Vile Bodies

Explore Waugh and Elliot’s view of the modern world in the two extracts.

Whilst both these works are considered modernist texts to varying degrees, the depiction of the modern world and in essence the “unreal city” varies greatly. Post and prelapsarian worlds coexist with each other through a traverse array of facades and the distorting viewpoint of the privileged, along with other incoherent modernist viewpoints.

Whilst Elliot’s depiction of the modern world is a barren, almost post apocalyptical wasteland, ‘Vile Bodies’ explores it in a less exaggerated sense. The pace of the lives of these ‘Bright Young Things’ along with their pronounced sense of ‘Ennui’ is emphatic of their acute disconnection with the world in which they inhabit. Planes, cars, airships, are key elements of depicting modernism as explored by Andy Webb in his ‘Literature of the modern world module’. These aforementioned methods of transport feature heavily in the novel and indeed this extract, whilst the concept of a stable home is notably absent. Exemplifying
With the delusions of agatha’s cries for the vehicle to be “faster, faster” to the sickness that Nina experiences. The sickness that is seen, is both physical and mental. this theme is a constant and the different forms of both sickness and alcohol abuse could have been reflective of the social problems of the time, which ultimately led to war, and the desolate aftermath that Elliot explores. The increasing emphasis on speed suggests that it may all break down and due to the ferocity with which they go about their daily lives, a point may come where the facades of grandeur can no longer be sustained and will ultimately result in the crashing back to the harsh reality of the postlapsarian world in which Elliot’s ‘wasteland’ lies, where the “testimony of summer nights” are no