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.