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| The Decline of Empire: New Perspectives on Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust |  |
In recent times there has been an increasing interest in rethinking fictions written in the modernist period from a post-colonial perspective - that is to make a post-colonial reading of a text in order to outline the effects of colonisation on both the centre of empire and the margins, and reveal how such a text either openly or unwittingly exhibits colonial ideologies. In particular, books such as Joseph Conrad's A heart of Darkness and E.M Fosters A Passage to India have been the subject of much critical analysis. Evelyn Waugh's popular 1934 novel, A Handful of Dust, does not in my opinion advocate colonial or imperial ideologies. I would argue that this text displays a discomfort with racial stereotypes and the imperial project.
The book recounts the demise of the upper-class marriage between Brenda and Tony Last. The ancestral home, Hetton Abbey, and it's upkeep consume the couple's finances and Tony's devotion - the building "was entirely rebuilt in 1864 in the gothic style and is now devoid of interest" (14). The mundane and economically stagnant life at Hetton drives Brenda to London where she instigates an affair with the younger, parasitic John Beaver, professional guest and notorious bore. Brenda's popularity soars amongst London society people while she increasingly neglects the welfare of her husband and child, the tragic John Andrew, in her pursuit of Beaver, culminating in John Andrews death and Brenda's gratitude that it is her son rather than the other John in her life, John Beaver, who is dead. Following the death Brenda files for divorce demanding a large settlement. In a farcical episode Tony is sent to Brighton to act out his infidelity to Brenda to satisfy the courts of his unreliable character. In many ways the second part of the novel is juxtaposed with the marital collapse to emphasise the moral decline consuming the world, in both the centre (England) and in the margins (South America) as Tony embarks on a journey through the Amazon with the explorer Dr. Messsinger in search of the mythical El Derado, an ancient city in the Amazon interior where Tony hopes to find "a transfigured Hetton" (160). Deserted by their guides, the tribal Indians, Dr. Messinger meets his death on a water fall and Tony suffering from fever is saved by the Dickens obsessed but illiterate Mr. Todd of Indian and English descent, who enslaves Tony in his mud hut home to read Dickens for the remainder of his days.
The decline of Hetton Abbey, it's ugliness, and the deterioration of the upper-class marriage between Brenda and Tony Last symbolise the extinction or "last" of Empire, the disillusion with the imperialist project that was looming in the modernist period. The penultimate pages of the novel see Tony's relatives, who have inherited Hetton, breed silver foxes representative of the new breed of savages that roam England. Although Waugh is not regarded as an overtly modernist writer, the editors of Modernism and Empire state that "modernism's place at the 'end of modernity' has led some to locate in modernism a questioning of attitudes to the 'other' and to colonialism...the argument is that more than an increasing liberal disquiet over colonialism can be see in modernism, rather it is the true starting point of postcolonial critique" (Intro 4). Patrick Williams points out that "one of the reasons for post-colonial animosity towards modernism is no doubt the fact that postcolonial critics encounter modernism as already in situ, an institutionalised, would-be hegemonic, seemingly reactionary presence, and one which even in its self-reflective moments appears obsessively concerned with the position of the west" (Modernism and Empire 18). In my opinion the alignment of modernism with post-colonial criticism is a worthwhile enterprise and one which I employ throughout the course of this essay. In some ways modernism's status as in situ makes an analysis more favourable than the growing comparisons between the postmodern and the postcolonial, which generally seems to reflect similarities between a critic's own agenda for postmodernism, notoriously difficult to define, and postcolonialism.
Like many writers of the modernist period, Waugh travelled widely and in December1932 he travelled to British Guyana which influenced the Amazon sequence in A Handful of Dust. Waugh was attracted to the East and the colonies as a place of liberation from the taboos of the West and a desire for the Other, but in A Handful of Dust Waugh clearly rejects such romantic assumptions. Many of the elements of this part of the novel can be traced to the people and customs Waugh encountered and recorded in his travelogues, such as the existence and ingredients for cassari, a drink received by Tony and Dr. Messinger from the local tribal women. Famous for his satire and conversion to Roman-Catholicism, Waugh's writings have been interpreted as a critique of English religious traditions and the demoralised society that exists as a result. Many critics argue that the Amazon sequence in A Handful 0f Dust highlights what Waugh felt was not just a decadence that was destroying English life, but that there is no sanctuary in which to hide from the growing problem of evil, and thus rejects the desire for Other. Different from other modernist writers, Waugh's encounter with the "savage" causes him to conclude that they are no different to the savages in England. Reconsidering A Handful of Dust in the twenty-first century from a post-colonial perspective, new readings such as the increasing discomfort with racial stereotypes, imperialism and the idea of Empire in the modernist period are evident.
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Many elements in the first half of the novel prepare us for the more overt critique of imperialism in the second. The entertaining portrayal of Brenda's friend, Princess Jenny Abdul Akbar, serves to show Waugh's dissatisfaction with portrayals of Eastern stereotypes like those attacked in Edward Said's seminal study, Orientalism. Brenda decides to introduce Jenny to Tony to "get him interested in a girl" (Dust 82). John Andrew wonders will Jenny "'be able to talk any english?'" (Dust 83) while on arrival Jenny is "preceded by a heavy odour of musk" (Dust 84), which she explains is "'my last link with the East'" (Dust 86). She tells Tony with the obvious Freudian connotations that the East has "an uncanny fascination for me" (Dust 85). Similarly Jenny sees Tony as typically English, teasing him "'How English you are'" (Dust 85). When Tony's friend Jock visits Jenny's flat, the narrator sarcastically observes that "the Princess's room was furnished promiscuously and with a truly Eastern disregard of the right properties of things" (Dust 114), this is important also as the Princess herself is characterised as promiscuous through her flirtatious nature and that it was her that Brenda chose to attempt to seduce Tony. Ben, the stables man is coarse and rude and highly influential in John Andrew's childhood world. John Andrew tells Tony that "'Ben says natives aren't human at all really'" but the foolish and ignorant Tony tells him that "'he's thinking of negroes, I expect'" (Dust 87). One can't help but surmise that the second half of the novel and the misfortune that befalls Tony is the fate the author feels he deserves for his racist and laissez-faire attitude to the people in the peripheries of Empire and in particular the humanity of the people that himself and Dr.Messinger bribe with cheap goods and European weapons to accompany them on their excursion into the Amazon interior. No doubt they plan to take what they can from an ancient city to which they have no ownership rights. |
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Waugh's disproval of racial stereotypes is also evident throughout the weekend spent in Brighton where Waugh and the woman, Milly, he is to pretend to commit infidelity with meet a friend of Milly's and his girlfriend. This friend, Dan, comes across as extremely flash and extravagant, "he wore a large fur coat and a beret; under the coat there appeared tartan stockings and black and white shoes" (Dust 138) while his girlfriend comments that "'this place stinks of yids'" (Dust 138) to which Tony dryly comments "'I always think that's the sign of a good hotel don't you'" (Dust 139), but what becomes increasingly obvious is that Dan is being depicted and hence parodied as a Jewish stereotype. Dan invites the couple to attend a Jewish party of a friend, "There was a party of about twenty or thirty people, all more or less like Dan" (Dust 140), whose hospitality to Tony causes him to wonder "whether he was as amiable to people he did not know were brought over unexpectedly to Hetton" (Dust 140). Waugh is clearly aiming to repudiate attitudes to racial stereotypes through this episode in the novel. |
Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)
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Tony and Dr. Messinger's journey into the Amazon interior repeats and parodies that of the futile and mercenary post-colonial hate-figure, Sir Walter Raleigh. The Guyanas were relatively undiscovered before he embarked on a quest for a hidden El Derado where he hoped to find gold. The mythical source of gold was most likely rumoured by the Spanish in order to divert Raleigh's attention from more profitable areas.
I mentioned earlier that the first half of the novel is juxtaposed with the second to portray the futility and amoral nature of life both in the centre and peripheries - Waugh commented that "'the Amazon stuff... had to be there. The scheme was a gothic man in the hands of savages - first Mrs. Beaver, etc., then the real ones...'" (Problem of Evil 44), Waugh's opinion being that the savages of the West are civilised savages. The failure of communication between Tony, Dr. Messinger and the tribal people is recounted in opposition to the failure of communication in Westminster, the centre of imperial government, where Tony's friend Jock attempts to do "something tangible in the interests of his constituents" (Dust 176). Another important result of this is reading Tony's imprisonment as his inevitable punishment for the imperial system that he invariably represents as the owner of a large estate in England. One critic has pointed to the fact that Tony bores Brenda and John Andrew when he reads to them at home in Hetton, while in the second half of the novel Tony is forced to spend his days repetitively rereading the work of Dickens to Mr. Todd. This is the event that I believe marks the explicit critique of imperialism in the novel, as it criticises the role and influence of the English literary canon in the process of colonisation. English literature played a major role in colonial education and it was through this that euro-centric and apparently "universalist" values were impressed upon the colonised subject. This literature often presented images of the colonised as inferior to the colonisers. A high value was placed upon the knowledge of English literature as such a well-grounded knowledge was required to enter into the civil service and legal professions in the colonies. Thus the ironic imprisonment of Tony in Mr. Todd's home is a dramatic inversion of the master-slave relationship that results in the canon as an instrument of torture against the centre of empire. The imperialist project back-fires ultimately destroying the life of Tony Last (or what was left of it after the savages in England ripped it apart), his ownership of Hetton and his command over his own life.
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Problematic in this reading of A Handful of Dust is the role of religion in the imperial project. Apparent in the novel is a critique of the dominant Anglican religion, through it's failure to change the decadent and demoralised society that destroys Tony Last. In particular the description of the sermon given by the vicar, Reverend Tendril, emphasises this point. The vicar had served in India for the majority of his life, "few of the things said in church seemed to have any particular reference to themselves" (Dust 32), that is the villagers, as the vicar failed to adapt his sermons now that he was back in England (this also seems to criticise the Kipling's portrayal of the church in his stories). The Anglican religion has become a habit and something that does not relate to the daily existence of the English people. On the death of John Andrew, Tony complains of Rev. Tendril, "'I only wanted to see him about arrangements. He tried to be comforting. It was very painful...after all the last thing one wants to talk about at a time like this is religion'" (Dust 115). The sermon made by the Reverend plainly aligns the Anglican religion with the imperial project as he tells the congregation "'let us remember our gracious Queen Empress in whose service we are here, and pray she may long be spared to send us at her bidding to do our duty in the uttermost parts of the earth; and let us think of our dear ones far away...we are never so near to them as on these Sunday mornings, united with them across dune and mountain in our loyalty to our sovereign and thanksgiving for her welfare; one with them as proud subjects of her sceptre and crown'" (Dust 33). The emphasis is on the role of the Queen rather than God. This corresponds with the reasons used by apologists for colonialism that it was driven by the need to spread the Christian mission and is complemented by the Queen's combined role of head of the Anglican church and the monarch, religion excused the true greed that drove imperial domination. A fictional example in the novel representative of the imperialist (mercenary) and Christian mentality is the case of Mr.Todd's father, who came to Guyana as a missionary, then deserted his wife, went in search of gold and married an Indian woman. What proves problematic at this point is that the Roman-Catholic church was also an imperialist institution, as missionary activity developed alongside European imperialism. If Waugh, as I am arguing, is dissatisfied with the imperial project, how can his allegiance to the Catholic church be explained? One critic argues that Waugh was constantly encountering missionary priests on his travels, but that unlike the heroes of Conrad and Kipling (Tendril being likely to appear in a fiction of the latter), these priests claimed to be working for an empire that commanded more profundity than that of the Queen's and Catholicism placed all human beings on a moral and intellectual par. Waugh's patriotism lay with the Christian rather than the British empire. |
Waugh was anti-modernist Catholicism and in many ways his writing reflects a hark back to the pre-Anglican era in England and to a traditional Catholicism. What is interesting about such a nostalgia is that it coincides with the period prior to the dawn of imperialism and Elizabethan England, before the excursion of Sir Walter Raleigh (who apparently loathed Catholicism) to South America and the plantations in Ireland, according to The Atlas of the British Empire, "all represented as incidents in the expansion of God's Protestant empire. Historians today are more likely to view the exploits of Queen Elizabeth's 'sea dogs' as looting expeditions on the fringes of the much greater world empire of Spain" (3). But again this exposes the problematic nature of equating Waugh's traditional Catholicism with an anti-imperialist mentality as the Spanish empire was at that time Roman-Catholic.
Bibliography
Bayly, C.A., ed. Atlas of the British Empire. London: Hamlyn, 1989.
Carens, James F., ed. Critical Writings on Evelyn Waugh. Boston: C.K Hall, 1987.
Heath, Jeffrey. The Picturesque Prison. London: Weidenfeld&Nicolson, 1982.
Myers, William. Evelyn Waugh and the Problem of Evil. London: Faber&Faber, 1991.
Stannard, Martin, ed. Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage. London: Routlege&Kegan Paul, 1984.
Waugh, Evelyn. A Handful of Dust. 2nd ed. London: Penguin, 1951.
This page was written by Rosa Flannery. E-mail me with your suggestions
This project was completed under the direction of Dr Leon Litvack as a requirement for the MA degree in Modern Literary Studies in the School of English at the Queen's University of Belfast. The site is evolving and will include contributions from future generations of MA students on other writers and themes.
