Virginia Woolf’s China: orientalism, ornament, and pictorial morphology

Wong, Hor Yau Serena (2026) Virginia Woolf’s China: orientalism, ornament, and pictorial morphology. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

This thesis examines Virginia Woolf’s references to China and Chinese motifs across her literary oeuvre. Specifically, it explores the manner in which Woolf drew inspiration from artistic framings of Chinese material culture and integrated them into the thematic, formal, and political dimensions of her literature. The thesis makes the case that Woolf’s engagement with China within her own writing was more sustained and extensive than has previously been recognised. Building on this observation, it further argues that her deployment of Chinese qualities and identities across her oeuvre is predominantly aesthetic, expressed through decorative objects and serving as markers of taste and style. The thesis contextualises its study of Woolf in the discursive practices of the Bloomsbury Group regarding Chinese art and literature. It then situates its investigation of Woolf and China within the aesthetic and philosophical influences of Bloomsbury and, in turn, demonstrates how Woolf’s interest in these discourses contributes to self-reflexive projections of China within Bloomsbury and the wider British modernist sphere. The thesis maintains that Woolf’s depictions of Chineseness ultimately function as a lens through which she interrogates notions of Englishness, which she extends to her critique of the British empire.

As indicated in its title, the thesis’s reading of Woolf and China is informed by the guiding terms ‘orientalism’, ‘ornament’, and ‘pictorial morphology’. The first term, ‘orientalism’, used here in the Saidian sense, refers to the fundamentally imaginative and essentialising representation of the East in Woolf’s engagement with China. The thesis acknowledges the need to address Woolf’s orientalism in her Chinese portrayals and positions her practice as a matter for postcolonial scrutiny. ‘Ornament’, meanwhile, which also draws on theoretical discussions of ‘ornamentalism’, highlights the creative ways in which Woolf’s orientalism emerges. Her depictions of China often appear through decorative, artificial descriptions and through the stylistic techniques of her narratives. Finally, the third term, ‘pictorial morphology’, speaks both to the productive impact of Woolf’s rendering of Chinese culture and to the method through which these representations can be constructively approached in the contemporary and increasingly globalised context. Woolf’s employment of Chinese imagery in her writing facilitates formal innovations that reorient the experimental methods of her literature. Concurrently, the intercultural representations in her literary texts create a pictorial space that fosters exchange across borders among her expanding readership.

The four discussion chapters of the thesis are organised chronologically around the stages of Woolf’s literary career, with some temporal overlap arising from thematic considerations. Woolf’s situational and ideological references to China throughout her oeuvre span issues of empire, race, eugenics, gender, and illness. The thesis draws on a wide range of materials from her novels, short fictions, essays, diaries, and letters to establish the creative, conceptual, and critical links at play within her treatment of such issues. Chapter One focuses on the formative years of Woolf’s development as a writer, during which she associates China with chinoiserie imagery within the context of British customs. It pays particular attention to her reviews of The Call of the East by Charlotte Lorrimer (1907), Modes and Manners of the Nineteenth Century, as Represented in the Pictures and Engravings of the Time by Max von Boehn and Oskar Fischel (1910), and Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures by Pu Songling (1913). Chapter Two studies Woolf’s incorporation of her reflections on Chinese aesthetics into her initial creative writing endeavours. It considers her novel The Voyage Out (1915) alongside its original manuscript, Melymbrosia (1912), as well as her novel Night and Day (1919). The chapter also analyses her short stories ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1917), ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919), and ‘Solid Objects’ (1920), and those written in relation to her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), including ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ (1923), ‘The New Dress’ (1924), ‘The Man who Loved His Kind’, and ‘A Summing Up’.

Chapter Three focuses on two of Woolf’s best-known novels, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse (1927). The chapter explores Woolf’s visual strategies in the formal and thematic aspects of her more technically mature works. And, finally, Chapter Four moves to Woolf’s refinement of her ideas on prose form extending from her engagement with oriental Chinese motifs. It discusses ‘Java Head’ (1919) and ‘On Being Ill’ (1926), her writings on Thomas de Quincey, including ‘The English Mail Coach’ (1906), ‘Impassioned Prose’ (1926), and ‘De Quincey’s Autobiography’ (1932), as well as ‘Poetry, Fiction, and the Future’ (1927), ‘Foreword to Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell’ (1930), and ‘Thunder at Wembley’ (1924). Ultimately, Woolf adopts an ambivalent attitude towards China, engaging with it as place, culture, and aesthetic in ways that render it at once ethically autonomous, ideologically monolithic, and socially vibrant. For Woolf and Bloomsbury, China functions as an ideational model through which their self-reflexive and cross-cultural projections materialise, a framework that remains significant in contemporary approaches to reading twentieth-century literature as shifting contexts inform new interpretive possibilities.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Additional Information: Supported by funding from the Research Support Award from the University of Glasgow.
• Subjects: P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General); P Language and Literature > PR English literature
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature
• Funder's Name: University of Glasgow Research Support Award
• Supervisor's Name: Randall, Professor Bryony and Goldman, Dr. Jane
• Date of Award: 2026
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2026-86133
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 16 Jul 2026 13:26
• Last Modified: 19 Jul 2026 06:36
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.86133
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/86133