Waugh’s Image of a Rootless Modernity in a Handful of Dust

Abstract

Evelyn Waugh focus on domestic spaces as sacred and regenerative loci where characters retreat to make sense of the political, social, and moral upheaval surrounding them. Evelyn Waugh employs the home as a space for spiritual reflection and regeneration.In this chapter, I will show how Waugh portrays the homes his characters inhabit as sacred spaces in the most literal sense of the word. For example, the ancestral homes in A Handful of Dust and Decline and Fall were built from quarried pieces of dissolved abbeys. Even, Brideshead, which is built from castle rather than church remains, is imbued by Waugh with religious properties. These structures strain against their secular roles as aesthetic spaces and attempt to have a spiritual effect on their inhabitants.