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Virginia Woolf’s short fiction “The Duchess and the Jeweller,” published in 1938, has been absent from critical focus partly because the text does not partake in the experimental narrative devices Woolf’s fictions commonly present. The lack of critical attention to the story also comes from its references to Jewishness and its deployment of pervasive racial stereotypes of Jews. This article challenges the critical receptions in which the story is conceived as either a non-experimental and moralistic tale or an Anti-Semitic piece of work. It seeks to demonstrate that the story offers anti-utilitarian imaginations of things, explores a new paradigm of aesthetics, getting beyond the Western overemphasis on optical vision, and thereby, generates multiple thoughts opposing political ideologies propagated in the 1930s. Although the text appears to display signs and images evocative of Jews, such representations serve to reveal Woolf’s self-conscious resistance to political powers, including Fascism, anti-Semitism, and Nazism. Noting that the story engages the trope of smell in order to criticize a wide range of cultural ideologies, from the Western idealization of optical vision to Nazism’s use of visual spectacles, this paper articulates the roles of smell and olfaction presented in “The Duchess and the Jeweller,” and argues that the sense of smell in Woolf’s text is closely associated with the true qualities of things or something naked, the recognition of which is essential for Woolf to reject the lies of political ideologies.

This article examines how Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) challenges an ignorant schoolteacher’s pedagogical ideas and methods. While maintaining the heroine’s attractive qualities, the 1961 novel also shows her as an “ignorant” educator who is politically naive and forces her students to accept her own personal doctrines about art, history, and politics, which are, in fact, intermingled with political ideologies propagated from fascists. In the process of becoming a socially engaged writer who explores a writer’s political responsibilities, Spark refused to glamorize the ostensibly charismatic teacher, who dictates her students under a state of ignorance. Although The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie tends to draw a sense of sympathy toward the heroine, the text denies aestheticizing Miss Jean Brodie, and exposes the crimes of the politically naive figure, who comes to imitate Fascism’s aestheticization of political life in the post-World War I era. Engaging a delicate mockery of the character’s autocratic actions, Spark’s fiction encourages us to consider the political problems of the naive teacher’s pedagogical approach and her emphasis on beauty, which involves the problematic acts of aestheticizing human beings and political experiences. By observing the novel’s juxtaposition between Miss Brodie and the Fascist leader, this paper interrogates Miss Brodie’s crimes and errors, often committed unintentionally.

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) embraces culturally unprivileged bodies, which are outside national ideals. The novel’s espousal of such different bodies comes from Woolf’s intention to undermine the athletic and superior bodies produced under the pedagogical terrain. Woolf recognized a range of schools in England as one primary site that caused great confines of male and female bodies. Bent on the destruction of standard bodies formulated in the schools, The Waves shows that both the boys’ school and the girls’ school are designed to tame individual bodies by means of physical education. While describing the pedagogical violence against individual bodies, The Waves also presents some disobedient characters who try to escape the schools. Instead of participating in athletic games supplied by the schools, they involve themselves in aesthetic activities that embody the imagination of bodily equality. To fathom the political aspects of The Waves, this article examines the novel’s representation of the English schools that discipline male and female bodies with a particular emphasis on physical education. Turning to the aesthetic figures, the present discussion, in turn, explores how the characters’ aesthetic performance can expand the possibility of espousing different bodies stigmatized as inferior or insignificant in society.