‘Noseless men … with their feet in fire’: Glimpsing Syphilis in the Fiction of Virginia Woolf

Abstract Images of individuals deprived of a nose—once a common symptom of tertiary syphilis—recur across Virginia Woolf’s fiction. This essay seeks to recover the significance of this medical marker and argues that Woolf uses semi-legible signs of venereal disease to dramatize the dangers of withholding sexual knowledge from women, specifically that of male sexual entitlement and of the realities of the male-oriented institution of heterosexual marriage. Woolf’s partial re-encryption of syphilitic symptoms act as invitational gestures for her reader to inquire further into the structural causes lying behind sexual disease and its invisibility. It situates close readings of The Voyage Out (1915), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), and The Years (1937) within wider feminist and public health debates about sexual infection, including Woolf’s discussion of Josephine Butler’s campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts in Three Guineas (1938), Christabel Pankhurst’s polemic against the ‘great scourge’, and Woolf’s own engagement with sexual health education via her involvement with the Women’s Co-operative Guild. It concludes with a revised reading of the figure of Mary Carmichael in A Room of One’s Own (1929), often taken as a cipher for the sexologist and birth control advocate Marie Stopes. In doing so, it argues that Woolf’s glimpses of syphilis imitate the censoring logic of the ‘conspiracy of silence’ and implicate her reader in the very act of recognition it sought to prevent.