Contradiction and ambivalence : Virginia Woolf and the aesthetic experience in "The Duchess and the Jeweller"
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.73Abstract
In the midst of the terror waged on Europe by Nazi demonstrations of power and racial extermination Virginia Woolf published a most contrevorsial short story -"The Duchess and the Jeweller" (1938)- which was originally entitled "The Duchess and the Jew" but was changed at the request of Woolf's American publisher for its racist connotations. The story has been neglected by the critics on account of two major reasons: on the one hand, it does not partake of those innovative narrative devices that most of Woolf's fiction presents; on the other such an apparently Anti-Semitist piece of work is inconveniently at odds with the oeuvre of a writer who so ardently and energetically rejected Fascism in her pamphlet Three Guineas which was curiously simultaneous in date of composition and publication to "The Duchess and the Jeweller". Despite the fact that Woolf may have been airing her personal prejudices of race and class in the characters of Oliver Bacon and the Duchess of Lambourne, the present paper does not aim to do away with such incoherence, ambivalence and contradiction, but rather focuses on the jewel imagery which structures the narrative and which addresses questions such as the 'art for art's sake' doctrine versus the material commodity of beautyDownloads
References
Baldwin, Dean. 1989. Virginia Woolf: A Study of Her Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne.
Beerbohm, Max. 1895. (1880). The Yellow Book 4: 275-283.
Bell, Clive. 1984 (1914). “The Aesthetic Hypothesis”. Modern Art and Modernism: An Anthology. Eds. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison. New York: Harper & Row. 67-74.
Bürger, Peter. 1984. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Trans. Michael Shaw.
Dellamora, Richard. 1990. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P.
Eagleton, Terry. 1975. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso.
Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. London: Basil Blackwell.
Elliott, Bridget, and Jo-Ann Wallace 1994. Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (Im)Positionings. London: Routledge.
Feltes, N. N. 1986. Modes of Production of Victorian Novels. Chicago & London: U of Chicago P.
Freedman, Jonathan. 1990. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture. Stanford, California: Stanford UP.
Guiguet, Jean. 1965. Virginia Woolf and Her Works. London: The Hogarth P. Trans. Jean Stewart.
Hagopian, John, and Martin Dolck, eds. 1964. “Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Duchess and the Jeweller’”. Insight II: Analyses of Modern British Literature. Frankfurt: Hirschgraben-Verlag. 363-367.
Head, Dominic. 1992. The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: CUP.
Lee, Hermione. 1996. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. London: Chatto & Windus.
Leighton, Angela.1992. Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P.
Light, Alison 2002. “Harnessed to a Shark”. London Review of Books (21 March). 27-31.
Marcus, Laura. 1996. “Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press”. Modernist Writers and the Marketplace. Eds. Ian Willison, Warwick Gould, and Warren Chernaik. London: McMillan. 124-150.
Pater, Walter.1986 (1873). The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Oxford: World’s Classics.
Pollock, Griselda. 1988. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art. New York: Routledge.
Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. 1997. Beauty’s Body: Femininity an Representation in British Aestheticism. Stanford, California: Stanford UP.
Shaffer, Talia, and Kathy Alexis Psomiades, eds. 1999. Women and British Aestheticism. Charlottesville & London: UP of Virginia.
Woolf, Virginia. 1976. The Letters of Virginia Woolf II. Ed. Nigel Nicolson. London: The Hogarth P.
Woolf, Virginia.1978. The Letters of Virginia Woolf IV. Ed. Nigel Nicolson. London: The Hogarth P.
Woolf, Virginia. 1980a. The Letters of Virginia Woolf VI. Ed. Nigel Nicolson. London: The Hogarth P.
Woolf, Virginia.1980b. The Diary of Virginia Woolf III. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Woolf, Virginia.1981. The Diary of Virginia Woolf II. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Woolf, Virginia. 1982. The Diary of Virginia Woolf IV. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Woolf, Virginia.1984. The Diary of Virginia Woolf V. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Woolf, Virginia.1985. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. London: The Hogarth P.
Woolf, Virginia.1987. The Essays of Virginia Woolf II. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth P.
Woolf, Virginia. 1992 (1938). Three Guineas. Ed. Morag Shiach. Oxford: OUP.
Woolf, Virginia.1992b. A Woman’s Essays: The Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf I. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Woolf, Virginia.1992c. The Crowded Dance of Modern Life: The Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf II. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Woolf, Virginia.1993. Virginia Woolf: Selected Short Stories. Ed. Sandra Kemp. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Woolf, Virginia. 1994. The Essays of Virginia Woolf IV. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth P.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The authors retain copyright of articles and authorize Journal of English Studies the first publication. They are free to share, redistribute, and/or reprint the article without obtaining permission from the publisher as long as they give appropriate credit to the editor and the journal.
Self-archiving is allowed too. In fact, it is recommendable to deposit a PDF version of the paper in academic and/or institutional repositories.
It is recommended to include the DOI number.
This journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
