As a literary scholar, I typically have a lot to say about main characters. It’s ironic, then, that when I became the main character of X for a week, I was left somewhat at a loss for words. The post that nearly 120 million people have seen is entirely innocuous: in it, I hold a hardbound copy of my PhD thesis on “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose”. The photo was taken just before I submitted the copy to Cambridge University Library, the final requirement for my PhD to be approved, and the post is captioned “Thrilled to say I passed my viva with no corrections and am officially PhDone”.
My thesis explores how the literature of the past century records and critically engages with the importance of smell in society. I examine why certain writers use smell to characterise harmful attitudes towards objects of disgust or desire. Over the course of the thesis, I discuss how smell can create gender, class, sexual, racial, and even species power dynamics, although many of these identity categories prove to be interrelated in literature. We tend to think about discrimination and prejudice as primarily visual phenomena, but all of the senses are heavily influenced by culture, and the strong emotional reactions produced by smell make it particularly politically charged.
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