Boselli 1

John Boselli
Death of the Private Heart
In the Oxford culture of Waughs Brideshead Revisited, with women kept in purdah,
students commonly formed profound homosexual relationships regardless of any queer
identification. Marriage and children would displace these romantic friendships and,
understanding this, the sexual categories of 1920s-era England account stressed the youths
orientation over their eroticism. These were not treated frivolously or with private shame, but as
learning experiences that prefigured healthy heterosexual couplings (Pugh). However, for queer
individuals, like protagonist Charles Ryder, the oppressive divide between youth and age,
Bacchic Oxford of the 1920s and hypermasculine 1940s England, encouraged brazenly
rebellious and oppressively conformist social performances, or camp, to insulate them against
the normative culture they would subvert.
In Susan Sontags 1964 essay Notes on Camp, she explains that homosexuals, by and
large, constitute the vanguard and the most articulate audience of Camp[for] the Camp
insistence on not being seriousconnects with the homosexual's desire to remain youthful
(63). Ryders love, the charming post-Wildean dandy Sebastian Flyte, teddy bear in tow,
whose speech is full of rainbow light for a second and then phut!, embodies the danger of
detachment in camp (Waugh 54, 60). The fledgling social queer hunting for the low door in the
wall, expecting an enclosed and enchanted garden, Ryder identifies Sebastian with the
essence of homosexuality, which for him is a life of strawberries, sunbathing, sweetness, and
(implied) sodomy (32).
His involvement is not high, or sincere camp for, unlike the exaggerated dress and stutter
of student Anthony Blanche, with his smooth chocolate-brown suit with loud white stripes,

Boselli 2
suede shoes, [and] large bow-tie, Ryder does not confirm any queer identification, likely
because he lacks to proper terminology to do so (34). Sebastians dominion over the bewitching
Brideshead Castle inspires Ryder to feign quasi-lordship of Queer Street (70); no longer
throwing their languorous parties, their homosexuality becomes exclusive within Oxfords
queer community, a simulacra of Anthony Blanches I may be inverted but I am not insatiable
command of homosexual discourse (53). Driven to drink every night by golden candlelight,
sleeping together in the nude, Sebastian and Charles fashion a gay Eden of the Brideshead
grounds (93). His homosexual camp performance fails because it is self-enclosed, railing not
against the plebian Rex Mottrams of the world, but merely imitating Sebastians defiance of
his Catholic family (Hekanaho).
Bridesheads narrative is a flashbulb memory from WWII soldier Ryder, and his queer
reminiscences (especially noticeable when describing other queer men from him his past, e.g.,
Blanche) are constructed of "normative, hegemonic masculine" language (Hekanaho). A form of
heterocamp, aspiring to the virile, emotionless, and heroic aesthetic that took hold after World
War II and the introduction of the tract home-commuter lifestyle, Ryder, just as he once declares
his devotion to Sebastian contra mundum, he inverts this sexual binary by excising any
explicit references to sex or the psychological reality of their love and repositions himself as part
of the straight community (Waugh 158). The novels military frame serves to remind the reader
that Ryder can and does function in a homosocial environment without homosexuality; the queer
past is ostensibly behind him, or rather coded into the text. The army here operates on a cult of
silence, where men lose their lives for one another, but to speak of the bonds that inform such
selflessness would be feminine. For Charles, the men around him, like compatriot Hooper, think
only of humane legislation and industrial change, not romance (Hekanaho). Ryders

Boselli 3
inability to live authentically straight (rather than simply heterosexual) or as part of the
homosexual demi-monde turns him toward religious heteropessimism.
Catholicism indulges Charles homoerotic leanings under the auspices of straight
devotion. The profoundly complex iconography of Christs rippling figure on the crucifix and
the rituals surrounding it direct Ryders carnal desires toward heaven, where the love of male
flesh (the Eucharist, for example) is an imperative. He recalls his father-in-laws last rites: I
suddenly felt the longing for a sign [of Lord Marchmains awareness], if only of courtesy [for
Julia, Ryders wife]; this pious self-deception is his final bid of acceptance to the Marchmain
clan, and yet, years later, standing in the decommissioned tabernacle of Brideshead Castle at the
novels end, the still-burning flame beams through a beaten copper lamp of deplorable design
(402). Just as Sontag cites Art Nouveau as the nadir of the camp aesthetic, so Ryder, private with
the God he beholds only as a heterosexual necessity, allows himself his queer observations,
seeing through the garish artistry because he himself has built his social interactions around such
bathos (Sontag 55).
Unable to accept both the blaze-and-crash lives of Sebastian, Blanche, and Kurt and the
grim aloofness of Brideshead Flyte and his own father in a gender normative culture for himself,
Charles negativity capability is what kills his heart. His camp performances belie his indecision.

Boselli 4
Works Cited
Hekanaho, Pia Livia. "Et in Pansy Ball Ego: A Queer Look at the Representations of
Masculinity in Evelyn Waughs Brideshead Revisited." Journal of Queer Studies in
Finland 2 (2008).
Higdon, David Leon. "Gay Sebastian and Cheerful Charles: Homoeroticism in Waugh's"
Brideshead Revisited"." ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 25.4
(1994).
Pugh, Tison. "Romantic Friendship, Homosexuality, and Evelyn Waugh's' Brideshead
Revisited'." English Language Notes 38.4 (2001): 64-72.
Sontag, Susan. "Notes on Camp." Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A
Reader (1964): 53-65.
Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. New York: Back Bay, 2012. Print.