Sensory Aesthetics and Feminist Modernisms

: A Revisionary Study of Novels by Virginia Woolf, Gloria Naylor, and Naomi Mitchison

Abstract

Exploring novels by Virginia Woolf, Gloria Naylor, and Naomi Mitchison, this thesis argues
that twentieth-century women writers engage with the sensory to critique, resist and revise
hegemonic manifestations of modernity. Woolf’s Orlando (1928) explores the relationship
between patriarchy and imperialism in 1920s Britain. Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place
(1982) and Bailey’s Cafe (1992) consider the complex histories of sexism and racism in
America from a post-civil rights perspective. Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962)
and Solution Three (1973) examine post-war inequalities in relation to the Cold War. Though
very different, the texts all employ sensory language to recover women’s bodies from
modernity’s suppressive discourses and impacts – a process that is reflected in and supported
by experimental episodic forms. By putting Woolf, Naylor and Mitchison in touch with one
another, I construct a new community of authors, and emphasise that feminist revision might
be understood in haptic terms, as a method of getting in touch.
This thesis attends to the precarity of radical women writers; the gender and race
politics of suppression; and relationships between readers, writers, and texts. It brings together
feminist and Black feminist theories of the body, women’s writing, and revision. Framing this
is the relationship I establish between sensory studies and feminist modernist studies. This
study is the first to explicitly bring these fields together from an intersectional perspective that
consistently considers race and gender. This project demonstrates that sensory studies and
feminist modernist studies can support each other’s recuperative and expansive aims. Both
fields bring new contexts and terms to the other. Feminist modernist studies expands sensory
studies’ existing literary focus, highlighting its affinity with revision theory. Conversely,
sensory studies’ emphasis on the socially constructed nature of the senses illuminates new
socio-political meanings in sensory prose.

Date of Award	23 Jan 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Sponsors	South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership
Supervisor	Andrew M Blades (Supervisor) & Cleo Hanaway-Oakley (Supervisor)