Victoria Welby’s semiotics, significs and gender: through a modernist lens

Abstract While there is an established body of scholarship discussing Victoria Welby’s contribution to semiotics, her philosophical ideas engage with many of the intellectual currents that would later define the modernist movement. Exploring Welby’s extensive articles, letters, speeches, and monographs – through a genealogical framework and modernist lens – conveys Welby’s semiotic portrait of language and gender as both building upon and extending the classical semiotic approaches of Peirce as well as demonstrating nascent modernist elements. This casts a new light on the importance of Welby’s semiotic concepts of Significs and mother-sense. Yet, although Welby’s works correspond with proto-modernist concepts, including language’s reflexive capabilities and the fluidity of gender, her semiotic philosophy marks a disjuncture with modernism’s formal experimentation. Thus, while Welby’s ideas about gender and language, in addition to her unschooled prose and eclectic approaches, were incompatible with the traditional institutions of late nineteenth century philosophy, neither did her works align entirely with modernism’s dramatic breaks, experimentation with form and intellectual revolution of the later twentieth century.