Vile Bodies

Like Adam, Nina rarely makes any critical commentary on the world or expresses her desires clearly. When Adam can’t marry her, she declares him boring; in the same tone, she declares his waxing and waning eligibility a delight. Modernity is the active character in Vile Bodies, rendering the rest of the characters passive observers. Nina does, however, feel physical tumult often throughout the novel, most tellingly as her new, unloved husband Ginger struggles to recall Henry the Fifth’s lines to his men about the beauty of England’s “emerald isle” while looking out the window of a plane. Following his gaze, Nina sees only telephone wires and signs of grayness and social disconnect. At the same time, the plane lurches, making her feel sick. This illness is the culminating discomfort in a series of declares “pains” Nina feels about her excessive drinking and about her first experience with sex. In Waugh’s depiction of gender, modern men unthinkingly chase after money and sensation, trying to change their position in the world but never affecting it. Women, on the other hand, he portrays like passive canaries dropped into a coalmine, experiencing more illness the more they descend into the pit of modernity.

Along with Simon Balcairn, Agatha is the only main character whose death Waugh describes in Vile Bodies. Like Balcairn’s, her death is written with satiric bathos (an anticlimactic counterpoint to pathos). If Nina is a canary in a coalmine, registering the toxicity of the atmosphere, Agatha is the dead canary already brought up from the mine, having plunged deeper and more fatally into modernity. The vehicle that takes her there is the motorcar, and not just any motorcar, but the strange “vortex” of constituent parts that make up the race car. After Agatha is mistaken for a male race car driver (in the novel’s gendered world, perhaps due to her having worn trousers), she spends the rest of the novel in a mental institution, dreaming that she is still racing across the countryside. To comfort her, her friends come and instantly throw a party, one more in a succession of themed parties in unique locations that slowly drain away the lives of the partygoers.

Colonel Blount lives in a large but dilapidated estate and is doted on by a barely functional staff scarcely younger than himself. His mental state is such that he can barely tell one of his daughter’s suitors from another. He is the ultimate representative of the generation ahead of Nina and Adam. He has seen colonial holdings and wars and changes in government and seemingly learned nothing useful about them before the ravages of time rendered him incapable of remembering the events he might have had the chance to learn from. His responsibility to the next generation is practically non-existent, as he fails to responsibly oversee his daughter’s marriage prospects or his potential son-in-law’s financial state.

Mr. Chatterbox is the pseudonym of the person who writes the society gossip column for the Daily Excess. The actual writer changes over time. Still, Mr. Chatterbox is among the most influential personalities in the story. When he writes that certain parties were dull or interesting, people who were at those parties tend to follow that opinion. It doesn’t matter that everyone seems to know the actual flesh-and-blood person writing the column. For instance, when Mrs. Metroland wants to destroy Simon Balcairn for writing as Mr. Chatterbox, she simply disinvites him from her party. It is far more interesting for society to pretend they don’t know Mr. Chatterbox’s identity, so long as they are entertained by reading his column. Thus, when Simon Balcairn dies by suicide, party society very easily shrugs off his death though they might have, in another context, judged themselves his murderers. For the column’s readers, the anonymity of Mr. Chatterbox is uncomplicated and comforting, while the anonymity of real people is uncomfortable.

Ginger Littlejohn wins Nina’s hand in marriage, but not her heart in love. He is coarse, having nothing to say about anything he sees but being bored with it all anyway. He is in every way a dull foil to Adam’s romantic aims. In a standard romantic narrative, Ginger would either be the winner of a tragic victory in which traditional practical concerns win out over the youthful hopes and dreams of the protagonists, or else he would be the loser in a romantic triangle in which Nina and Adam run off and elope. Instead, he is neither: He marries the girl but can’t have her. Later, Nina presents Adam as if he were Ginger to her absent-minded father, and the plan goes off without consequences. In a world in which tradition is upended, endings are neither happy nor sad, but contingent upon each moment’s context.