A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh's Summary

A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh's Modernist Masterpiece of Satire, Betrayal, and Spiritual Desolation

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

Analyse the formal and structural techniques that establish A Handful of Dust as a landmark modernist novel
Evaluate the complex representation of gender, class, and colonial relations within the novel's satirical framework
Critically assess the intertextual engagement with Eliot, Dickens, Flaubert, and Conrad
Understand the significance of the novel's dual endings and their implications for the protagonist's spiritual quest
Interpret the novel's critique of modern English society and its cultural decline

Introduction: The Novel and Its Critical Reception

Publication and Context

Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust (1934), his fourth novel and widely agreed as his best, recounts the betrayal of Tony Last by his wife Brenda, bored after seven years of marriage and drifting into adultery with the callow John Beaver. Tony's consequent refusal to play the expected role of guilty party leads to bitterly unexpected and cruelly ironic consequences at the novel's shocking end.

The novel draws its title and epigraph from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), establishing the central metaphor of spiritual barrenness and cultural decay. Waugh's choice—"fear in a handful of dust"—suggests a mortality-terror and a more generalised intimation of terror as the only appropriate response to the attenuations, entrapments and anomie that the novel articulates.

The novel is split into two halves of Europe and the colonial lands of Demarara, respectively. By doing this, Waugh tries to obviate any distinction between western and eastern savagery, and to make a connection between the two versions of barbarism in the two cultures that are supposed to be completely different from each other.

Waugh's Personal Context

On 29 September 1930, four years before the publishing of A Handful of Dust and a year after his divorce from his first wife Evelyn Gardner, Waugh converted to Catholicism. Since he was a prominent writer of the age, his conversion created a scandalous reaction in the media. Although Waugh stayed quiet on the topic for a short time, the opinion still commonly maintained among his acquaintance was that he became Catholic to compensate himself for the emotional wound he had received on the break-up of his marriage.

In his expository essay "Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened to Me" published in the Daily Express on October 20th, 1930, Waugh explains:

"Today we can see [the loss of Christian faith] as the active negation of all that western culture has stood for. Civilization—and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe—has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance."

The ideas about civilization, moral and social issues penned in the essay established the basis of his novel. What he voices in his essay is his complaint about the contemporary superficial society. Moreover, his shelter into Catholicism can be regarded as a way of solution and salvation from dishonesty. Merging his discontent with the keen observation of the society, Waugh delineates his modern public in the novel deriving from the real condition of the time.

Detailed Summary

Part One: Hetton and London

The novel opens with John Beaver, a parasitic young man, visiting his mother Mrs. Beaver, an interior designer who profits from other people's misfortunes. The conversation reveals the commercial and instrumental attitudes that dominate the world of the novel. Mrs. Beaver discusses a recent fire in a house, expressing satisfaction that the damage will provide her with decorating work.

Beaver is invited to Hetton Abbey, the Gothic country house of Tony Last. The house, rebuilt in 1864, is Tony's passion and obsession. When Beaver asks Brenda whether she likes Hetton, she pours out her real opinions:

"Me? I detest it... at least I don't mean that really, but I do wish sometimes that it wasn't all, every bit of it, so appallingly ugly. Only I'd die rather than to say that to Tony. We could never live anywhere else, of course. He's crazy about the place... As it is we support fifteen servants indoors, besides gardeners and carpenters and a night watchman and all the people and odd little men constantly popping in to wind the clocks and cook the accounts and clean the moat, while Tony and I have to fuss about whether it's cheaper to take a car up to London for the night or buy an excursion ticket."

Beaver's visit marks the beginning of Brenda's dissatisfaction. She begins spending more time in London, and her affair with Beaver develops. Tony, oblivious to the betrayal, continues to focus on Hetton and the traditional values it represents.

The Death of John Andrew

The pivotal moment of the novel occurs when John Andrew, Tony and Brenda's son, dies in a hunting accident. The boy falls from his pony and dies instantly. Jock Grant-Menzies travels to London to inform Brenda.

Brenda, worried about John Beaver's safety, hears the news of John's death. Her immediate reaction reveals her subconscious priorities:

"John... John Andrew... Oh thank God..."

She had been fearing that John Beaver had been in an accident. Her relief that it is her son, not her lover, who has died exposes the depth of her moral corruption.

After John Andrew's death, Brenda reveals her relationship with John Beaver and demands a divorce from Tony. The reader is invited to compare Brenda's response with that of the only woman who truly cared for John Andrew—his nanny, who is disrespected by the child who calls her "silly old tart."

The Divorce and Betrayal

Tony, hoping to avoid a scandal, agrees to provide evidence of adultery. He travels to Brighton with Milly, a prostitute hired to play the role of his mistress. However, Tony and Milly do not even sleep in the same room but only eat together in the restaurant of the hotel to show people his supposed infidelity.

Brenda's brother Reggie St Cloud comes to haggle about the alimony Brenda will receive after the divorce. The amount of money she demands is rather high for Tony, meaning he will be obliged to sell Hetton. Up until this moment, Tony has always preserved his tolerant and decent attitude towards everyone. However, when the only thing he depends upon is at stake, he assumes a different attitude:

"Brenda is not going to get her divorce. The evidence I provided at Brighton isn't worth anything. There happens to have been a child there all the time. She slept both nights in the room I am supposed to have occupied. If you care to bring the case I shall defend it and win, but I think when you have seen my evidence you will drop it. I am going away for six months or so. When I come back, if she wishes it, I shall divorce Brenda without settlements of any kind."

The Brazilian Expedition

Tony decides to embark on a journey to Brazil with Dr. Messinger, an explorer. The chapter "In Search of a City" suggests that Tony is escaping from the troubles in his life by going to an unknown place. This expedition can be accepted as a practical manoeuvre of Waugh to strip his hero of all his Gothic illusions.

Tony reaches the land of Macushi people in British Guiana. After a long journey on foot, the indigenous Macushi people leave the two explorers at night because of the lack of communication between them and more importantly because of the enmity between Pie-Wies and Macushies. The companions are left in a destitute condition in the sheer wilderness. Tony's continual hallucinations and fits of fever control the pace of the journey. Dr. Messinger is compelled to leave him behind to bring help for Tony, yet he dies on the way.

Mr Todd and the Dickensian Prison

Wandering in his demented and unconscious situation, Tony is found by Mr. Todd, a mulatto residing in Pie-Wie land. Mr. Todd, whose name means death in German, carries Tony to his house and heals his delirium with herbal drink. However, Todd's help serves his personal benefit: he wants Tony to read Charles Dickens' novels to him.

When Tony recuperates, he wants to leave. Though Mr. Todd lets him go wherever he wants, he is well aware that Tony is not going to be able to survive the forest. He withholds Tony without his consent, and Tony is left to make a choice between two deaths: starving in the forest or waiting to die while reading Dickens to Mr. Todd.

Mr. Todd represents the grotesque return to the obstinately demanding child who demands to be read to. Mr. Todd's house can be recognised as the place of uncanny where the barbarism of wilderness is juxtaposed with the savagery of civilization in London. Even though Mr. Todd saves Tony's life, he uses his upper-hand to bargain with Tony, revealing himself to be no different from the members of the London society.

The Ending

In the official ending, Tony dies in Brazil. Hetton is inherited by his cousins, the last representatives of the Lasts. A symbolic tombstone of Tony is erected in the garden. Brenda proves her fickle disposition by marrying Jock Grant-Menzies, Tony's close friend. Nothing seems to change after Tony's death. Hetton is still on the verge of grasping its former glory, and the other characters retain their lifestyle in London.

Waugh writes an alternative ending in which Tony comes back from Brazil safe and sound. In this version, Tony does not die but somehow succeeds to travel back to England. He becomes careless towards Hetton and his wife. The most significant issue portraying the new disposition of Tony is his secret agreement with Mrs. Beaver about a flat he wants to keep in London. Behaving like Brenda, Tony wants to keep the same flat in London for himself. He paves the way for his possible adulterous relationships. Similar to Brenda's case, Tony seems to become just like the other characters he despised and finally succumbed to the system of the age by being dishonest.

Major Themes

The Spiritual Wasteland

The novel depicts modern London as a spiritual wasteland. The characters are susceptible to change, waver and decay by means of a small temptation, and are nothing but just a handful of dust. Similar to Eliot's wasteland, Waugh's wasteland is created by modernity and degenerate lifestyle.

The novel's title from The Waste Land suggests a world desperate for a sign. There is no sign of a village, let alone a City to replace Tony's lost Gothic world that had "come to grief" and from which "the cream and dappled unicorns had fled." The wasteland is the break away from the past and the old values, created by its denizens, the high-society of London.

Human Selfishness and Self-Delusion

The novel aims to lay bare "human selfishness and self-delusion." Waugh directs his criticism towards various aspects of English social life indicating the pervading decadence in the moral values of the individual and modern zeitgeist.

Mrs. Beaver's lack of sympathy and avarice can be observed in the society and in the other characters of the novel, apart from Tony Last. Social parasitism, feeding on the wealth or the fame of others for selfish ends, proves itself to be the rule of the society. Each one of the characters is so much engrossed in their own "appetite and inclinations" that the world they live in consists of shallow little characters who have no consequence because they have blandly resigned themselves to live in a treacherous world without hope of recourse to any effective moral order.

The Failure of Humanism

Waugh's novel deals entirely with behaviour and contains all he had to say about humanism. The novel is the "analysis of the bankruptcy of a humanism cut off from its religious roots." For Waugh, an individual's alienation from religion and moral values diminishes their concern and common sense for the other people around them.

Waugh assumes a pessimistic stance in his novel in writing the drab picture of his distorted perception of humanism, that is to say the human affection and respect. He voices his critical reflections on contemporary society by means of the poor quality of the intricate series of relations among the socialites of London.

The Betrayed Romantic

The novel is written on the theme of "betrayed romantic" which prioritises the plight of the soul rather than the society. Tony Last embodies the innocent man who values the past and its traditions. Yet, in order to survive in the society, Tony embarks on a quest for self-identity but fails in each attempt.

Tony, as the hero of his story, cannot rescue himself from the struggles which determine his inevitable death. Both endings prove that wasteland is populated by people who are only "handful of dust" that lack solemn disposition. Being the victim of the society and his frailties and weak character, Tony, both in the official and alternative ending, is defeated and cannot perform his duties to designate his stance in the society.

Colonialism and Orientalism

Waugh's concern with colonialism and imperialism and his Orientalist thinking in fiction is born out of his adventurous temperament and his racial and gender-conscious attitudes. Behind all these works set in a colonial context there is a general satirical attack on the European modern world, men, and specially, women.

The three novels could be examined in terms of the Orientalist issues. Usually, the female subjects in Orientalist discourse are regarded as "mysterious yet untrustworthy, sexually arousing yet not quite clean, intriguing and yet uninteresting." These issues are visible in Waugh's novels.

Gender and the Subaltern

From a postcolonial feminist perspective, Waugh's fiction can be considered as highly patriarchal and Eurocentric where there is no space for the raced subaltern to speak. Waugh's racial prejudices and misogynistic attitudes lead him to portray the main group of savages in these novels as women.

The female subaltern is arguably triply colonized, this time by the author. Racism, sexism, colonialism, and even the first world Feminism are complicit in the discourse of Western Imperialism in making the colonized women more colonized. The European women are represented as active and to some extent independent, while the women of other races are the subalterns who lack the voice the other women have.

Characterization

Tony Last

Tony Last is the last person in the novel who values the old tradition and heritage. He is devoted to his country house, Hetton Abbey, although he knows that it is not convenient for him to finance its upkeep. Tony's deep interest in an old and traditional building emphasises his over-sensibility for the old Victorian values.

Tony's voluntary attachment to Hetton is one of the reasons for his obliviousness towards the realities of daily life. He develops "an adulterous relationship" with Hetton that causes him to neglect his wife and son. His obtuseness about daily life and "refusal to face facts" make him turn his face to Hetton, the past and tradition to avoid the change and the new system.

Tony can be blamed for his downfall because of his naïve and trustworthy disposition, and he is the victim of his illusion. Excessive tolerance is his another faulty side. During his quest, Tony always feels that he is under the attack of both Brenda and the expectations of the society. He becomes part of a false plot of cheating on Brenda in order to enable her to sue him for the divorce.

In the alternative ending, Tony becomes careless towards Hetton and his wife. He paves the way for his possible adulterous relationships. He seems keen on cheating both Brenda and his former moral principles, thus he takes care of small details to secure himself. Getting rid of his former principles and beliefs about order, tradition and integrity, Tony, in his journey to Brazil, remoulds himself into a man of the age.

Brenda Last

Brenda is 26 years old: she was courted by Tony aged 18 and married him aged 19. Mrs Beaver says "people used to be mad about her when she was a girl" and her obtuse and sentimental mother says she was always "excitable." The suggestion is that she has been indulged as the beautiful teenager and that this continues to be her role in her marriage.

The reader sees no sign of Brenda as a maternal presence for her son. Indeed, she sometimes seems hardly solid at all. Mrs Beaver refers to her "very fair, underwater look." Used to being indulged, courted, as if etherealised, she drifts into the affair with Beaver, on an impulse, as if as a game. She refers to Beaver as a "cub" and calls herself, a year older than he, "an old married woman."

Brenda's reaction to her son's death is surprising. Her subconscious revelation—"John... John Andrew... Oh thank God..."—exposes the depth of her moral corruption. She is victimised by her own faulty blurting out her real feelings and in the future, she will be victimised by the society that is abusing her. When she is short of money, John Beaver threatens her with break up, Mrs. Beaver refuses to give her a job, and Jenny Abdul Akbar insinuates her husband's well-off condition without giving any solace in her misery.

John Beaver

John Beaver is a parasite who always waits for others to pay his bills and offer him something. He is completely under his mother's influence and calls her "Mumsy" or "Mummy", just like the way John Andrew calls Brenda. He is "the archetype of modern man, bored, boring" and "bestial."

The ironic use of the name Beaver is evident in relation to his nature as a "scrounging" man. He is a "lazy, scrounging son under his mother's influence" who sets off for Hetton only for the sake of his "commercialized relationships" and to upgrade his lesser socialite position in London. Although his motivation is not to entice Brenda but to have a name in the society, he inadvertently deviates Brenda from her roles as a wife and mother.

Beaver leaves Brenda with the help of his mother after finding out about her loss of money. One of the reasons for which Beaver stays with his mother is to save money. He is a parasitic figure throughout the novel.

Mrs. Beaver

Mrs. Beaver is an interior designer who actually designs people's lives and destinies and is powerful enough to ruin people's marital lives—such as Brenda's. This could be seen in her attempts to provide flats and rooms for women to spend some times with their fiancés in. She completes her plans so artistically and deceitfully that she never fails.

The very first conversation between John Beaver and his mother creates the dominate tone of the novel which depicts a world of "commercial" and "instrumental" attitudes to humanity. Mrs. Beaver's real motive in telling about the house fire is not to commiserate the loss of the family but to make a profit out of an agony. Her lack of sympathy and avarice can be observed in the society and in the other characters of the novel, apart from Tony Last.

Mr. Todd

Mr. Todd, whose name means death in German, is a version of Mr. Kurtz from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, as the names suggest. Kurtz can be read as mere eloquence, a voice in a hollow body. Mr. Todd is in effect an embodiment of reception theory, a flagrantly Dickensian character demanding to be feasted on Dickens to the end of his days.

Despite his parental power over Tony, Todd is also a grotesque return to the obstinately demanding child. As Jonathan Greenberg argues in a psychoanalytic reading, Todd is "infantile and needy; he demands to be read to like a stubborn child." Todd is an ironic representation of realism's ideal humanist reader whose emotional receptivity and sympathetic understanding are exactly what Dickens trusted would foster moral amelioration. But there is nothing morally ameliorated about the murderously insane Mr. Todd.

Minor Characters

Mrs. Rattery is dubbed the Shameless Blonde but a skilled aviator, horse-rider, whisky-drinker and solitary card-player. She is detached, self-sufficient, benevolently indifferent and in a sense presiding over the novel as proxy-novelist. Mrs Rattery represents Waugh as novelist and, in the ironic way, her literary ancestors include the ageless and sexless Tiresias presiding over The Waste Land.

Jenny Abdul Akbar is presented as an Oriental woman who is "not black but married one." She embodies promiscuity, exoticism, sexuality and the East in the eyes of the Western subject. She is a comic figure who, despite having terrible scars from her ex-husband's abuse, explains her "frightful nightmares" to near-strangers.

John Andrew is Brenda and Tony's son who is class conscious. When having a small argument with his nanny he calls her "Silly old tart" knowing that the nanny earns her living by babysitting him. His rude treatment of his nanny reflects that of his idol, Ben, who regards women, black and Jewish people as subhumans.

Literary Techniques and Narrative Strategies

Proleptic Technique

Waugh uses the proleptic technique, as in Beaver's fortune-telling, locally and with more of a self-conscious shock-effect. In A Handful of Dust, these moments are multiple and cumulative, creating a more sombre inevitability closer to the use of the technique in Shakespearean tragedy.

The instances of proleptic patterning act like a kind of grip on the novel's sub-structure, with the effect of making the protagonists seem trapped in the impersonal machine that is the novel's form. The much-celebrated mistaking of names at the novel's heart is itself proleptically prepared for, its impact thus sharpened further.

Narrative Economy and Syntax

The narrative economy in A Handful of Dust extends to the issue of syntax and sentence structure. The stripping back of scene setting enacts a kind of distaste for narrative itself in its usual elaborations. The specific formal techniques have one end in common: to cause maximum pain for the reader.

One unsettling technique Waugh deploys in terms of economy is to exclude passages of dialogue which, in retrospect, the reader knows must have taken place and which carry crucial plot developments. For example, when Beaver returns after his visit to Hetton and casually tells his mother that Brenda "talked of taking a flat in London," we feel betrayed in having to learn that through him.

Repetition and Paralleling

The paralleling technique can have a startling effect. There's a provocative parallel set up between Marjorie's malevolent and "very unrepaying" Pekinese dog Djinn and the benevolent but maligned Colonel Inch. Djinn is seen "gazing moodily at the asphalt"; he then "got lost and was found a few yards away [...] staring at a shred of waste paper." Colonel Inch would regularly lose his own hunt and be "found [...] morosely nibbling ginger-nut biscuits."

Reggie St Cloud and Therese de Vitre are bizarre reflections of each other. Reggie "carried his burden of flesh as though he was not yet used to it" while Therese "had not long outgrown her schoolgirl plumpness and she moved with an air of exultance, as though she had lately shed an encumbrance and was not yet fatigued by the other burdens that would succeed it."

Cutting Technique and Cinematic Narrative

"Transfigured" is the word that is used for Tony's vision of the mythical City—"a transfigured Hetton"—and trans-figuring becomes the structural principle driving the extraordinary pages that cut between the Brazilian jungle where Tony is in delirium and London, the un-transfigurable city. The cutting is done to cause maximum pain and, again, it's the economy of the method, the stripping back of the usual narrative baggage, that does the work.

The cutting technique has been anticipated earlier in the novel by telephone scenes. The juxtapositions and cutting between Brazil and England have the sharpest effect once Tony develops fever. In the jungle, "It was late afternoon when [Tony] first saw Brenda [...] But she did not answer him. She sat as she used often to sit when she came back from London, huddled over her bowl of bread and milk."

Irony and Satire

There's a ruthlessness about the deployment of irony in this novel that has analogues elsewhere in early Waugh but never to this relentlessness of effect. It's a ruthlessness that corresponds to the ruthless plot and—in the nicest possible way—the ruthlessness of its characters. Images of eating and animality are threaded throughout, from Mrs Beaver, purveyor of chic, who "gobbled" her yoghurt, to Reggie St Cloud, member of the House of Lords, who spoke "blandly" and "ate in a ruthless manner."

The moments leading up to John Andrew's death are introduced by the extraordinary words, "Then this happened," which seem almost brutally awkward, as if refusing to play by the normal narrative rules. David Lodge writes of Waugh's "vision of... anarchy" remaining "objective—morally, emotionally, and (perhaps most important) stylistically."

Wordplay and Allusion

The wordplay behind the cool, understated surface of the prose is significant. Mrs Beaver will "look about for another suitable house to split up." Getting names wrong is a bitter joke hitherto associated with Jenny Abdul Akbar. The name Beaver itself seems chosen not only as an ironic evocation of animals famous for building homes, but also as flickering wordplay on the word "Bovary."

The connection with Flaubert's Madame Bovary and boredom is clear from the start. There's a delicate allusion on the very first page. We hear of housemaids breaking glass while Mrs Beaver gobbles her nasty morning yoghurt with a spoon: this is an attenuated and impoverished version of the scene at La Vaubeyssard in Madame Bovary where a servant breaks window-panes while Emma is in rapture.

Intertextual Framework

T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land

The novel's title invites the reader to consider its world as un-regenerative, barren and dessicated. It's a world whose genie stares at a shred of waste paper, a world where crowds of people walk round in a ring. It's a world desperate for a sign, as in Eliot's "We would see a sign!" and in Waugh's choric "But there was no sign [...] But there was no sign."

The debt to Eliot also includes the novel's relations with the earlier modernist Heart of Darkness. The Conrad novel stayed with Waugh through his career; its influence is also clear in the autobiographical The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold where a journey on board ship turns into an allegorical journey into Pinfold's dark inner demons.

Charles Dickens and Little Dorrit

Dickens frames Waugh's novel, from Pecksniff, mentioned derisively at the start of the second chapter, to Dorrit at its climax in Brazil. Dickens for Waugh was, in effect, a signifier for his own father, Arthur Waugh, publisher of the Dickens novels for Chapman and Hall. Modernism and Eliot, as Stannard observes, were deployed by Waugh as "the language of reaction against his father."

The novel that Tony is about to read to Mr Todd after we learn of his now terminally imprisoned hopes is Little Dorrit, Dickens' powerful indictment of imprisoned hopes, the dark heart of Victorianism. The reason why Waugh sketched Mr. Todd as a Dickens lover can be observed in the microcosmic world he built for himself. Mr. Todd supposes that the Victorian life that Dickens depicted is the civilized life from which he learned many things.

Gustave Flaubert and Madame Bovary

The debt to Flaubert's Madame Bovary is less easy to anchor in Waugh's biography but it seems clear that Waugh's ambitious fourth novel is designed to lock directly into the European novel's treatment of adultery as the master-plot of plots. The connection with Bovary and boredom is clear from the start.

Compared to the grand fantasies and voluptuously eroticised passions of Emma's early relations, Brenda, like Emma, finds herself "rediscovering, in adultery, all the banality of marriage." "But it was only Brenda" is the response in the Beaver household when Brenda phones towards the end.

Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness

Mr Todd is a version of Mr Kurtz, as the names suggest. Kurtz can be read as mere eloquence, a voice in a hollow body. Kurtz is in effect an embodiment of the performative principle. Mr Todd is in effect an embodiment of reception theory, a flagrantly Dickensian character demanding to be feasted on Dickens to the end of his days.

Waugh's debt to Conrad also includes the influence of Heart of Darkness in the novel's concern with the absurdity of a culture frozen into repetitions of a nineteenth-century identity disseminated to every corner of the planet. Tony's fate as a zombified reader captures one aspect of the British empire's legacy to English culture: a forced diet of the fetishized markers of a vanishing Englishness.

Edith Wharton and The Age of Innocence

The textual ancestry of Waugh's depiction of well-mannered ruthlessness includes Wharton's The Age of Innocence, another bitterly realised social satire, where the tribal community of old New York expel their kinswoman by taking life "without effusion of blood." The tribalism in A Handful of Dust is a harshly portrayed version of the Bright Young Things.

The Wharton novel, set in the 1870s, was probably the first to include the telephone as emblematic of modernity. The emotional impact of Waugh's novel is significantly structured by telephone conversations, which together emblematise the impersonalised communication of modern man.

Postcolonial and Feminist Readings

The Sexed Subaltern

Working from a postcolonial feminist perspective, representations of Waugh's women in A Handful of Dust, Black Mischief and Scoop are explored to shed light on Waugh's attempt to colonise all women literarily and his biased attitude toward the non-western women as alterity. The female subaltern is arguably triply colonized, this time by the author.

In terms of Spivak's idea of the symbolic clitoridectomy, it could be suggested that even the author as a western man living in the colonial context of the first half of the twentieth century, clitoridectomizes some of the female characters. Spivak argues that throughout history, the "symbolic clitoridectomy" was always a kind of oppression for the "female sexuality" regardless of their class, race and culture.

Orientalism and the Female Subject

Usually, the female subjects in Orientalist discourse are regarded as "mysterious yet untrustworthy, sexually arousing yet not quite clean, intriguing and yet uninteresting." These issues are visible in Waugh's novels. Jenny Abdul Akbar and the other Eastern women Tony meets are exotic and appealing, yet they lack something.

Jenny Abdul Akbar is presented as an Oriental woman who is "not black but married one." She embodies promiscuity, exoticism, sexuality and the East in the eyes of the Western subject. Waugh describes Jenny's flat in London to provide the "cultural amnesia and incoherence" of the character and the land she came from. The princess's single room was furnished promiscuously and with truly Eastern disregard of the right properties of things.

Racism and Eurocentrism

Waugh's racist attitudes often lead him to prefer white women to the women of other races. In giving the oriental attributes to Jenny, Waugh acts somehow as a racist misogynist. However, regarding the misogynistic attitudes of Waugh and his satiric skills and goals, whenever he gives voice to his female characters, whether white or non-white, he has a satiric purpose that is to ridicule humanbeings' follies whether male or female.

Waugh's lack of concern for providing his Oriental women with education and modern training is another reason through which one can prove his racism. Throughout these novels, the only example of these other women—though not academic—is Rosa who has a basic knowledge of English because of her European husband. There is no space for such subalterns to speak, because the writer himself is not willing to represent the two races and the two genders as equal at all.

Gender and Power

In the three selected novels of Evelyn Waugh, there is no reference to the notion of childbirth. Waugh's women, mostly the western colonial women, remain reluctant to traditional roles of motherhood, wifehood and this is why they have more power than the other group of women, i.e. the raced subaltern. According to McDonnell, mother figures are "inhuman" in Waugh's fiction. There is hardly any happy and united family.

While the European women in Waugh's fiction are represented as active and to some extent independent people, the women of other races are the subalterns who lack the voice the other women have. The Oriental women like Rosa, Jenny, Black Bitch and Mrs. Youkoumian are always defined through their relation with their husbands, while the white women are more free and independent.

The Novel's Two Endings: Critical Significance

The Official Ending

In the official ending, Tony dies in Brazil. Hetton is inherited by his cousins, the last representatives of the Lasts. A symbolic tombstone of Tony is erected in the garden. Brenda marries Jock Grant-Menzies, Tony's close friend. Nothing seems to change after Tony's death. Hetton is still on the verge of grasping its former glory, and the other characters retain their lifestyle in London.

In this ending of the novel, Tony seems to be defeated in his quest of himself and the others. Failing in finding the essence of his soul and getting trapped in a situation where he waits for his death, Tony, as the hero of his story, cannot rescue himself from the struggles which determine his inevitable death.

The Alternative Ending

Twenty-nine years after the publication of the novel, Evelyn Waugh writes an alternative ending in which Tony comes back from Brazil safe and sound. Associating Tony's expedition with his own trip to Boa Vista in 1933, Waugh explains the reason for this alternative ending as a sheer curiosity and a practical literary manoeuvre.

In this version, Tony does not die but somehow succeeds to travel back to England. He becomes careless towards Hetton and his wife. The most significant issue portraying the new disposition of Tony is his secret agreement with Mrs. Beaver about a flat he wants to keep in London. Behaving like Brenda, Tony wants to keep the same flat in London for himself. He paves the way for his possible adulterous relationships. Getting rid of his former principles and beliefs about order, tradition and integrity, Tony remoulds himself into a man of the age.

Implications of the Dual Endings

Both endings prove that wasteland is populated by people who are only "handful of dust" that lack solemn disposition. Being the victim of the society and his frailties and weak character, Tony, both in the official and alternative ending, is defeated and cannot perform his duties to designate his stance in the society.

In the first version of his end, he surrenders to his human side by being afraid of dying miserably and submits to Mr. Todd who promises his future death. In the alternative version, he seems to lack the willpower to fulfill the requirements of his quest and opts for the easy way to comply with the rules of the age, becoming one of the reckless Bright Young People of Mayfair circle.

Critical Perspectives and Scholarly Debates

Waugh and Modernism

Waugh's attitudes toward both modernism and modernity more generally are similarly vexed. His disapproval of the new culture and tradition can clearly be detected in the novel through Tony Last. This disapproval of the represented new order is so pervasive that it even had an important role in the title of the work.

Waugh is commonly said to be a misogynist. However, his stance toward women was ambiguous. Though he presents a male world in his fiction and his racialist tendencies, Eurocentrism and class consciousness almost always color his attitude toward women, he also provides the reader with some challenging roles for women.

Waugh and Satire

Waugh's writing, a "theatre of cruelty" in Stannard's words, is split into two eras: his early works which are mostly satiric, comedic and a kind of social criticism with a "bitter wit," and works after his conversion in 1930. In the three novels under discussion—A Handful of Dust, Black Mischief and Scoop—he chooses satire as a means to write a colonial text where the ideas of gender, race, class, ethnicity and nationality all come together to put on display an absurd view of human life.

He attacks mostly the individual woman rather than, to use his own phrase, "a rabble of women." That is, he does not deal with women in general; he is rather concerned with individual women in particular situations and locales. Unlike the male heroes who are often defeated in their journeys, the women act differently and by assuming different roles and positions assert their agency and individuality.

Waugh and Autobiography

There are some critiques that condemn Waugh for his misogyny as an act of revenge. In Boyd's opinion, Waugh's description of Brenda Last in A Handful of Dust is "so bleak as to be unbelievable"; it is also a revenge on his failed marriage with She-Evelyn (Evelyn Gardner), Waugh's first wife.

Waugh deliberately delineates a perfect wealthy family with a loving couple and a small child in order to show the greatness of the irony he employs. However, Tony's obsession with Hetton triggers Brenda's boredom. Tony, in a way shares the same fate with Waugh in terms of unsuccessful marriage and betrayal.

The Real and the Unreal

Regarding Waugh's racial prejudices, Christopher Hollis's notion of "real" characters is significant. According to Hollis, the "unreality" of characters like the Azanian people leads to one's lack of sympathy for them. The reader is unsympathetic to these people and their "bad end" because they are not familiar and there seems to be no "sufficient human emotion" in these people that can convince the reader to think of them as "humanbeing."

In Scoop, Black Mischief, and A Handful of Dust, the characters mostly selected from the English upper or middle-classes are "believable but absurd" and this absurdity is essential to this "believability."

Key Passages for Analysis

Passage 1: The Fortune Telling

"On the Sunday morning of his weekend visit to Hetton, John Beaver tells Brenda's fortune with cards. Oh yes... there is going to be a sudden death which will cause you great pleasure and profit. In fact you are going to kill someone. I can't tell if it's a man or a woman... yes, a woman... then you are going to go on a long journey across the sea, marry six dark men and have eleven children, grow a beard and die."

This passage establishes the novel's proleptic technique. In one sense, it could not be more serious, for here, in typically refracted and grotesque form, is the novel in miniature. There is John Andrew's death, from which Brenda profits, or thinks she will profit, in her decision to leave her husband; there is Tony's resultant long journey across the sea and later "stiff growth of beard"; there is Mr Todd's profligate and bigamous fathering of "most of the men and women" on his savannah; and there is Tony's presumed death and his actual living death.

Passage 2: Brenda's Reaction

"John... John Andrew... Oh thank God..."

This is the much-celebrated mistaking of names at the novel's heart. Brenda hears the news of John Andrew's death and, realising that it is not John Beaver, says "Oh, thank God" and then bursts into tears. This moment is proleptically prepared for, its impact thus sharpened further. Waugh is at pains to prepare in a particular way for the scene, with important consequences for the reader's sympathies.

Passage 3: The Brazilian Jungle

"Now at last she broke down and turning over buried her face in the pillow, in an agony of resentment and self-pity. // In Brazil she wore a ragged cotton gown of the same pattern as Rosa's. It was not unbecoming. Tony watched her for some time before he spoke."

This passage demonstrates the cutting technique in the novel. It's as if the narrative is determined to be so scrupulously, gravely neutral as to be relinquished of its obligation to comment or evaluate at all. This is narrative as absence. The juxtapositions and cutting between Brazil and England have the sharpest effect once Tony develops fever.

Passage 4: The Novel's Opening

"No one, I am thankful to say", said Mrs Beaver, "except two housemaids who lost their heads and jumped through a glass roof into the paved court. They were in no danger."

The syntax, and particularly the deliberate placing of "said Mrs Beaver", which has the effect of relegating what follows to an afterthought, enacts the cruel indifference to housemaids, dehumanises them. Cruel indifference to maids and servants is not Mrs Beaver's prerogative only: in one of the novel's more casual details of plot, Brenda casually dismisses Grimshaw, her long-standing personal maid, in the middle of the 1930s slump, as soon as she acquires the flat.

The Novel's Place in the Literary Canon

Modernist Achievement

A Handful of Dust should be assessed by the extent to which Waugh is able to evoke sympathy from the reader not only for Tony but also for Brenda. The range of ironic techniques deployed may seem to preclude, for the reader, anything other than a sense of futility in a bleakly cold, albeit brilliantly executed and often wildly funny, cruel black comedy.

The ambitiousness and distinction of this novel asks us to connect it not with others by Waugh but with two very different early twentieth-century novels: Wharton's realist The Age of Innocence, satiric and edgily nostalgic, and Ford's modernist masterpiece The Good Soldier, where adultery and a disappearing culture are subtly counterpointed in richly ironic narrative complexity.

Waugh's Own Assessment

Writing his novel, Waugh knew how good it was and how different from his first three novels: "I peg away at the novel which seems to me faultless of its kind. Very difficult to write because for the first time I am trying to deal with normal people instead of eccentrics."

"Normal people" reminds us of the Flaubertian ambition to realise, with sympathy as well as disgust, the sheer ordinariness of boredom and habit and the flight from them into fantasy and gameplaying. In emotional as well as socio-political and economic terms, this is a world in "slump," the word used in reference to Beaver's unemployability.

Conclusion

A Handful of Dust stands as a landmark work of modernist fiction that combines structural sophistication with devastating social satire. The novel's use of proleptic patterning, narrative economy, and intertextual allusion creates a work of remarkable formal complexity while maintaining a powerful critique of modern English society.

Waugh's portrayal of Tony Last's spiritual quest and ultimate failure reflects his own disillusionment with modern humanism and his conversion to Catholicism. The novel presents a world cut off from moral and religious foundations, where human relationships are reduced to commercial transactions and selfish motives.

The postcolonial and feminist readings of the novel reveal its problematic representation of race and gender, particularly in the treatment of colonised women and the "sexed subaltern." Waugh's Eurocentric and patriarchal biases are evident throughout the text, even as he provides some challenging roles for his female characters.

The novel's dual endings—one in which Tony dies in Brazil, another in which he returns to become like those he once despised—emphasise the futility of his quest and the impossibility of escaping the corruptions of modern life. Both endings prove that the wasteland is populated by people who are only a "handful of dust."

In its engagement with literary predecessors from Dickens to Eliot and Flaubert, A Handful of Dust demonstrates Waugh's deep immersion in the literary tradition while also establishing his distinctive voice as a satirist and social critic. The novel remains a powerful exploration of spiritual desolation, human selfishness, and the failure of modern humanism.

Discussion Questions

How does Waugh's use of proleptic technique contribute to the novel's atmosphere of inevitability and entrapment?
In what ways does Tony Last's attachment to Hetton Abbey reflect broader cultural anxieties about the decline of tradition and the loss of English identity?
How does Waugh's representation of Brenda Last invite both sympathy and condemnation? Is she a victim of her society or a perpetrator of moral corruption?
What is the significance of Mr. Todd's obsession with Dickens? How does this relate to the novel's critique of humanism and Victorian values?
How do the novel's two endings change our interpretation of Tony's character and his spiritual quest?
In what ways does A Handful of Dust engage with postcolonial themes, and how does Waugh's representation of colonial spaces and people reflect his racial and cultural biases?
How does Waugh's Catholic conversion inform the novel's critique of modern society and its spiritual emptiness?
What is the relationship between the novel's formal techniques and its thematic concerns? How does form reinforce meaning?
How does the novel's engagement with literary predecessors—Eliot, Dickens, Flaubert, Conrad—enrich our understanding of its themes?
Is A Handful of Dust ultimately a pessimistic novel? Does it offer any possibility of redemption or salvation?

References

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Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Bedford Books, 1996.

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Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. Oxford UP, 2008.

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Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Trans. Margaret Mauldon. Oxford UP, 2004.

Greenberg, Jonathan. "'Was Anyone Hurt?': The Ends of Satire in A Handful of Dust." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 36, no. 3, 2003, pp. 351-373.

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McCartney, George. Confused Roaring: Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition. Indiana UP, 1987.

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Patey, Douglas Lane. The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography. Wiley-Blackwell, 2001.

Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder and Park, You-me. "Postcolonial Feminism: Postcolonialism and Feminism." A Companion to Postcolonial Studies. Eds. Henry Schwartz and Sangeeta Ray. Blackwell, 2000, pp. 53-71.

Slater, Ann Pasternak. "Right Things in Wrong Places." Essays in Criticism, vol. XXXII, 1982, pp. 48-68.

Spivak, Gayatry Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 1988, pp. 66-104.

Stannard, Martin. Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years. Flamingo, 1993.

Ward, Jean. "The Waste Sad Time: Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust." English Studies, vol. 89, no. 6, 2008, pp. 679-695.

Wasson, R. "A Handful of Dust: Critique of Victorianism." Critical Essays on Evelyn Waugh. Ed. J.F. Carens. G.K. Hall, 1987, pp. 133-143.

Waugh, Evelyn. A Handful of Dust. Penguin, 1934.

Waugh, Evelyn. Black Mischief. Penguin, 1975.

Waugh, Evelyn. Scoop. Penguin, 1976.

Waugh, Evelyn. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Michael Davie. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976.

Waugh, Evelyn. The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Mark Amory. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980.

Waugh, Evelyn. A Little Order: A Selection from His Journalism. Ed. Donat Gallagher. Eyre Methuen, 1977.

Wilson, Edmund. Classics and Commercials. Farrar Strauss, 1950.

Keywords: Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust, modernist novel, modernist literature, Tony Last, Brenda Last, satire, spiritual wasteland, T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, intertextuality, narrative technique, prolepsis, betrayal, adultery, colonialism, postcolonial feminism, gender studies, Orientalism, Mr Todd, Hetton Abbey, Bright Young People, English literature, twentieth-century fiction, British modernism

Friday, July 10, 2026

A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh's Summary Major Themes Characters Literary Techniques