Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose

Abstract

This thesis studies how literature registers the importance of olfactory discourse—the language of smell and the olfactory imagination it creates—in structuring our social world. The broad aim of this thesis is to offer an intersectional and wide-ranging study of olfactory oppression by establishing the underlying logics that facilitate smell’s application in creating and subverting gender, class, sexual, racial and species power structures. I focus largely on prose fiction from the modern and contemporary periods so as to trace the legacy of olfactory prejudice into today and situate its contemporary relevance. I suggest that smell very often invokes identity in a way that signifies an individual’s worth and status in an inarguable manner that short-circuits conscious reflection. This can be accounted for by acknowledging olfaction’s strongly affective nature, which produces such strong bodily sensations and emotions that reflexivity is bypassed in favour of a behavioural or cognitive solution that assuages the intense feeling most immediately. Olfactory disgust, therefore, tends to result in rejection, while harmful forms of olfactory desire may result in sublimation or subjugation. My thesis is particularly attentive to tensions and ambivalences that complicate the typically bifurcated affective spectrum of olfactory experiences, drawing attention to (dis)pleasurable olfactory relations that have socio-political utility. I argue that literary fiction is not only an arena in which olfactory logics can be instantiated, but also a laboratory in which possibilities for new kinds of relations and connections can be fostered and tested. Chapter One explores how smell can be used to indicate class antipathies, partly as they relate to homelessness, beginning with George Orwell’s seminal non-fiction text, The Road to Wigan Pier (1936), before considering Iain Sinclair’s The Last London (2017) and Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019). In Chapter Two I explore the fantastical, idealistic, and utopic thinking that surrounds olfaction, which presents smell as fundamentally non-human, by addressing J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933), Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch (2021), and Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020). Chapter Three focuses on the intersectional olfactory dimensions of ‘misogynoir’—the coextensive anti-Black racism and misogyny that Black women experience—and considers Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981), Bernice McFadden’s Sugar (2000) and Raven Leilani’s Luster (2020). In Chapter Four, I conceptualise an oppressive olfactory logic, which is used against women and girls in order to legitimise their harassment or abuse, drawing primarily on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), but also Patrick Süskind’s Perfume (1985). Chapter Five discusses two forms of olfactory desire—perversion and queerness—which have separate moral valences. I address J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg (1994), Ann Quin’s Berg (1964), and Sam Byers’ Come Join Our Disease (2020), and argue for fiction’s role in reorienting readers’ habitual relations to olfaction.