“A Twitch Upon the Thread”: Revisiting Brideshead Revisited

Abstract

“A Twitch Upon the Thread” is the title of Book II of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. The phrase comes from G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, and is first introduced near the end of Book I. Cordelia, the youngest sister of the Flyte family, explains to protagonist Charles Ryder that her family haven’t had a particularly good track record as Catholics; her father, her brother Sebastian, and her sister Julia have all left the faith: “But God won’t let them go for long, you know. I wonder if you remember the story Mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk — I mean, the bad evening. Father Brown said something like ‘I caught him’ (the thief) ‘with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.’”1 Cordelia is described by her brother Sebastian as “a fervent Catholic,” and “bird-happy in her religion” (89), possibly because, as Charles later cynically suggests, she doesn’t seem to know all that much about the details (330). In religious terms, Cordelia, the youngest child of the Flyte family, is the only one who approaches Catholicism “properly” — which is to say as a child, in a childlike mode of pure faith. Cordelia, unlike her eldest brother Bridey, seems interested in the spirit of the law and not the letter.KeywordsReligious FaithHomosexual RelationshipGood Track RecordHomosexual DesireConversion NarrativeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.