Catholic Approaches to Jerusalem: Fragmentation and Continuity of Identities - Evelyn Waugh's Helena and Muriel Spark's The Mandelbaum Gate

Abstract

Evelyn Waugh's historical novel Helena and Muriel Spark's novel of intrigue and adventure The Mandelbaum Gate both portray protagonists with complex identities - identities which mirror in important ways the identities of the authors - in quests for self-understanding and resolution of inner unrest through travel. Their journeys consist in, or culminate in, pilgrimages to Jerusalem and the surrounding holy sites. In each case, the complexity and fragmentation within the character of the protagonist (reflecting that in the author) is compared with the complexities and layerings in the identity of Jerusalem, while ultimately, through the notion of pilgrimage, a unified sense of identity is achieved, both for the protagonists' view of the city and for the protagonists' view of their own selves. In this achieved sense of identity, the various historical strands are affirmed as part of a spiritual whole. I shall explore first the complex and to some extent parallel personal webs of identity which each author creates for the protagonist, showing how issues of religious identity and nationality intersect and come into conflict in similar ways for both authors and their protagonists. I shall then examine how in each novel Jerusalem, at first approach, presents conflicts and layerings of identity which echo those of the protagonists and lead to an encounter in which the protagonists must decode an elusive Jerusalem, as well as reflect on themselves. Finally, I shall discuss how the idea of pilgrimage offers, through this encounter of personality and place, a way to the reconciliation and fulfillment of identities which the protagonists of both novels eventually achieve.1Issues of personal identity and conflicts or feelings of irresolution within the self are key elements of both novels. The importance of these problems for both novelists can be related to their status as members of the Catholic minority in the United Kingdom. This minority has felt itself to be marginalized since the Reformation, and falls outside the dominant state churches, the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, which, since the Reformation, have been central to the formation of national identity, whether English, Scottish, or British. Twentieth-century Catholic British writers have regularly taken the stance of writing against the majority Protestant culture in Britain, often seeing it as not only non- and anti-Catholic, but also suspecting it of being largely secular. The sense of marginalization and non-inclusion is felt particularly poignantly by those whose Catholicism does not result from a Catholic ethnic background, and who therefore cannot resolve the conflict between their British identity and their Catholicism with the help of an alternative Catholic national identity. Many of the most prominent twentieth-century British Catholic writers have been in this situation (e.g. G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, David Jones, Muriel Spark, Graham Greene), which has been the result of their being converts. Being a convert raises further complexities, since converts have grown up with another religious background, which remains part of their personal history, and they may also feel themselves to be a minority within a minority among Catholics, the majority of whom are not converts. Some of these writers have sought a reconciliation between their religious and national identities by reconnecting with a pre -reformation past (e.g. Chesterton with medieval Catholic England, and David Jones with early Welsh and British history). On the other hand, others (such as Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and, to some extent, Evelyn Waugh) have emphasized a cosmopolitan atmosphere in much of their writing, taking advantage of their sense that British Catholics can more easily understand the non-British world, and are more internationally oriented, than their Protestant counterparts. Evelyn Waugh, in particular, explored in some of his writings the culture of English recusants, that is, those English Catholics belonging to families which remained Catholic continuously since the Reformation, forming a very tightly knit circle of their own. …