How good it is to sit in the shade and talk of love.

September 27, 2013 1:19 PM

Friends, I am finally getting around to watching the 1981 version of Brideshead Revisited, and I have some questions about it.

I am very much enjoying the episodes. I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't yet read the book, and I am only through the second episode of the television program, so it may be that, in time, the show itself (or the book) will answer my question.

However, I thought I would inquire of the hive mind, so that I have a better context for the story.

Thus far, the people around Sebastian and Charles, both at Oxford and in Venice, seem remarkably, if not incredibly, tolerant and acceptive of their relationship. As is my understanding, Evelyn Waugh wished to keep the nature of their relationship ambiguous, but still, I find myself wondering to what extent the people of Europe of the early 1900s would have regarded Charles and Sebastian as tolerantly as they do in the program. I suppose I am asking how realistic what I am watching is.

Thank you in advance, as always, for helping me broaden my horizons.

posted by 4ster to Media & Arts (10 answers total)

Without having my books handy I can't do any sort of bibliography here, but as you're watching, note who is accepting of the relationship, and who is turning a blind eye--but also how different their relationship is viewed, than the way Anthony Blanche is viewed. The less stereotypically effeminate the characters are, the more their relationship can be accepted as one of deep friendship (the "homosocial" relationship). It is not quite as effusive as the love-letters ostensibly straight men would send to their friends during the Victorian period, but you see a large degree of tolerance for the display of emotion.
posted by mittens at 1:30 PM on September 27, 2013 [9 favorites]

Agreeing with what mittens said above. And not to get spoiler-y, but as you get in, you will see direct confirmation of the sliding scale of acceptance as related to the effeminacy of characters.
posted by Capt. Renault at 1:59 PM on September 27, 2013

IMO it's different in the book, where there's nothing overt for people to accept or tolerate; just two mates from university.
posted by Segundus at 2:39 PM on September 27, 2013 [3 favorites]

FWIW, my parents, who tend not to like anything too overtly sexualised (especially same-sex) absolutely adored Brideshead Revisited when it first came out. I was pretty young then so I don't know if they were aware and chose to ignore it, or deliberately interpreted Sebastian and Charles as being "just good friends".

My point, I guess, is that people can come up with all kinds of excuses to make things fit into their worldview, regardless of cognitive dissonance or compelling evidence indicating otherwise. And the early 1900s dominant worldview certainly would have interpreted their relationship as an intimate male friendship, without romantic/sexual overtones.
posted by Athanassiel at 6:04 PM on September 27, 2013 [4 favorites]

The key to understanding Charles and Sebastian's friendship along the spectrum of human attachments comes later in the book, where, in Italy, I believe, Sebastian's father's mistress has a talk with Charles about friendships. I won't spoil it but it's the answer you're looking for. Anthony Blanche is homosexual and thus occupies a different sort of world, having crossed into disreputability. Charles and Sebastian aren't. They never cross from philia to eros.
posted by resurrexit at 8:22 PM on September 27, 2013 [2 favorites]

FWIW, I don't think there's anything ambiguous about the nature of their friendship. It's an intense sort of love that confuses us moderns because, for us, when we love someone passionately, we tend to express that sexually. The book really is set in a time that's going to be just completely foreign to most anyone reading it today.

Wish I could watch that production again for the first time!
posted by resurrexit at 8:28 PM on September 27, 2013 [1 favorite]

I have not seen that since I was a teenager, never read the book. What immediately comes to mind is a voice over from Charles, something like: "In England, they say your first love is another boy." That hit me really hard at the time.

There is a stage where the very idea of sex is just gross and yet you've got the baffling equipment going off at night and the hormones and the knowledge but you can't fathom it and cleave to your same-sex friends. I took the series that way.

I think people were older when they hit that stage back then.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 3:31 AM on September 28, 2013

It's not clear in the novel whether Sebastian and Charles have a sexual relationship. Some people point to the line "naughtiness high in the category of grave sins" as suggesting that they did; on the other hand, getting dead drunk is also considered a "grave sin" by the Catholic Church.

I disagree that Cara's conversation with Charles suggests definitively that Sebastian and Charles's connection is free of either romance or sexuality. "'I know of these romantic friendships....I think they are very good if they do not go on too long'" might equally suggest that she finds same-sex romantic/sexual experimentation in youth different from lifelong homosexuality or bisexuality.

The TV script, on the other hand, seems to take romantic love between Charles and Sebastian as a given, and leaves ambiguous only the question of whether they had a sexual relationship as well. To adapt anything is to impose one's interpretation on it, of course.
posted by Sidhedevil at 9:52 AM on September 28, 2013 [2 favorites]

Also, the idea that Oxford students of that era weren't having sex with each other isn't borne out by reading diaries and letters. Waugh's good friend Harold Acton catalogued his sexual conquests meticulously, for instance (he and Brian Howard, another Waugh friend and classmate, were according to Waugh the models for Anthony Blanche).
posted by Sidhedevil at 9:59 AM on September 28, 2013 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you everyone for the input. I finished it a couple of months ago, and I enjoyed it greatly.
posted by 4ster at 1:38 PM on December 10, 2013