‘Two large feet, in tight shoes, so that the bunions showed’: Misshapen Feet as Emblems of Class Constraint in Virginia Woolf’s The Years
(Under Peer Review)
This project offers a close reading of the moment in The Years when Peggy Pargiter’s idealised vision of communal harmony is abruptly interrupted by the sight of a dancer’s bunioned feet forced into tight shoes. I argue that Woolf mobilises this fleeting detail as a corporeal index of class constraint, using bodily distortion to register pressures that the narrative itself leaves unspoken. Contextualised through medical accounts of bunions and read alongside the grotesque choreography in 'Street Haunting: A London Adventure', the analysis demonstrates how Woolf repeatedly turns to gait, posture, and discomfort to expose the contrivances of social hierarchy. The bunioned feet thus function as a concentrated emblem of the novel’s broader interrogation of social class: a moment in which physical strain illuminates the regulatory force of social norms while gesturing toward the possibility of change.
Dance, Feminist Community Formation, and Digital Humanities
(Emerging Research)
This emerging research examines how choreographic structures in Virginia Woolf’s writing—scenes of dance, collective gesture, and rhythmic convergence—generate alternative forms of feminist community. Across The Years, Three Guineas, and Between the Acts, I consider how Woolf imagines political possibility not through institutional authority but through fleeting, embodied constellations of women moving in relation to one another. These moments offer a model of nonhierarchical collectivity central to her late political thinking.
Building on this conceptual foundation, the project explores how digital humanities tools—such as network visualisation, layered annotation, and AI-assisted analysis—might help illuminate or spatialise these relational formations. While I am not approaching DH as a data specialist, I am increasingly interested in the interpretive possibilities these methods open up, particularly in how they bring into focus the spatial, rhythmic, and affective patterns underlying Woolf’s choreographies of relation.
This strand of work aims to create a dialogue between modernist studies, embodiment, and digital experimentation, suggesting new ways of understanding movement as both an aesthetic principle and a political gesture in Woolf’s writings.
Sound, Silence, and the Working-Class Women of Mrs Dalloway
(Work in Progress)
This project investigates how Mrs Dalloway encodes class difference not only through description or focalisation, but through sound—what is heard, half-heard, or missing altogether. I focus on moments where working-class women appear at the edges of the novel’s sonic fabric: Lucy, Clarissa’s maid; the charwomen and shopgirls; the exhausted women moving through London’s streets. These figures rarely receive direct speech. Instead, they surface through fragments, interruptions, and silences that are no less telling than dialogue.
One key point of departure is the novel’s famous opening line: 'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself'. I explore the possibility—never acknowledged in mainstream criticism—that this line may echo the unrecorded voice of domestic workers. Spoken in the idiom of household exchange, the sentence reads uncannily like an exchange between housemaids. This ambiguity allows us to reconsider whose voices open the novel and whose perspectives are structurally displaced as the narrative shifts into Clarissa’s consciousness.
Through close readings informed by sound studies and feminist theory, the project argues that Woolf uses silence as a diagnostic tool: the muffled presence of working-class women exposes the uneven distribution of audibility in modern London. Attending to these fleeting, often muted moments reveals a subtle but insistent critique of the social hierarchies that determine who is allowed to speak, who is merely overheard, and who disappears into the city’s background noise. By restoring attention to these sonic margins, the research reframes Mrs Dalloway as a novel fundamentally concerned with listening—and with the political stakes of who gets to be heard.
