Exposing the Nerves of Language: Virginia Woolf, Charles Mauron, and the Affinity Between Aesthetics and Illness

This essay argues that Virginia Woolf’s construction of illness in her essay “On Being Ill” and the French aesthetician Charles Mauron’s theory of aesthetics as articulated in The Nature of Beauty in Art and Literature and Aesthetics and Psychology are related because each recognizes that patients and artists share a unique perceptual and physiological relationship to their surrounding world. For both writers, Woolf more extensively than Mauron, illness becomes the signifier for the body as an aesthetic instrument. It is what forces the reader to recognize art as a product of a corporeal process that is primary rather than secondary to an intellectual process.