Vile Bodies

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1930

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-9

Chapters 10-14

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

A Critique of Modernity

1930 was a critical year for Waugh, for Britain, and for the world. The world was reeling from a deepening worldwide depression, which put millions of people out of work and called into question the foundations of capitalism. During this time, Britain’s colonial empire was being challenged, most famously in India, where Mahatma Gandhi led his famous Salt Satyagraha, a protestation of salt taxes, which became a tipping point in the ongoing fight for Indian independence from the British. New inventions such as the plane, motorcar, and telephone had become normalized objects by 1930, altering the nature of everyday life. Waugh himself was married and divorced within a year, events that corresponded with the writing of Vile Bodies. Waugh’s adoption of aesthetic modernist techniques was a way of wrestling with these dynamic changes.

American and Continental European modernists tended to extoll the modern era in writing and painting, welcoming, for instance, the sleek form of the motorcar and the hustle of modern social life. The English, by contrast, were cooler about modernity. In the late 18th century, as the first factories began upping the pace of life, Romantic poets sought solace in the receding natural world, or within the wilds of their own personalities. Other English writers registered their dissatisfaction with modernity through satire. In a world dominated by the English empire’s economic structure, moreover, there could be no making peace with the changes brought about by modernity.

Thus, Waugh’s satire takes particular focus on the democratizing effect of technology. In his world, the telephone flattens the emotional aspect of marriage proposals, making them meaningless. Movies are massive Ponzi schemes, making beggars of formerly great men. The speed of the modern press, combined with the liberalization of government, makes clowns out of an ever-shifting parade of Prime Ministers. Motorcars bring chaos and death. In an alternative reality to the one Waugh establishes, perhaps kings would sit on thrones, marriage proposals would happen in manicured gardens, and authors would hold universal respect and awe. In Vile Bodies, however, modernity’s innovations make the institutions that structure society—including interpersonal relationships, art, entertainment, and national politics—ridiculous and unpredictable.

“Bright Young Things” and the Burgeoning Media

In 19th-century England, politicians, soldiers, artists, and thinkers were considered celebrities. Their reputations tended to be burnished by privilege and status, years of work, or campaigning on behalf of their reputations. Their stories were told in books and in long newspapers columns. The communications of the early 20th century, on the other hand—radio, telephones, and newsreels—were more immediate and fleeting and so, too, were the types of celebrity they produced. The media of the late 1920s introduced an insatiable appetite for beautiful things of minor importance. Modern celebrities, the people the novel calls “Bright Young Things,” were created as media fodder at this time.

English celebrity culture of the late twenties and early thirties was a unique mix of breathless reverence for movie stars and mean-spirited gawking at English royalty. English moviemaking would never achieve the star power of Hollywood, and so the most sensational stories in the English tabloids of the time centered on the misadventures of King George V's four sons, especially those of Edward, Prince of Wales, whose dalliances with West End actresses were all the rage. As for the people 21st-century media consumers might think of as B- or C-list celebrities, these were people of minor peerage (the nobility) who hosted wild parties of the sort depicted in Vile Bodies.

There was a dark side to the fun and glamor featured in gossip columns like the one in the novel. Media attention could turn malevolent, asking more of celebrities than they were able to give. Before she dies, Agatha Runcible recounts a dream in which she’s racing before an audience, “all shouting at us at once to go faster, and car after car kept crashing until I was left all alone driving and driving” (241). Waugh’s novel points to the risks of too much public attention. At the same time, his focus on social gossip, and the partygoers’ desire to know each other’s secrets, contrasts satirically with supposedly more serious news that goes unremarked upon, such as when the Prime Minister is unaware that war is imminent.

The Decay of English Privilege

The early 20th century was a historical hinge point for the English peerage and other representatives of English privilege. People with titles like “Earl,” “Duchess,” and “Baron” were assumed to have had their titles handed down over generations; however, such titles were also passed to merchants throughout the 19th century by way of marriage, literally passing a heritage of outmoded feudalism to capitalist newcomers, and undermining older institutions of hierarchy and wealth. At the same time, the vast colonial holdings of British military and economic leadership had reached their height and were beginning to show weakness as colonized people demanded political and economic freedom. Within another generation after Waugh’s, the British would almost completely relinquish political control of the massive global holdings that had brought vast wealth to earlier English generations.

Such change brings with it dizzying social consequences. The older generation depicted in Vile Bodies is better equipped to deal with the strange fluctuations of modernity than the young, but only because they possess the protections and finances of an earlier age. When the British empire was at its height, the worst rigors of production—such as planting, sowing, and manufacturing—had been hidden away from English consumers, offloaded to impoverished colonized regions across the world. With the loss of those colonies, the dependence of colonizing forces on the colonized for luxuries and supposedly age-old forms of authority and tradition (which were often actually quite new or ad-hoc) was shaken to the core. When this happened, the dehumanization which the colonizers imposed on the colonized eventually returned to the colonizing country. The sons and daughters of landholders reverted to being workers in a world in which work became more alienating than ever.

Colonel Blount, who lives in a large but dilapidated estate and is doted on by an incompetent staff, represents the fall of older structures of wealth and power. His mental state is such that he can barely tell one of his daughter’s suitors from another. In this sense, he becomes Britain’s last source of entrepreneurship, his inert wealth preyed upon by smarter and savvier people than himself. These include a producer of terrible movies and even Adam, a writer reduced to a hack, whose own father was once a respected professor.