The Sense of the Sense of Smell in Virginia Woolf’s Flush

In her novella Flush, Virginia Woolf narrates the life of Elizabeth Barrett’s dog and deals with several issues central to her work, such as sensations, language, and writing. One of the stylistic characteristics of the mock-biography is the importance it confers to smells, which is all the more interesting as smells are a rare topic in literature and are notoriously difficult to talk or write about. Adopting a dog’s point of view allows Woolf to bypass the taboo attached to smells and to deal extensively with them. This chapter focuses on the linguistic representations of smells in Flush; it analyzes the use of the nouns referring to smell in the novella, that is, smell, but also aroma, essence, odour, scent, or whiff. The syntactic properties of these nouns and the lexemes cooccurring with them are studied. This contribution focuses in particular on the adjectives used to describe smells. Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive metaphor theory is used to show that in Woolf’s text, smells are presented as agentive entities. This chapter first provides a survey of how smells are described in Flush; it then shows that the difficulty of characterizing smells linguistically is partly due to the ontological complexity of smells and that Woolf exploits this complexity to offer a representation of the nature of sensations. Finally, the last section demonstrates that Woolf’s style in Flush mimics some of the most central features of smell to achieve a modernist aesthetic.