis’s strong
aversion to the Bloomsbury group and his affiliation with British fascism prior to the
second World War positioned him in direct opposition to Virginia Woolf and her
affiliates.
Style, content, and affiliations within the world of modernism divide Woolf,
Lewis, and Waugh. Yet each of their novels from the early 1930’s focus on characters’
memories and visualizations of an elusive or illusory past, which has frequently
disappointing relationships with the characters’ experience of the present and imagination
of the future. Each of the novelists developed this disappointment in a similar way: by
looking at children and their relationship with conceptions of time and history. The three
modernist authors often have conflicting or incongruous perspectives of childhood, as we
will see. Despite the absence of a united vision, Woolf, Lewis, and Waugh create childcharacters
that are crucial to the plot and thematic development of their respective stories.
3
Furthermore, the interwar modernists tie their children to a larger, and just as
complicated, concept: the past. In making such a connection, the authors enter into an
existing discourse: Carolyn Steedman argues that over time, and especially within the
past two centuries, child-figures and childhood evolved into tools “used to express the
depths of historicity within individuals” as well as figures connecting to psychological
promises of retrieving a lost past (12). For Steedman, childhood becomes a tool for
verifying and bolstering the actual existence of personal history as well as offering a
gateway through which that individual can address and access the past, at least in theory.
I wish to take this connection of children and the personal desire to establish ones’ own
place in history a step further by explicitly connecting children with the concept of
nostalgia in the modernist era.
Nostalgia and children are rarely connected in discussions of modernist literature
or text. Yet fictional children often represent significant investments in and hopes for the
future as well as keys to memory and the past. The relationship of children and nostalgia
in modernist writings is, I believe, a crucial and overlooked aspect of modernist writing:
it transcends specific group ideology, associations, and boundaries, reaching across the
range of modernist aesthetics. This is not to imply that the gap is important because of a
united vision of their relationship. On the contrary: the balance of the child-nostalgia
relationship can vary widely between texts. In A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh focuses
primarily on nostalgia and its problems and manifestations, rather than children—though
children were crucial players in the novel’s depiction of nostalgia, they did not
themselves embody nostalgic impulses. In contrast, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves clearly
invests in childhood as a doorway for nostalgic desires and memories. And Wyndham
4
Lewis presents the most complex case of all in his biting satire, The Apes of God,
developing an environment in which childhood is opposed to the romanticization of the
past, yet simultaneously a mechanism for accessing an idealized history.
Within the past decade, numerous critics including Troy Boone, Claudia Nelson,
and Basudeo Sharma have written on the emerging awareness of children’s social,
literary, and legal lives that occurred during the Victorian period. And since the Second
World War, work written about the relationship between children and literature in
contemporary society has flourished in journals like Children’s Literature and work done
by critics including Dennis Butts and Peter Hunt. But this leaves a rather glaring gap
between the end of Victorianism and World War II: conveniently (or oddly), the absence
of truly significant critical attention to children in the modernist period.
One possible explanation for this hole is an absence of outstanding child
characters in modernist fiction. Hope Howell Hodgkins remarks that, in terms of
fictional presence, children “receive little [attention] in the high modernist era, which in
its peculiar aloofness from childhood makes an island between Victorian sentimentality
of the Golden Age and postmodern interest in children” (357). And the response to this
island seems to transfer into a corresponding absence of widespread scholarly interest
concerning or involving child characters in modernist literature. But while Hodgkins
correctly perceives a significant decrease in explicit or extended treatment of children—
there are few, if any, Oliver Twist or Kim equivalents in modernist Britain—her
explanation is not entirely satisfactory. Children frequently appear in modernist novels,
playing roles that are crucial to their novels’ thematic and artistic development. Though
it is easy to write off children that fall between the gap of Victorianism and post5
modernism as inconsequential, minor figures, I believe that such an opinion is an
oversimplification, and perhaps a tactic of avoiding the complicated roles that children
play across the boundaries of “modernism.”
An additional explanation is that modernists, especially British authors
disillusioned by the Great War and in the midst of a time of political questioning and
national transition, would desire to remove themselves from the romanticism of the
Victorian era. One method of distancing themselves from romanticism would be to avoid
a favored subject of romanticism: namely, children. To a group that was concerned with
the events surrounding a war on unprecedentedly large turf, the idea of children as
symbols of hope might seem farcical, the idea of a romantic future impossible. Yet
Margaret R. Higonnet observes that modernists who participated in the visual arts were
often drawn to children in the roles of aesthetic metaphors, models, and audience
members (86). And the frequent overlap between visual and literary modernism—most
famously seen in the Bloomsbury Group in Britain, Gertrude Stein’s salons in France,
and Wyndham Lewis’s dual status as writer and painter—imply a noticeable connection
between the different artistic modes. It does not seem plausible that the visual and
literary branches of modernism, which were often in close proximity with one another,
would have such grossly differing foci or perspectives. This points to a notable gap in
critical recognition of children in modernism—either a significant and unstudied divide
between visual and literary modernist subjects, or a total oversight regarding the place of
children in British modernist literature.
But children certainly do exist in modernist texts—and furthermore, their
presences complicate and enliven the works—so this critical gap deserves to be filled.
6
The modernist treatment of children, however overlooked and understudied, has given a
new kind of richness to the way that authors after modernism approach children and
childhood—and I do intend to be broad with “approach children and childhood,” because
I believe that this pertains to the entire scope of literature’s dealings with pre-adolescent
figures. The child-figures in The Apes of God, A Handful of Dust, and The Waves are not
positive figures, though each novel has child-figures that provide some amusement—
often darkly. Though these children may be overlooked by other characters or
downplayed by the novel’s narrative, they are rarely treated as generic figures or
examples of a “type,” which allows authors after modernism to continue to look at
childhood and the child in increasingly complex ways.
The modernists’ increasingly nuanced and controversial constructions of children,
particularly in relationship to nostalgic tendency and desire, require some preliminary
clarification: in order to discuss the textual relationships between children and nostalgia
in any meaningful way, it is first necessary to explicitly lay out the scope and limitations
of the specific terms “child” and “nostalgia.” And since nostalgia in interwar Britain was
so frequently intertwined with the figures of children, it is imperative that children be
identified and treated as individuals, separate from characterizations of adults.
Any discussion of human growth, both mental and physical, requires a clear
definition of the terms and concepts that the discussion will encompass. So in order to
make any kind of argument about a connection between childhood and adulthood,
especially one centering on the somewhat fraught concept of nostalgia, it is also
necessary for me to clarify exactly what I mean when I talk about “children” and
“adults.” Defining the term “child” is a rather slippery issue: in what specific, qualitative
7
ways do children differ from adults? Where is—or is there—a dividing line between the
state of being a child and the state of being adult? What happens to instigate the growth
of a person (or, in this case, character) from childhood to adulthood—and more
specifically, (how) do modernists understand it?
Authors and historians have struggled to come to a consensus regarding where
and how the shift from childhood to adulthood occurs and how to conceptualize and treat
children. Philippe Ariés proposes that during the middle ages, childhood was not a
recognizable period of time (124). Instead, children were those individuals who were
unable to survive without care from protective figures (i.e. mothers or nannies).
“Childhood” as such, then, ended at the age in which they were not immediately and
always dependent on authority figures, or around five to seven years of age—by
contemporary standards, extremely early (Heywood 11). And Carolyn Steedman
suggests that Britain during the nineteenth century reiterated this sense of the child as a
dependent figure, but that childhood during that century was both a “time span” and a
“category of experience”—meaning that a child was not confined within a specific age
range, but occupied a rather pliable space in time (7).
Since the apparently simple issue of the child is, in reality, quite complex, it is
above all important to explore exactly how one can differentiate children from adults.
There are many potential criteria for such classification. They tend to fall into two large
categories. The first, and more common, category is based on physical attributes and
biological distinctions between child and adult. But even this apparently straightforward
category presents its own divisions, controversies, and alternative understandings.
Physical characteristics of childhood can be based on physical or sexual maturity; in the
8
“biologically immature” phase (a term borrowed from Colin Heywood), childhood would
comprise the period of time up to the point at which an individual reached puberty or
would be otherwise fully physically developed (170). Although this might seem to be an
acceptable definition, it still leaves much to be desired. At what point is a person
physically mature? Since the human body continually undergoes the processes of aging,
growth, and decay, setting strict parameters for “child” in terms of age or bodily
development seems to be subjective—or, at the very least, purely comparative—given the
absence of any general consensus in modernist or even twentieth century definitions of
the child.
The second broad category that can be used separate children from adults is a
psychological state, or the way in which a person thinks and perceives the world. This
category encompasses the area of human awareness that is not based on a physical states
or capabilities: for example, mental maturity or emotional maturity. Determining the state
of childhood by an individual’s relative lack of awareness of the world around them
might seem, at first glance, to be a logical point of division between child and adult. But
the problems with this category should also be obvious: unlike physical maturity, there is
no quick or definitive way to gauge emotional maturity or mental maturity—in fact, there
does not seem to be any rubric to definitively differentiate “adult” mentalities from those
of children. And, like physical maturity, each of the options in psychological maturity is
unsteady; to what extent can any person reach “full” emotional or mental maturity?
Attempts to solve the problem of determining a childhood seem to raise more
questions than provide answers. The two broad categories of physical and psychological
maturity fail to encompass a series of additional traits that could be used to divide the
9
states of child- and adulthood. The first of these qualities is economic independence:
individual ability to work or support oneself financially. Entrance into sexual awareness
could fall under the category of either physical or mental development. Educational
progress could also be a marker. And there are, to be sure, many other potentially
differentiating factors that I have not listed. But not everyone will reach emotional,
mental, or “educational” maturity. Regarding economic independence, it is possible to be
financially dependent and remain an “adult” (for example, heirs of large inheritances or
workers with disabilities who rely on governmental aid). And these dividers do not even
begin to cover less literal or obvious categories: for example, the categorization of adults
as, forever, the children of their parents or referring to one’s followers as one’s children.
To be clear, I am not trying to find a single right way to define the child or unite
the many interpretations of child and childhood. Just the opposite: I want to clarify that
the issue with these definitions is that none of them are truly satisfactory. All of them
seem to have some kind of exterior deciding factor—a mediator or precedent that decides
whether or not a person is a child or adult. And the person, group, or mark that
determines when an individual undergoes the change from child to adult is, in every case,
unclear.
The difficulty of finding a single “right” or definitive solution to the problem of
dividing children from adults highlights the intrinsic subjectivity of the terms “child” and
“adult.” This discrepancy can also be seen in the ways that Lewis, Waugh, and Woolf try
to come to terms with children and childhood in their respective texts. And indeed, each
of the modernists approaches the division of children and adulthood with individual
nuances and concerns, constructing different definitions of “children” or completely
10
eschewing simplistic notions of a child/adult division. As we will see later, Wyndham
Lewis will combine an ironic perspective of the aging corporeal state in relation to oftenperformed
actions and mentality of childhood. Virginia Woolf will initially render the
child as a discoverer, a figure that explores and recognizes the separate spaces of
adulthood and childhood. Evelyn Waugh’s children, the most lifelike, will become
instigators that push the plot forward, refusing to let adults’ nostalgia stagnate.
One of the dangers in approaching children in modernist fiction is the temptation
to read child characters as autobiographical doorways into the mind or opinions of each
respective author. The children and child-figures that exist in each novel are important as
such, but are not realistic or biographical portrayals of real children—nor are they
necessarily indicative of the modernists’ personal visions of the child and childhood.
Rather, the lack of fixity in defining the child as such are a form of experimentation and
boundary-pushing, an intentional deviation from past (i.e. Victorian) standards of
narration and thought that vary between each author in their presentation and focus.
Like the problems surrounding a straightforward, simple definition of “child,”
particularly in relation to British modernism, the word nostalgia defies singular
categorization. Similarly, Lewis, Waugh, and Woolf will, through the course of their
writing, resist a unified concept or presentation of nostalgia, especially when it
corresponds to their child-figures. In order to avoid unnecessary repetition in my novelspecific
study of the interwar texts, I will construct the grounding of nostalgia here by
presenting and discussing the term’s three most outstanding forms and their particular
significance to interwar modernism. In order to represent the broad reaches and
11
manifestations of nostalgia, I will focus on a general historical and critical understanding,
rather than concepts rooted in one particular period or school of thought.
The first manifestation of nostalgia was not, as might be expected, a sense of
longing for the past or the “good old days.” Rather, Svetlana Boym traces the origins of
the term nostalgia to 1688, when a Swiss doctor named Johannes Hofer constructed a
new word from the Greek roots nostos, or “return home,” and algia, or “longing,” to give
a name to what was at the time a medical condition (xiii, 3). Medical nostalgia was
understood to be an intense, traumatic homesickness able to affect mental faculties:
sufferers experienced a feeling “akin to paranoia, only instead of a persecution mania, the
nostalgic was possessed by a mania of longing” (4). The term “nostalgia” continued to
be used in a medical context through the first decades of the twentieth century, though it
had largely faded from common diagnosis by that time. Furthermore, this “mania of
longing” often had an incapacitating effect on the sufferer’s body: Hofer noted that
physical symptoms could include loss of appetite and nausea, fever, brain inflammation,
and cardiac arrests. Mental affects could include suicidal desires (4).
Victims of medical nostalgia were overwhelmingly male, and beginning in the
nineteenth century, their disease was believed to be a reaction against the fragmentation
that an increasingly modernized world left in its wake—evolving modes of
transportation, communication, and warfare that complicated means of living (Chu 83).
This connection to war accounted for the primarily male-based character of the disease;
soldiers on a battlefield far from home were, more than any other group in Britain,
exposed to a very real severance from their lives and experiences in their mother country.
These men were cut off from their homes by distance and lifestyle; everyday activities
12
were drastically altered by the events and traumas of war, as were soldiers’ surroundings
and the company they kept. But more significant than altered routine was the
overarching problem that led to nostalgia: the victims’ sense that they no longer had
direct ties to their native country. The soldiers’ bodies were removed from the soil, which
seemed to have a similarly disruptive effect on the state of their mentalities.
Patricia E. Chu’s application of nostalgia to Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier
sets a precedent of visualizing medical nostalgia in relation to a specific modernist text.
Chu reads the character Chris’s medical amnesia (paired with overwhelming shellshock
from participating in the Great War) as an extreme case of nostalgia’s intense effects on
mental status (83-84). Medical nostalgia, then, highlights two kinds of violence: the first,
regarding literal violence in war; the second is the violence of an individual’s severance
from a sense of the familiar. The violence of nostalgia in West’s novel is not identical to
that of the novels by Lewis, Waugh, or Woolf, yet Chu’s observations regarding the
violence of nostalgia in the modernist novel will appear in the interwar authors’ novels
through nostalgia’s ties to warfare and its effects on the body/mind. Furthermore, her
application of medical nostalgia in a modernist context is a precedent for a more
widespread consideration of the possibilities of nostalgia in relation to British interwar
texts.
The second variety of nostalgia that I will consider is grounded in the hyperreal,
as defined by Jean Baudrillard. This concept is the crucial base of the second kind of
nostalgia, which is present in a cultural environment. In setting up a vision of culturalwide
nostalgia, I am first concerned with Baudrillard’s concepts of simulations and
13
simulacra in the construction of hyperreality, then in connecting the hyperreal with
nostalgic perspective.
In short, the hyperreal is based on the action of simulation and the image of
simulacra. Simulations and simulacra are, respectively, actions and images that represent
a reality that has never actually existed. The hyperreal is a simulation of a simulation—in
other words, the presentation of something that has never existed, yet is given the guise
of reality. Imagination creates the hyperreal product that the mind accepts as real,
although this constructed (hyper)reality does not rely upon a citable source for its
generation. A hyperreal world is a world in which the real is not longer present; rather, it
is subverted by simulacra that are accepted and treated as real. Thus this simulation of
space and time becomes hyperreal, “a real without origin or reality,” and the presence of
the imaginary conceals reality’s non-existence (1, 14). This concept of the hyperreal
links neatly with nostalgia. The impossibility of perfectly rendering the real parallels the
impossibility of achieving a perfect rendering of the past: the past becomes hyperreal
because it is unattainable. So, then, nostalgia is a way of constructing hyperreality that
makes a simulated version of the past available by accessing the imaginary, and its
manifestation can range from the fairly mundane to the pathological.
An imaginary (constructed) past will come into play in each of the interwar
novels in this study. It might consist of individuals’ recollections of feelings or
understandings of situations that stand in and claim to represent the “real” past. Yet
Baudrillard’s concept of nostalgia deviates away from the individual diagnosis seen in
medical nostalgia; instead of being an individualized, treatable condition, his nostalgia
affects a widespread group—an entire culture of beings. In order for such a widespread,
14
complicated notion of simulated reality to exist, there must be a group participation and
investment in the idea. This form of nostalgia is much more insidious than medical
nostalgia because its presentation is not nearly as noticeable in the individual—though
individuals participate in (or fall under the illusion of) hyperreal nostalgia, the
widespread character of the nostalgia masks its presence in single subjects. But the true
“trick” of the hyperreal is that its subjects are unable to recognize the falseness that is
inherent in their so-called reality.
In the contemporary era, nostalgia has found a third niche: a longing for the “good
old days.” This form of nostalgia borrows significantly from Baudrillard’s concepts of
the hyperreal, but lacks the underlying implication of a culture-wide understanding and
widespread base, manifesting itself instead in personal wishes, desires, and memories.
Elizabeth Outka notices this form of watered-down, reminiscent nostalgia in literary
modernism’s tension between the old and new; the conflict, she notices, centers around a
romanticization of the past in search for something “pure” or “sanctified,” rather than the
actual existence of the past with all of its own worries and complications (95). And
Svetlana Boym identifies the primary twentieth-century understanding of nostalgia as a
particular “sentiment of loss and displacement” in response to the loss of a home that no
longer or never existed, as well as “a romance with one’s own fantasy.” (xiii). Though
this romanticization and fantasy take place on an individual level, Boym notices that
“good old days” nostalgia has become an “incurable” condition of modernity (xiv).
This reminiscent nostalgia might seem to be fairly simple in comparison to
Baudrillard’s perspective of nostalgia in relation to the hyperreal, but this third version of
nostalgia can serve both positive and negative functions. The fantasy-pasts that these
15
nostalgics create may be the remnants of their own pasts or places in time and space that
were outside of their lifetime and realm of experience. In a positive way, nostalgic
remembrance of the past can make events more tolerable or pleasing to the memory. It
can also maintain an individual’s connection to people, places, or events that are no
longer in existence.
But, like hyperreal nostalgia, those who dream of the good old days remember a
past that did not exist in the way their imaginations reconstruct it, because their
imagination lacks the wholeness or unity of that bygone time. They participate in an
essentially escapist activity that encourages them to build a version of the world that
eliminates major problems and constantly promotes the primacy of a lost past over the
current existence of the present. When the nostalgic uses these constructions of the past
to envision and instruct the present and future, their individual, false notions can have
destructive effects on their own lives and relationships as well as the lives of others.
Since reminiscent nostalgics’ delusions of (nonexistent) pasts can have effects in their
activities and interactions, even the most “individualized” nostalgia becomes a public
concern, rather than an individual concern, because the delusions are no longer limited to
the body and mind of the sufferer.
In all three varieties of nostalgia—medical, hyperreal, and reminiscent—the key
aspect of nostalgia is also the most insidious. Nostalgia is a desire for the past—
sometimes a yearning to return to past events or states of existence, sometimes an urge to
regain the innocence of lost time, sometimes a wish to reconnect with people and places
that have changed or no longer exist. The problem with these desires is that they look
toward illusions of a past that has never existed; although the places, times, and people
16
may have actually existed in the past, the nostalgic’s reconstruction is a fiction, a
romanticized or skewed version of that past. Furthermore, if the time that is the focus of
nostalgia occurred prior to the sufferers’ lifetimes, there is no way that they could hope to
be able to remember it; it is out of their realm of experience and is permanently
inaccessible, except through delusion.
Nostalgia has historically been seen as a medical condition/disease; a sociohistorical
condition; and, most generally, a way of looking at the past under a
romanticized lens. Dealing with the varying interpretations and effects of nostalgia raises
major questions: How does one correctly remember the past? Is it possible? And if it is
possible, is nostalgia at all a healthy, responsible, or “good” way to do so? As with
definitions of childhood, no single understanding of nostalgia, whether medical, social, or
sentimental, seems to be able to stand by itself as the (single) definitive or primary
concept. Furthermore, these supposedly individual ideas of nostalgia frequently overlap.
So, like the definition(s) of “child,” the definition(s) of “nostalgia” are at once
ambiguous and problematic. But Lewis, Waugh, and Woolf will each deal with the
problem—if it is indeed a problem—of nostalgic thought and construction individually,
tying it irrevocably to the figures of children that populate their respective novels.
Though I have primarily raised questions and provided a frame for thought regarding the
nature of children/childhood and nostalgia, I will now shift from dealing primarily with
theory and crucial underlying topics to a specific study of the two topics in each interwar
novel, addressing the works individually. The many dimensions of the child in the three
novels alone will indicate the illusion behind the idea of a universal notion of the child
and childhood and result in a similarly complicated view of nostalgia, as we will see.
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CHAPTER II
NOSTALGIA DISRUPTED: A HANDFUL OF DUST
A Handful of Dust has, through its title, obvious ties to canonical modernism; it
explicitly referenced T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and the novel’s epigraph was an
excerpt from the same work. Yet Evelyn Waugh was not generally affiliated with any
particular modernist movement during his lifetime, and his work reflected this lack of
affiliation: rather than attempt to revolutionize or scandalize the literary world with
textual or thematic innovation, his novels relied on fairly conventional formal frames.
Despite the absence of overt textual experimentation or group affiliation (as Virginia
Woolf had experienced with Bloomsbury, or Lewis with the Vorticists), Waugh was, at
least in retrospect, solidly modernist. He was certainly writing and publishing at the
same time as well-known Modernists, including Woolf and Lewis, Eliot, and Pound, and
his work was considered to be of high quality, as his contemporary Rebecca West
recognized (Stannard 95-96). Mark Perrino similarly identifies his acquaintanceship with
the Sitwell family, associates of the Bloomsbury Group that Lewis satirized in his 1930
novel The Apes of God (54).
In my introduction, I wrote that children and nostalgia would have varying levels
of emphasis in each of the three interwar novels in this study. As the initial novel that I
will explore, it seems appropriate that Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust focuses less on
children and primarily on nostalgia—a thematic decision that will contrast with the
evolving manifestations of children in Woolf and Lewis. Yet children are critical to
Waugh’s novel; when they interact with adults, they remain for the most part unchanged,
but have a particularly transformative effect on the adults in question. Their catalytic
18
effect has, for the adults’ nostalgia, a result that is as dismal as the novel’s referential title
seems to foreshadow.
There are only two outstanding child characters in Waugh’s novel: the main
character’s son, John Andrew, and Winnie, the daughter of a fairly minor character. And
even these children appear only in various episodes, rather than consistently throughout
the novel. So, rather predictably, Evelyn Waugh’s portrayals of children in A Handful of
Dust have been generally skimmed over by critics. If Waugh was, as Hope Howell
Hodgkins submits, “the most family-minded modernist writer” (he would later have
seven children, in comparison to Woolf and Lewis, who remained childless) then this
apparent dearth of children is not promising for the significance of children in modernist
literature at all, let alone in relation to as broad and widespread a concept as nostalgia
(358). Yet these children, though few in number, play crucial roles in the 1934 novel’s
development of nostalgia as mediated through the main character, Tony Last.
Perhaps Waugh is indeed the most family-minded modernist, for despite his own
state of childlessness during his writing of the 1934 publication, he does not seem to find
the notion or state of childhood particularly troublesome; his child-characters are fairly
realistic: they speak and act believably, defy caricature, and are easily distinguishable
from adults in their language and actions. John Andrew Last, Tony’s son, is somewhere
around the age of six, still young enough to require a nanny. His youthfulness, never
explicitly specified by age, and his fairly precocious personality allow Waugh to focus
his humor in John Andrew’s speech and actions, which often parrot the lower-classed,
“filthy” language of an estate stable hand. And Winnie, a “plain child with large goldrimmed
spectacles,” is a somewhat mundane eight-year-old who gets carsick, wants to go
19
to the seaside, and demands ices during her brief appearances in the work (129, 127).
Though their “realistic” depiction in A Handful of Dust may seem to indicate a
correspondence between fictional and real children, such a connection is illusory—
wishful thinking, at best. Rather than functioning as a direct transference of children into
the novel or a reflection of Waugh’s opinion of children, John Andrew and Winnie act as
catalytic figures, tools that assist the progress both of the plot and the revelation of Tony
Last’s pathological nostalgia, as we will see.
The few instances in Waugh’s text that hint at any ambiguity in the border
between childhood and adulthood center on horses. In the most notable instance, John
Andrew has acquired a new horse on his sixth birthday, a replacement for the Shetland
pony that had provided a doorway into the world of riding. The transition between horses
is also the beginning of a transition from child- to adulthood: “Before her arrival riding
had been a very different thing…Now it was a man’s business”—as opposed to child’s
play (17). But even this potential ambivalence is not serious—though riding might be a
man’s business, John Andrew is, Waugh makes clear, certainly not a man. He still
requires instruction from the stable hand, Ben, and the continued supervision of a nanny.
Though children and adults may interact with one another, in even his driest humor
Waugh’s images of childhood, particularly John Andrew’s appearances, are clearly set as
an experience separated from adulthood.
Similarly clear-cut, at least initially, is Waugh’s presentation of nostalgia, seen
through the eyes and experiences of his main character, Tony Last. Tony reveals his
desire to maintain the past through his wishes for a comfortable, unchanging world. His
estate, Hetton Abbey, forms the “world” that allows him to maintain his unrealistic
20
beliefs and expectations. Not only does Hetton offer him an arena for his hopeful
nostalgia, but the building itself is also a subject of Tony’s past-obsessed fantasies. Such
a nostalgic attachment to homes and buildings is not a fictional fluke; the obsession with
the past, in terms of home décor and maintenance, was a widely-recognized aspect of
British culture in between the First and Second World Wars. Interwar Britain was
characterized by a population that was “too enchanted with [their nation’s] glorious
history,” according to Deborah Cohen, particularly in terms of domestic architectural
style (179). This near-obsessive enchantment with the past was commonly demonstrated
in the organization of the household. After the First World War, throwbacks to the
Regency and Empire styles, rather than more contemporary architectural concepts,
became popular among well-to-do residents of Britain (Cohen 182). Tony Last actively
participates as a member of this historically-enchanted populace, but his interest in the
past emerges differently than his more mainstream, non-fictional contemporaries.
Though Tony avoids furnishing his home in the more prevalent Empire or
Regency styles, he proudly preserves Hetton Abbey as a Gothic structure, then an
architecturally unpopular style—a local guidebook suggests that since its 1864
refurbishing, the house is “devoid of interest” (12). Despite this published view of his
home, Tony clings to the belief that “the time would come, perhaps in John Andrew’s
day, when opinion would reinstate Hetton in its proper place”—as an environment that
embodies and epitomizes a national vision of glorious British history (13). Through
Hetton, Tony visualizes a national past with which he can tie his personal and family
history—a past that he believes is exemplified the home he has meticulously maintained.
Tony lives in an entirely fabricated world, since he has constructed an interior with what
21
Charles Rice terms “nostalgia for lost origins” in order to connect himself with the wider,
culturally-revered past that he has not experienced (5). He is, like other members of his
social circle, a member of a society that idealizes and gives preferential treatment to the
past in comparison to the present. But Tony’s simulation of the past is simultaneously
personal: the world that he constructs through Hetton does not subscribe to the popular
preferences of his society.
Waugh’s rendering of nostalgia, set up in Tony’s reverence for Hetton Abbey and
its backdrop, is twofold. In a world in which architecture is a means of connecting to the
past, the first and more obvious nostalgia is focused on space and place. Within
backward-oriented Britain, Tony’s maintenance of Hetton Abbey and its interior is an
individual attempt to reconnect with a history that is forever lost—an “emotional pain
that Tony cannot articulate” that emerges in his personal feelings of nostalgia rather than
in speech or actions (Gorra 211). And in his attempt to articulate his desire for the past
by preserving Hetton in its outmoded Gothic style, Tony divorces himself from the
chance to live in the present and instead constructs a life in which he is contained “like a
fossil in his bedroom, still crammed with the unbroken relics of his childhood” (Slater
49).
Tony cannot escape from his sense of frozenness, but this fossilization is selfimposed.
He is not forced to live in Hetton; rather, he chooses to remain at the family
estate while his wife purchases and moves into an apartment in London. Since Hetton is
Tony’s childhood home, his decision to remain on the country estate, rather than reside
with his wife in a city flat, allows him to remain in the same physical and mental space
that he occupied as a child; this is a sign that he looks backward toward his personal and
22
familial pasts as places of comfort. His childlike state of existence within the family
home is preferable to beginning a new, adult life in a flat because he can control—or
maintain—his already-familiar surroundings.
Hetton’s structure points simultaneously backward, to the desire for a
romanticized past, and forward, to a similarly idyllic future that, to a certain extent,
mirrors the past. The house’s structure also traps Tony in its simulation of history and its
lack of motion; by immersing himself in Hetton’s backward-looking space, he
perpetuates his own arrested development—staying, childlike, with the relics of his past;
for as long as Hetton continues to stand, he can remain comfortably static inside.
Tony’s domestic nostalgia appears in more than Hetton’s exterior alone: the
home’s out-of-date façade houses constant and readily apparent relics of the past through
the names of its rooms. Hetton’s Gothic-Arthurian interior is as far from post-war vogue
as its Gothic shell, and its departure from popular nostalgic obsession (in favor of Tony’s
personal variety of nostalgia) is overwhelmingly apparent within its interior: each room
in the house has a name, labeled in Gothic text that has been “collected” from Arthurian
legends—prototypical British mythology. Rooms’ names include Morgan le Fay (which
is “not in perfect repair,” despite the Lasts’ efforts), Guinevere (his wife Brenda’s room),
and Galahad (Tony’s own room) (13). And yet Tony’s nostalgia, as evidenced by the
interior and exterior spaces of Hetton, is not merely a method of participating in his social
environment, but is instead a pathological obsession. Overwhelming desire for control
over his environment shifts Tony’s nostalgia from the social norm to such a pathological
status. Unable to merely adopt the architectural façades of the past like other British
citizens, Tony’s nostalgic attention to the house and its inherent reverence for mythology,
23
literally inscribed within the house’s structure, allows him to organize and re-construct
the national and familial pasts that Hetton’s referential construction evokes.
Furthermore, they allow him to live within the confines of familial and national nostalgia
even as he goes about his everyday life. It is this overwhelming desire to physically
occupy the spaces of the past that indicate on aspect of Tony’s extreme psychological
state.
But Tony’s pathological nostalgia is not limited to Hetton’s architectural space;
Waugh’s second rendering of nostalgia is based in emotions. George McCartney notes
that much “like the decorative dado and molding of an earlier age [the Lasts’] personal
and family loyalties are treated as the remnants of a nostalgic but inconvenient interior
design better covered and put out of sight” (137). Within Hetton’s architectural space, its
occupants attempt (and fail) to preserve outdated feelings for one another, remnants of an
unredeemable past. The Last family’s connections to one another are lukewarm, at best;
though Tony has emotional ties to his son, John Andrew, and Brenda, his wife, they are
rarely together as a family; Brenda spends most of her time in the city, and Tony rarely
leaves Hetton. Yet Tony preserves his dream or illusion of a functioning, healthy family
despite his marital relations that consist of “domestic playfulness” at their most intimate
moments (16). Waugh reveals his characters’ participation in acts of emotional nostalgia
through their contact with child characters, whose presences and interactions with the
adult world expose the constructedness and ultimate failure of an artificially-rendered
past.
Extreme attachment to and desire for the nostalgic past, both spatially and
emotionally, control Tony’s life. His actions—as opposed to his feelings alone—revolve
24
around the preservation of failing system, despite evidence of nostalgia’s weakness. The
problem with both foci of Tony’s nostalgia—space/place and emotional—is that they
reveal their artificiality by failing to live up to their promises. Hetton’s remodeling in the
1860s has transformed it from a place that was “formerly one of the notable houses of the
county” into a structure that does not appeal to the British public—moving Hetton even
farther from the possibility of regaining the cultural appeal that Tony so desperately
desires (12). The interior of the house also seems to resist human ability to live within
the trappings of the past; Tony plans to remodel the house because the interior is “not
altogether amenable to modern ideas of comfort,” and the room called Galahad is so
uncomfortable that, as Tony’s wife Brenda notices, “No one who sleeps there ever comes
again—the bed’s agony” (12, 23). And Tony’s emotional nostalgia, seen in his
sentimentality and nostalgic treatment of others, collapses in the novel’s tragedies. He
and his wife, Brenda, undergo separation and the beginning stages of divorce; their son,
John Andrew, dies in a horse-related accident; and Tony himself is forever separated
from his beloved estate after a journey to South America goes wildly awry. These events
make it impossible for Tony to maintain his illusion of a stable, comfortable home
environment, both spatially and emotionally. Waugh does not allow Tony to maintain his
nostalgic complacency by means of retaining a solid connection with the people and
places that surround him—instead, these very connections highlight how his nostalgia
fails him.
But the failure of Tony’s nostalgia does not occur spontaneously. Instead, it is
gradually set in motion through his interactions and relationships with children, who play
catalytic roles in Tony’s life. The two relationships that most disrupt his complacency
25
are those that he has with John Andrew and a pseudo-niece named Winnie. John Andrew
is, by far, the more prevalent of the two characters and is more immediately connected to
Tony’s construction of nostalgia. As Tony’s son, he lives in the same space that Tony
occupies and constructs, simultaneously occupying his father’s simulation of the past.
Tony also expresses an expectation that John Andrew will continue his efforts to preserve
the past by maintaining his desire to “reinstate” Hetton in Britain’s popular opinion—an
investment through which Tony can rest easily, knowing that the future of the family will
continue to revere the history that he prizes.
John Andrew’s unexpected death, then, is a critical hit to Tony’s notions of
security. It is this first incident that begins to change his relationship with nostalgia and
its objects and reveals the importance of the child in relationship to nostalgia within A
Handful of Dust. The setting of the boy’s death is especially crucial to the beginning of
the estate’s disintegration as a nostalgic fortress: the accident that ends John Andrew’s
life takes place during a foxhunt on Hetton’s estate. This foxhunt highlights the hereclear
division of child and adult: John Andrew, a young boy, is allowed to go foxhunting,
an adult event that is inappropriate for a child that requires constant supervision from a
nanny. The end result of the hunt is an accident in which John Andrew is struck and
killed by another rider’s horse—a sort of punishment for his transgression from ageappropriate
activity. Since John Andrew is Tony and Brenda’s only child, the future of
Last nostalgia is jeopardized by his abrupt death: if Tony dies before the estate is returned
to its rightful place in British opinion, there will be no one left in the Last line to preserve
Hetton. This is a threat to Tony’s physical and mental constructions of lasting
26
nostalgia—but not an immediate death knell, since Tony is still relatively youthful and
can still hole himself up within Hetton’s comforting space.
But Waugh’s destruction of Tony’s nostalgia is not complete without eliminating
his emotionally-based illusions: those that allow him to maintain a comfortable façade of
family unity and solidity. Tony’s family is in the process of dissolving around him: John
Andrew is gone, and as shocking as the loss is for Tony, he predicts, “‘It’s going to be so
much worse for Brenda. You see she’d got nothing else, much, except John. I’ve got
her, and I love the house … but with Brenda John always came first naturally’” (105).
But even this understanding of Brenda is a delusion—his wife has been emotionally
withdrawn from both Tony and their child for much of the novel. John Andrew’s death
provides Brenda with the realization that “without offspring their marriage is pointless,”
and this is a strong enough impetus for her to ask Tony for a divorce (McCartney 151).
With the loss of Brenda and John Andrew, Tony can have no more illusions about the
state of his emotional relationships. But he still has Hetton.
The problem of the divorce is the entry point for the second critical child. Tony
still clings to the last vestiges of his emotional nostalgia, allowing Brenda to appear as
plaintiff in the divorce case despite her infidelity. In order to provide the court with
evidence for a divorce, Tony and his lawyers stage a simulation of infidelity, renting a
suite at a seaside hotel for Tony to carry on the performance of an affair. But the woman
with whom Tony chooses to engage in this deception, Milly, brings her eight-year-old
daughter, Winnie, with them to the seaside resort—much to the surprise of Tony, the
hotel’s reception clerk, and the detectives that have been hired to find proof of Tony’s
unfaithfulness. Winnie’s presence complicates the simulation of infidelity, as one of the
27
detectives notices: “I don’t like the look of this case. Most irregular. Sets a nasty,
respectable note bringing a kid into it” (130). And illusion is much more important than
reality: a lawyer recalls, “‘Lately we had a particularly delicate case involving a man of
very rigid morality and a certain diffidence. In the end his own wife consented to go with
him and supply the evidence. She wore a red wig. It was quite successful’” (125). But
Winnie’s presence spoils the “red wig” of the affair by giving it the illusion of normality
and a familial context, rather than an image of torrid spousal deviance.
Winnie’s presence is not itself nostalgic, but has several considerable effects on
Tony. The first of these is that she provides grounds for Tony to solidify what he had not
realized to be a slipping hold on Hetton. After his unsuccessful stay at the seaside hotel,
Tony discovers that Brenda has increased the amount of alimony she desires; going
through with the divorce as planned would force Tony to sell Hetton in order to pay the
large sum that she demands. So it seems that the child assists Tony; by ruining the façade
of infidelity, Tony can keep the nostalgic environment that he has cultivated. Winnie has
inadvertently allowed Tony to maintain possession of his estate and the remains of its
soothing connection to an imagined past.
However, Waugh will not allow Tony to escape from his fate. His realization of
Brenda’s betrayal, in both her own infidelity and her demands for what essentially
comprises the loss of his estate, is a blow that shatters his nostalgic ecstasy: “His mind
had suddenly become clearer on many points that had puzzled him. A whole Gothic
world had come to grief…there was now no armor glittering through the forest glades, no
embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled…” (146).
His realization that Brenda plans to forcibly vacate him from the home that he loves
28
strips his emotional connection to both Brenda, who has betrayed him, and Hetton, which
becomes, through Brenda’s eyes, valued through its monetary potential, rather than the
romanticized history to which it points. Furthermore, he sees his nostalgia for what it is,
and “the common literary motif of the deceptive contrast between appearance and reality
receives an ironic modification…behind the facade is not reality but nothing”—a perfect
example of Baudrillard’s hyperreality (Ward 687). Behind Tony’s belief of a happy,
functioning family, there is no true emotional tie. The Last’s marriage, previously
characterized by the passionless façade of “domestic playfulness” and affection, is,
through Brenda’s divorce, revealed to be nothing, and Tony’s vision of a mythological
Hetton as home for ongoing nostalgia is shattered.
Tony’s nostalgic weltanschauung begins its downward spiral through the death of
his child within the property that he loves so dearly. Through this re-rendering of his
estate, Last undergoes a final sense of “betrayal and dispossession”—both from Brenda,
who reveals the absence of genuine investment in the family, and from Hetton, which is
no longer a space that can maintain the illusion of an idealized past (Stannard 355). The
largest betrayal is John Andrew’s death itself; Hetton, which Tony has cultivated as a
safe and comfortable space, is not truly safe for his son, who represented a future of
continued nostalgia. And without Brenda, he has little chance of producing another heir
that will continue the Lasts’ constructive project after Tony’s death.
This final realization of Hetton’s falsely preserving nature instigates Tony to
break away from his formerly nurturing space and travel to South America, where he will
later die. Tony’s failure to return to England does not end Waugh’s focus on Hetton and
its nostalgic nature. Tony’s brother, Richard Last, inherits the estate, but traces of Tony
29
remain in an inscribed stone memorial that commemorates “Anthony Last of Hetton,
Explorer” (213). Tony Last is forever tied to Hetton in this stone, even though he is not
present on the estate—or even in England—in body. Teddy, Richard Last’s son,
similarly continues to tie Tony to Hetton’s estate through his own unwitting continuation
of nostalgia. Teddy chooses to live in Galahad, the “unlivable” room that drove away
guests, and exhibits an overwhelming love for his own writing of history in his desire to
“one day…restore Hetton to the glory that it had enjoyed in the days of his cousin Tony”
(214). In this closing line, Teddy chooses to install Tony as a nostalgic figure within the
confines of his former estate and inscribes himself, Teddy, as the true inheritor of the
overwriting, reminiscent nostalgia that characterized Tony’s occupation of Hetton. Yet
he remains oblivious to the fact that his vision of the past is wholly constructed.
Teddy has no real frame of reference for what has previously happened or what
really existed, apart from what he imagines to be a glorious past. Thus he has already
fallen into the same illusion-filled romanticization of history that his uncle occupied.
Together, the memorial stone and Teddy’s dream for the future bind Tony into the
mythical familial past that Tony worked to maintain during his lifetime. But even
Teddy’s return to nostalgia hints at larger problems. Whether Teddy’s attempts to
reconstruct the house’s physical and symbolic greatness will have eventual success is
unsure; so far, such attempts have been fruitless. And with the inheritance of a romantic
longing for a past that never existed, Teddy’s future as a keeper of Tony’s legacy seems
destined for disappointment.
Evelyn Waugh’s vision of nostalgia in A Handful of Dust is complex and
intentionally disappointing. Tony lives in a hyperreal environment that fosters his
30
visualization of an ideal future that is identical to the past. But the romanticized reality
that Tony envisions is intensely personal, rather than a vision shared by the rest of his
environment or culture—a trait of reminiscent nostalgia. Finally, Tony’s nostalgia is
monomaniacal, a singular obsession that consumes his thoughts and actions, which
revolve around Hetton and its occupants. So through Tony, Waugh combines elements
of Baudrillard’s (invisible) cultural nostalgia and longing for the good old days with the
overwhelmingly intense psychological effects of medical nostalgia.
But Waugh’s vision of nostalgia does not remain stable; though Tony Last begins
the novel in stasis, the novel’s children act as catalytic forces, disrupting his constructed
worlds and instigating change through their presences and actions. Though Waugh
chooses to emphasize, rather than question, the divisions between children and adults,
children—specifically John Andrew and Winnie—connect with and influence adult Tony
by means of nostalgia, constantly pushing him out of his hyperreal world until it
collapses and leaves him without support. John Andrew and Winnie may not be
harbingers or vessels of nostalgia; nor are they overtly major characters. But by
influencing and altering the course of Tony Last’s life and feelings, they represent a
future that outwits even the most carefully-maintained nostalgia.
A Handful of Dust uses a narrative that is comparatively traditional, when viewed
alongside The Waves and The Apes of God; yet its use of the child is not at all traditional.
Children are, rather than merely representational characters, devices used to instigate and
highlight the failure of nostalgia in Tony Last’s life. They cannot heal emotional wounds
or medicate Tony’s pathological personality; nor can they protect or preserve adherents to
nostalgic belief. Waugh’s narrative posits that because children like John Andrew or
31
Teddy Last cannot recuperate what Tony has lost, Tony’s efforts and sacrifices become
essentially meaningless: they do not preserve the past, and only serve to highlight the
shifting and forward momentum of the future.

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