Spatial and sensory aesthetics in Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928)

This chapter explores the spatiality of sensory aesthetics in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928). Whilst also referring to sensory studies scholarship on hierarchical post-Enlightenment conceptions of the senses, the first section of the chapter brings together feminist and postcolonial theories of “the gaze” to suggest that Woolf’s novel exposes an imperialistic form of patriarchy – reflected in early twentieth-century propaganda and the male literary tradition – as a hegemonic way of seeing that is rooted in spatial and sensory hegemony. The second section goes on to explore how this gaze is undermined as part of the novel’s radical feminist critique. Woolf’s use of intersensorial aesthetics including her revision of sensory-spatial structures via textual experiment is fundamental to this. As such, the chapter participates in the current sensory turn within modernist studies while advancing its focus on matters of gender and race. Simultaneously, it brings a new combination of theoretical contexts not only to Orlando but to Woolf studies and modernist studies more broadly.