We don't know if you're closer to high school or college graduation (or done with school completely), but we're guessing that you're at least familiar with the concept that school has an endpoint. And what's weird about graduation is that it's always kind of sad that you've ended an era of your life, whether you're glad to leave or not. That's why we here at Shmoop all trooped off to see
High School Musical 3. Sure,
Zac Ephron, and
Vanessa Hudgens may be good looking, and the dancing is to die for, but what we really wanted was the
nostalgia we feel for that lost past.
In a way,
Brideshead Revisited is like an ode to that moment in senior year when everyone knows that the end of a certain way of life is coming. For some (like, maybe, the Marchmains of the novel), the best years of their lives are already past, the years when they were, say, the captains of the football team or the homecoming queens (if English aristocrats can be compared to high school football captains). What's left after the end of this golden era, for some people, could be a slow decline: alcoholism, adultery, and even death.
We know that
Brideshead Revisited isn't
literally about high school. Still, if
Friday Night Lights is anything to go by, a lot of people look back on their high school years as a period of glory before the anxieties of adult life. And it's pretty clear that Charles Ryder is doing something similar, looking back on those years before
World War II as an "enchanted garden," the last gasp of aristocratic gentility and art for art's sake before the chaos of his post-Oxford working life.
What's going on in
Brideshead Revisited is the graduation of an entire society, represented in miniature by one family, the Marchmains. We see this family transition from a state of relatively stable social grace to a period of instability and decay. But, just as there really is life after high school, there's some hope at the end of
Brideshead. Even as the estate of the novel has fallen apart, among its fragments there are still some remains of earlier, better days that continue in tougher times.