Vile Bodies is a 1930 novel by Evelyn Waugh satirising the Bright Young People:
decadent young London society between World War I and World War II.
The title is a literal translation of the Latin phrase "corpora vilia," the plural of "corpus vile," meaning a person or thing fit only to be the object of experimentation. The characters in the book are unwittingly at the mercy of the author's whims in the same way that, according to Biblical tradition, human lives are subject to the designs of their supernatural creator.
This form of mirroring is a common literary metaphor. It has been suggested that the title could be a reference to St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians 3:21 which, [in the Authorised Version or King James Bible of 1611], reads "Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body," but it is hard to see any way in which this interpretation relates to the plot or themes of the book.
The original title was to be Bright Young Things, which went on to be that ofStephen Fry's 2003 film adaptation. Waugh changed it because he thought the phrase had become too clichéd. The title that he eventually settled on also appears in a comment made by the novel's narrator in reference to the characters' party-driven lifestyle: "All that succession and repetition of massed humanity... Those vile bodies...", which would tend to support the translation of "corpora vilia" as the title's source.
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