“Writing Down” Fish: Culinary Aesthetics and Politics in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Between the Acts

Abstract

This article traces fish as a culinary motif across Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Between the Acts (1941). It argues that fish – an overlooked foodstuff in Woolf’s writing – functions interdiscursively, articulating sensory experience and socio-political meaning while operating as both aesthetic matter and critical concept. In A Room of One’s Own, I consider the sole dish served at an all-male college as a symbol of the material inequalities that underpin the production of knowledge at “Oxbridge.” This, in turn, allows me to recontextualise the aesthetic arrangement of this first course within a transnational interwar gastronomic culture. A possible debt to Marcel Boulestin’s recipe, I suggest, helps to clarify how the meal episode confronts “taste” in both literal and figurative senses, implicitly challenging the hierarchy that excludes this “inferior” sense from aesthetic experience. I then turn to Between the Acts, where soles reappear, and show how their trajectory from Pointz Hall’s kitchen to the luncheon table politicises the everyday meal, bringing domestic labour and wartime scarcity into view. I further argue that the recurring anxiety over the freshness of the fish here resonates with a notorious episode in French gastronomic history: in light of Woolf’s 1939 essay on Madame de Sévigné, the motif brings to mind François Vatel’s suicide and reframes fish as spectral matter. Finally, in dialogue with Woolf’s radio talk “Craftsmanship” (1937), I read fish as metapoetic raw material to offer a parallel between ingredients and words in Woolf’s textual practice.