Nanny Hawkins and the Servant Problem
by David Bittner
The character of Nanny Hawkins in Brideshead Revisited has seldom been dealt with, and I, for one, think it is high time that she be debunked. It is my belief that she belongs to the dubious tradition of ineffectual servants exemplified by Juliet Capulet’s Nurse. Both women are rather effete characters, more concerned about pleasing themselves than being truly useful. The difference between the two is that Nanny’s days of authority are behind her, while Juliet’s Nurse continues to exert her influence. The Boots’ servants in Scoop, who wait upon the family in “desultory fashion,” may be a source for Nanny.
That Nanny is really rather detached from the Flyte siblings is made quite clear by Waugh. He says, following Sebastian’s return from his Levantine jaunt, “Nanny did not particularly like to be talked to. She liked visitors best when they paid no attention to her and let her knit away, and watch their faces and think of them as she had known them as small children; their present goings-on did not signify much beside those early illnesses and crimes.” When Charles and Julia inform Nanny about their plans to marry, it does not occur to her to “question the propriety” of the match. In the PBS presentation of Brideshead Revisited, when Julia plays halma with Nanny, Sebastian says, “Dear Nanny Hawkins. She lives entirely for pleasure.” It is a measure of Nanny’s detachment from the real activities of the Flytes that she believes the upper classes spend most of their leisure evenings in the ballroom.
Juliet’s Nurse is just as inert as Nanny but shows no sign of fading into the background as she ages. Mark van Doren says of the Nurse that she takes a “prurient interest in love-business, the details of which she mumbles toothlessly, reminiscently, with the indecency of age.” He adds that the Nurse’s delight in reminiscence is, among other things, “lickerish.”
The Twayne series’ book on Romeo and Juliet, by Cedric Watts, is scarcely more admiring of the Nurse. Watts says, “Her idiom, tending so often toward the vulgarly colloquial, makes clear her social class. She uses credibly habitual forms of endearment to Juliet and takes a partly prurient pride in Juliet’s eligibility for marriage.” Watts adds that when the Nurse urges Juliet to accept Paris as her husband, “her practical cynicism becomes overt.”
Watts’s point about the colloquial quality of the Nurse’s speech has its counterpart in Waugh’s description of Nanny’s speech in her old age, “formerly sharpened by years of gentle conversation,” but “reverted now to the soft, peasant tones of its origin.” And Nanny, like the Nurse, is more concerned about herself than about making a difference in the household she serves, the way Scarlett O’Hara’s Mammy and Mr. B’s Hazel and Miss Daisy’s Hoke all do. As Waugh writes, “the changes of the last years had come too late in [Nanny’s] life to be accepted and understood.” All Nanny can say in regard to the blitzed Lady Brideshead’s misfortune, for instance, is “It doesn’t seem right.”
But let’s be fair. If good help is hard to find, it is probably also true, as Montaigne said, that “few men are admired of their familiars.”