Subversive Sensations: Reconsidering the Sensory in New Woman Literature

My dissertation, “Subversive Sensations: Reconsidering the Sensory in New Woman Literature,” explores how sensory studies can help inform our readings of authors who seek to destabilize traditional social categorizations and create space for forms of identity that prioritize in-betweenness, hybridity, and inclusivity. The project focuses on understudied women writers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Sui Sin Far, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Amy Levy, amongst others) who believed that changing the way we perceive bodily sensation can affect our social perception. I argue that many women authors from this period tie their rejection of a patriarchal system to an explicit dismantlement of the Western hierarchy of the senses (which places the most value on the supposedly more “rational” qualities of sight and sound and treats the senses as isolated phenomena). These writers—who all lived between boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and nation—demonstrate how attuning ourselves to the so-called “lesser” sensations of touch, taste, and smell and viewing them as part of a larger human sensorium can serve as a tool of empowerment. Using the theories of feminists such as Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa (who argue that sensory encounters—especially those that are pleasurable—can lead to moments of attunement and awakening), the critical work of sensory studies scholars such as David Howes and Constance Classen, and recent neurological findings, I investigate the ways that women writers who lived during the turn into the twentieth century root social transformation in sensory perception and explain how this kind of approach could be useful in a twenty-first century context.