Helena
By Evelyn Waugh

264 Pages • $12.95

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
AND REFLECTION

Helena
By Evelyn Waugh

[Open a pdf version]

Use the following questions as guides to deeper individual understanding of the novel or for group discussion.

1. What is your general impression of the character of Helena? What did you like about her?

2. What does Helena’s youthful passion for horses express about what she finds constraining about her life, especially in the context of her reverie during the “entertainment” at her father’s banquet (pp. 24–27)?

3. When Helena tells her father about her marriage to Constantius, she focuses on his promise to take her to “the City”—Rome. Her father objects, and Helena responds, “I must see for myself, Papa.” What does this tell us about Helena?

4. In reflecting on the wall that keeps “barbarians” from the empire, Helena says, “Instead of the barbarian breaking in, might the City one day break out?” If we understand that the highest ideals of Rome are, in Waugh’s view, now embodied in the church, what hope does Helena’s question express?

5. Why does Constantius get involved in the cult of Mithras? What is he seeking from it?

6. What is Helena’s response to Constantius’s enthusiasm for the cult? How does this express her fundamental intellectual concern?

7. When Helena meets her old teacher, Marcias, he asks her if she, now divorced by her husband and in a sort of exile, had found what she wanted. She responds, “I have accepted what I found. Is that the same?” Is it?

8. Marcias accuses Helena of persisting in asking a child’s questions: “When? Where? How do you know?” Are such questions really childish? Why or why not?

9. What is Constantine’s stance toward Christianity? What seem to be his primary motives in legalizing Christianity and embracing its symbols? How does he conceive his own role in the religion? What does Helena think of this?

10. Throughout Helena, the author holds intellectuals up for particular ridicule. Why? What temptations do intellectuals succumb to that Waugh finds particularly harmful to authentic, living faith?

11. Waugh does not directly describe Helena’s baptism. Why do you think he left this crucial moment to our imagination? What effect does the silence have?

12. The bishop of ?Jerusalem, Macarius, reflects on Constantine’s grandiose plans for his city’s holy sites. “What Hadrian had carelessly preserved, Constantine had zealously destroyed” (p. 196). What is the irony in this? How can our well-intentioned religious activities sometimes backfire?

13. Why does Helena seek the true cross? Why does she consider the Magi her patrons?

14. How does Helena respond to the various legends she’s told about the cross?

15. “Her work was finished. She had done what only the saints succeed in doing; what indeed constitutes their patent of sanctity. She had completely conformed to the will of God” (p. 226). How did Helena’s unique personality and her questions open her to fulfilling God’s will?

16. Waugh ends Helena by writing, “Above all the babble of her age and ours, she makes one blunt assertion. And there alone is hope.” What “assertion” does Helena make? Why does this “alone” embody hope?

17. How would you describe the “babble” of our age? What does Helena’s quest and discovery say to this age? What hope does it give?

Back to the top