- Name: Divya Sheta
- Paper Name:106.The Twentieth Century Literature: From World War 1900 to World War II.
- Assignment Topic: A Reading of Gender Identity and Sex conflict in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando: A Biography’
- Subject Code No:22399
- Roll No.:06
- Enrollment No :4069206420210033
- Email ID: divyasheta@gmail.com
- Batch:2020-23 MA SEM-II
- Submitted to: Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English, MK Bhavnagar University.
• Introduction:
Twentieth century literature of English history openly described the subjects such as Gender and Sex. England become more freely to discuss about those subjects after such a religious and ethical ages. Traditionally, literature produced more in ethical and religious, but after 1900s and first World War, they started to write on this direction which speaks openly about humans Gender Identity in both Men and Women. Main noticeable thing is that, women writer such as Virginia Woolf, who was considered one of the greatest female writers of twentieth century. She lead as inspirational female writer in todays time also. With her distinct style of narration and poetic language, Woolf produced some of the most influential novels of the first half of the twentieth century.
The Novel, Orlando is considered as Woolf’s an experimental work or an experimental. She also considered as the pioneer of the term of Stream of Consciousness in literature. Her mostly works about the voice of feminist perspective, Gender identity crisis and many more trending subjects of twentieth century society.
• About Virginia Woolf:
The niece wrote Cameron's biography for the Dictionary of National Biography, and drew on her own nursing practice for her Notes on Sickrooms (1883). The Stephen forebears were evangelicals, part of the Clapham Sect around the reformer William Wilberforce; Leslie Stephen was the son of Jane Catherine Venn (daughter of John Venn [see under Venn, Henry], rector of Clapham) and Sir James Stephen, the colonial under-secretary who framed the bill to abolish slavery in 1833. As lawyers, writers, and educators, the Stephens belonged to the professional élite—the intellectual aristocracy, so called—in nineteenth-century England.
Julia Jackson grew up in a different set, that of the Pre-Raphaelite artists who gathered at Little Holland House in London. Though artists, including Holman Hunt, proposed to her, she chose to marry a polished gentleman, Herbert Duckworth. She was a grieving young widow with three children when she married Leslie Stephen and produced four more: the artist Vanessa Bell (1879–1961), (Julius) Thoby Stephen (1880–1906), Virginia, and the psychoanalyst Adrian Stephen (1883–1948).
Virginia was largely self-educated, and continued with a programme of reading throughout her life. Her only sustained formal study was in Greek. At fifteen she attended a few Greek classes at King's College in London, and at eighteen wrote to a cousin, Emma Vaughan, in June 1900: 'Greek … is my daily bread, and a keen delight to me.' In October that year she began private lessons with old Clara Pater, sister to Walter Pater, in an atmosphere of Persian cats and Morris wallpaper, but these lessons proved too undisciplined, and in 1902 Miss Pater was replaced by Janet Case, one of the first women to pass through Girton College, Cambridge, who gave Virginia the only systematic tuition she ever had and introduced her to the feminist cause.
• About the Novel:
Orlando, novel by Virginia Woolf, published in 1928. The fanciful biographical novel pays homage to the family of Woolf’s friend Vita Sackville-West from the time of her ancestor Thomas Sackville (1536–1608) to the family’s country estate at Knole. The manuscript of the book, a present from Woolf to Sackville-West, is housed at Knole.
The novel opens in 1588. Young Orlando, a 16-year-old boy, writes a poem called “The Oak Tree.” He finds favour at the Elizabethan court and love in the arms of a Russian princess.
A garrulous poet, Sir Nicholas Greene (said to be modeled on Sir Edmund Gosse), discusses literature with him. During the reign of Charles II (1660–85), Orlando is named ambassador to Constantinople and is rewarded with a dukedom. One night he stays with a dancer and cannot be awakened. Seven days later Orlando rises, now a beautiful woman. She returns to England and savours intellectual London society in the age of Addison, Dryden, and Pope but turns to bawdy street life for relief from this cerebral life. She marries to achieve respectability during the Victorian years, and by 1928 she has returned to London, where she is reunited with her friend Greene, who offers to find a publisher for “The Oak Tree.” Back at her country estate, she stands under the great oak and remembers her centuries of adventure.
The novel is also an affectionate portrait of Sackville-West, who, because she was a woman, could not inherit Knole. Written in a pompous biographical voice, the book pokes fun at a genre the author knew well: her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, had edited the Dictionary of National Biography, and her friend Lytton Strachey had written the revolutionary Eminent Victorians. Woolf also parodies the changing styles of English literature and explores issues of androgyny and the creative life of women. Orlando marked a turning point in Woolf’s career. Not only was it a departure from her more introspective works, but its spectacular sales also ended her financial worries. Readers praised the book’s fluid style, wit, and complex plot.
• Orlando’s Gender and Sex Conflict:
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, “The main factors driving gender inequalities, conflict and fragility are: prevalence of discriminatory gender norms and practices, widespread sexual and gender-based violence, weak institutions and women’s lack of access to justice and basic services, women’s exclusion from political and economic decision making, and a narrowing space for opposition or civil society organisations.” Gender performativity, as theorized by Judith Butler, seems to be particularly relevant in Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando: A Biography. It is an in-depth exploration of what it means to be a man and a woman, that might threaten to challenge and alter the reader’s preconceived notions of what qualifies to being male or female characteristics by highlighting the differences between socially structured gender and biological sex.
Orlando promotes the concept that gender and sexuality are not exclusively linked to sex, thereby normalizing and promoting a more androgynous reality as an arguably more natural state. Orlando is written in the form of a mock-biography and spans approximately 400 years in duration, starting with the Elizabethan era, and ending, notably, in 1928, although the eponymous protagonist ages only 36 years over the course of the narrative. Judy Little writes, “Orlando arrives as an adult on the scene of each era, she escapes normal childhood socialization” that evolved her as “a self who is free of the major illusions of many eras and the stereotypes of both sexes”.
The book starts off by describing Orlando slicing at the severed head of a Moor with his blade and imagining himself engaging in battle beside his grandfather and father. This masculine image is almost immediately juxtaposed with a description of him that is phrased predominantly in feminine terms like “the red of his cheeks”, “the lips themselves were short”, “the ears small”, “eyes like drenched violets”, etc. At the onset of the novel, the narrator introduces the male Orlando stating, “He- for there would be no doubt of his sex”. Yet, following up the narrator claims that the fashion of that time made him appear woman-like.
Karin Elise suggests that,
WOOLF MOCKS THE MASCULINIST SUBLIME BUT ALSO THAT THROUGH ORLANDO WOOLF CELEBRATES AN ALTERNATIVE AESTHETIC, AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL OF SELF IN ORLANDO, THAT RESEMBLES THE ANDROGYNOUS MODEL IN WOOLF’S A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN.
The next poignant event is Orlando’s initial observations regarding princess Sasha. Orlando’s inability to immediately discern “the name or sex” of that person of “extraordinary seductiveness” , is imperative to note that his attraction is not limited by the boundaries of sex. Orlando’s conclusion after a more prolonged observation- “…a boy it must be- no woman can skate with such speed and vigour” refers to the boundness by conventions to reject the possibility of a homo-erotic connection”.
After seven days of existing in a trancelike sleep, Orlando awakens to find that his body has been transformed into that of a female and “we have no choice but confess- he was a woman”. The narrator ergo begins to address Orlando as “she”. When Orlando is transformed, she simply arises in her new form, stark naked and proceeds by taking a bath. She does not seemed to have suffered during this drastic change and neither is she shocked by it.
In this context, Sharron E. Knopp in her essay If You Saw Me Would You Kiss Me?, claims
ORLANDO IS NOT A WOMAN ACTING LIKE A MAN. ORLANDO IS A MAN. AND A WOMAN. […..] AND THERE IS NOTHING UNNATURAL ABOUT IT.
Woolf writes,
ORLANDO HAD BECOME A WOMAN THERE IS NO DENYING OF IT. BUT IN EVERY OTHER RESPECT, ORLANDO REMAINS PRECISELY AS HE HAD BEEN. THE CHANGE OF SEX, THOUGH IT ALTERED THEIR FUTURE, DID NOTHING WHATEVER TO ALTER THEIR IDENTITY.
When in Constantinople amongst the natives, Orlando did not experience gender differences due to her changed sex. However as soon as she boards the Enamoured Lady to return to England, appropriately dressed as a “young Englishwoman of high rank”, she realized that English “women are not […..] exquisitely apparelled by nature”.
Woolf writes:
CLOTHES HAVE, THEY SAY, MORE IMPORTANT OFFICES THAN MERELY TO KEEP US WARM. THEY CHANGE OUR VIEW OF THE WORLD AND THE WORLD’S VIEW OF US.
Cross-dressing in Orlando occurs fairly frequently. Archduke Harry dresses as a woman, but later reveals himself as a man. Similarly, even after Orlando’s sex change, she continues to switch between clothes of both gender. This motif functions in the novel to emphasize the similarities between men and women, underneath their clothes, and hence, that genders should be allowed more freedom in their actions.
As England comes into view, the impropriety of female authorship of the time strikes Orlando. Orlando would restrain “the tears came to her eyes”, but remembering herself becoming a woman, “she would let them flow”. She also recollects “that men cry as frequently and as unreasonably as women” from her own experience as a man. Orlando particularly feels the oppression of gender conformity during the Victorian period, in the form of “a ring of quivering sensibility about the second finger of the left hand” and the “weight of the crinoline that Orlando has submissively adopted”.
Seeing Orlando in light of A Room of One’s Own, Rognstad explores:
ORLANDO AS A PERSONIFICATION OF THE IDEAL STATUS OF ANDROGYNY; SOMEONE WHO KNOWS THE SECRETS OF BOTH SEXES AND CAN ACCESS THE WHOLE SPECTER OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE.
The novel exuberantly conveys its message of the urge of gender equality in our society. Ergo, my feminist reading of Orlando salutes Woolf as an author, who so beautifully cultivates the fluid identities of the notions of sex and gender in her piece.
• Related with Woolf’s real-life Incidents:
Is Orlando the first English language trans novel? It is, yet in the most playful way. Orlando manages his transition with grace and a profound truth. On seeing himself as a herself for the first time in the mirror, she remarks: “Different sex. Same person.”
That difference of sex, though, had legal and social implications. Many of the men Woolf knew, including her husband Leonard, and her sister Vanessa’s husband, Clive Bell, had been educated at Cambridge. Virginia and Vanessa had been home schooled; the usual method for upper class girls. Other girls were barely schooled at all.
Less than a fortnight after the publication of Orlando, Woolf went to Girton to deliver the second of her two lectures, entitled Women and Fiction. A week earlier she had been at Newnham. Woolf reworked her lectures into her splendid polemic A Room of One’s Own published in 1929. She included the details of two starkly contrasting experiences: an opulent lunch at King’s College with some of her men friends, followed by a threadbare dinner at Girton. She wrote in her diary: “Starved but valiant young women … Why should all the splendour, all the luxury of life be lavished on the Julians and the Francises and none on the (Elsie) Phares and the (Margaret) Thomases?” Woolf was preoccupied by the social and economic differences between the sexes – differences, she believed, that were gender biases masquerading as facts of life. Orlando had paved the way for this more serious and disturbing exploration. The protagonist spends hundreds of years trying to reclaim his own property and cash, legally sequestered after he wakes up as a woman.
“Did you feel a sort of tug, tug, as if your neck was being broken on Saturday last at five minutes to one?” Woolf wrote to Sackville-West, as she finished the book on 20 March 1928. Woolf, of course, dedicated the book to her and sent her a copy on publication day, 11 October 1928. The love affair was nearly over by then. It had lasted three years, beginning at Christmas 1925, and Sackville-West had altered Woolf’s mind. The author had used every ounce of the affair to propel her own writing, and to alter how fiction could be written – and, in A Room of One’s Own, to discuss how women might soon alter the world with their writing. Not bad, for what she called “a little book.”
• Conclusion:
The study of her trans-novel is quite worthy to understand that how Woolf’s wrote her novel regarded her love affair and perhaps her Idea to make Orlando as Transgender on that time is quite new in literature. Her most of works included the study of Phycology also. Gender and Sexual conflicts are still we faced Woolf’s work gives us to raised the voice among to search Identity and other Conflicts also.
Work Cited:
Das, Shreya. “A Feminist Reading of Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography.” Feminism In India, 31 July 2015, https://feminisminindia.com/2015/07/31/feministic-reading-virginia-woolfs-orlando-biography/.
“'Different Sex. Same Person': How Woolf's Orlando Became a Trans Triumph.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 3 Sept. 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/03/different-sex-same-person-how-woolfs-orlando-became-a-trans-triumph.
“Gender Equality in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Situations.” OECD, https://www.oecd.org/dac/gender-development/gender-equality-and-womens-empowerment-in-fragile-and-conflict-affected-situations.htm#:~:text=The%20main%20factors%20driving%20gender,economic%20decision%20making%2C%20and%20a.
“Orlando.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/topic/Orlando-by-Woolf.
(Words: 2433)
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