Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Woolf’s Orlando and the Perfomativity of Gender
Orlando, one of its author’s best known works, is considered by some the longest love letter in the history of modern literature. Virginia Woolf, without hiding this fact, based the main character, the noble Orlando, on her lover Vita Sackville West. West’s pictures appear in the original print of the novel as illustrations of Orlando.
“He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters (13).” We meet Orlando, who is a man, in his early adulthood, when, as a noble man, he is introduced to the Queen and wins her attention, followed by many favors, because he is exceptionally beautiful. Just like in the first sentence cited above, Woolf gives frequent references to the body and the clothes in which the body is dressed, when she talks about the sex or in our modern term, gender of her characters.
Early in his life, Orlando is preoccupied with love of literature, especially poetry. Later, he encounters the pains of romantic love between young adults, when he falls in love with the daughter or niece of the Russian ambassador in London. At the beginning, Orlando does not know Sasha’s gender, but feels that he is attracted to her. “… a figure, which, whether boy’s or woman’s, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him with the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirely in oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish-coloured fur (37).” In this part of the novel - which might be the only part where Woolf points this out directly - Orlando is scared that the person he finds highly attractive might be a male: “When the boy, for alas, a boy it must be – no woman could skate with such speed and vigour – swept almost on tiptoe past him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question (38).” Orlando, with this very simple end of the sentence, fully complies with the conservative tradition of his time and even though he is in despair about the possibility of Sasha being male, it does not cross his mind that love between two males could be acceptable as well.
Unlike Orlando, the character of Archduke Harry is one which does not think that loving another man is a cause not worth pursuing. When he fell in love with the portrait of Orlando, when Orlando was a man, the Archduke, of desperation, dressed as a woman to win Orlando’s love. Orlando flees England partially to get away from the Archdukes Harriet, who is Harry in disguise and they meet again only after Orlando became a woman herself, and came back to England. But Orlando had and has no interest in the Archduke or Archdukes, who as a woman, seemed rather grotesque in appearance to Orlando, suggesting that the Archduke did not perform the role of the female sex with much success. After Lady Orlando declines the Archduke’s marriage offer, he goes back to Romania with another woman.
Orlando undergoes his life altering transformation while being the Queen’s ambassador abroad. He is thirty years old, disappointed and hurt by both poetry and romantic love, lives his life as an important man of wealth when he falls asleep for seven days just to wake up as a woman.
“Orlando has become a woman – there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatsoever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory – but in future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’ and ‘she’ for ‘he’ – her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all.” (138)
Woolf uses the plural “they” to talk about Orlando in changing, as if she suggested that the person is now two people really, one male and one female, in the same body. Lady Orlando lived from this moment on not only with the face, but also with memories of Lord Orlando. With this turn, Woolf takes the opportunity to engage in social critique of the colonial English society of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Orlando, as a woman, questions the society’s attitude towards women, his/her own attitudes towards women in the past and her/his actions based on these attitudes. Similarly to Lord Orlando when it came to poetry and romantic love, Lady Orlando will examine the society with an open mind, just to find that as a woman, more precisely, as an unmarried woman, her status is not comparable with that of the former Lord Orlando and other men of the society.
After her transformation from male to female, Orlando spends time in Turkey among a group of gypsies. Woolf gives her heroine a transitional time to come in terms with what has happened to her. The mental state and the transition itself is helped by clothing, which is gender neutral:
“With some of the guineas left from the sale of the tenth pearl of her string, Orlando had bought herself a complete outfit of such clothes as women then wore, and it was in the dress of a young Englishwoman of rank that she now sat on the deck of the Enamoured Lady. It is a strange fact, but a true one that up to this moment she had scarcely given her sex a thought. Perhaps the Turkish trousers, which she had hitherto worn had done something to distract her thought; and the gipsy women, except in one of two important particulars, differ very little from the gypsy men.” (153)
Nonetheless, it seems that Lady Orlando will never forget that she was a man for many years and she will meditate about the importance and the many functions of sexual identity, clothes and gender performance in social life and her own feelings about identity. Woolf gives Orlando the very unusual choice - at least philosophically - to which sex/gender she wants to belong. Knowing now both, Orlando finds herself wanting to be of none.
“And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being she seemed to vacillate; she was a man; she was a woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses or each. It was a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in. The comfort of ignorance seemed utterly denied her. … Thus it is no great wonder if, as she pitted one sex against the other, and found each alternately full of the most deplorable infirmities, and was not sure to which she belonged – it was no great wonder that she was about to cry out that she would return to Turkey and become a gipsy again…” (158-159)
Orlando was, despite all confusion, very much conscious of her gender and started learning how to perform it correctly. To stress the point, Woolf uses the verb “act” when talking about performing gender roles. One of the first instances when an occasion for this arises is when Archduke Harry unmasks himself to her.
“Recalled thus suddenly to a consciousness of her sex, which she had completely forgotten, and of his, which was now remote enough to be equally upsetting, Orlando felt seized with faintness. … In short, they acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with great vigour and then fell into natural discourse.” (178-179)
Other changes in her actions and behavior due to change of sex/gender, as well as comparison of gender appropriate social norms of the times, are illustrated throughout the second half of the novel, like, for example here:
“Some way out of the difficulty there must be, she supposed, but she was still awkward in the arts of her sex, and as she could no longer knock a man over the head or run him through the body with a rapier, she could think of no better method than this.” (182)
In the following longer passage about Orlando’s gender identity Woolf at first states that men and women are different in appearance and in the way they relate to the outside world. However, in the paragraph following, she disagrees with the previous statement. Woolf seem here to strongly suggest that everybody has a part of a woman and a part of man in them and often it is clothes that give the only clear distinction to an outsider, as to what gender a person is. This is, in my opinion, the single most important passage in which Woolf very clearly explains her views on the perfomativity of gender.
“So, having now worn skirts for a considerable time, a certain change was visible in Orlando, which is to be found even in her face. If we compare the picture of Orlando as a man with that of Orlando as a woman we shall see that thought both are undoubtedly one and the same person, there are certain changes. The man has his hand free to size his sword; the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders. The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same too.
“That is the view of some philosophers and wise ones, but on the whole, we incline to another. The difference between the sexes, is happily, one of great profoundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than usual – openness indeed was the soul of her nature – something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed. For there again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keeps the male of female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. Of the complications and confusions which thus result every one has had experience; but here we leave the general question and note only the odd effect it had in the particular case of Orlando herself.
“For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue how, for example, if Orlando was a woman, did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and something worn rather shabby? And then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man’s love of power.” (188-189)
It is interesting that when Orlando was a man, at the beginning of the novel, it was clear that he was male. Now, after the change of sex, Orlando does not know who she is in terms of gender – although she knows that she is the same person she always was – and as Woolf puts it “cannot now be decided” what her gender is, even though, she clearly is performing the female gender role. He identity, it seems from this sentence, does not fully agree with the gender performance. Woolf seem to suggest that by achieving a certain age and acquiring certain experiences, Orlando transformed into a woman with the memories and consciousness of both male and female, Orlando’s gender must be ambiguous. As we mature and become more conscious of ourselves and the society which we live in, Woolf implies, we must realize that gender is not one or the other and set in stone.
“Whether, then, Orlando was most man or woman, it is difficult to say and cannot now be decided.” (190)
And to live like she felt on the inside, she used the outside to mirror her feelings, performing both sexes with equal ease. As she was both female and male, Orlando found herself changing sex/gender as frequently as she changed from a dress to a suit.
“Now she opened a cupboard in which hung still many of the clothes she had worn as a young man of fashion, and from among them she chose a black velvet suit richly trimmed with Venetian lace. It was a little out of fashion, indeed, but it fitted her to perfection and dressed in it she looked the very figure of a noble Lord.” (215)
And what is more, when she appeared in public dressed as a man, she was perceived and treated as a man.
“..for a man he was to her…” (216)
Orlando enjoys the advantages of changing identity with the clothes she is wearing, multiplying “pleasure of life” and “love of both sexes equally”, which is the only place the possibility of Orlando’s bisexuality is mentioned. Woolf also gives as a detailed account of Orlando’s day, in which she is a woman or a man, depending of the function she performs and the needs she want fulfill; and something in between or both, when in the privacy of her home, she is wearing a China robe, permissible for both sexes.
“… for her sex changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one se of clothing can conceive; nor can there be any doubt that she reaped a twofold harvest by this device; the pleasures of life were increased and its experiences multiplied. From the probity of breeches she turned to the seductiveness of petticoats and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally.
“So then one may sketch her spending her morning in a China robe of ambiguous gender among her books; then receiving a client of two (for she had many scores of suppliants) in the same garment; then she would take a turn in the garden and clip the nut trees – for which knee breeches were convenient; then she would change into a flowered taffeta which best suited a drive to Richmond and a proposal of marriage from some great nobleman; and so back again to town, where she would don a snuff-coloured gown like a lawyer’s and visit the courts to hear how her cases were doing – for her fortune was wasting hourly and the suits seemed no nearer consummation that they had been a hundred years ago; and so, finally, when night came, she would more often than not become a nobleman complete from head to toe and walk the streets in search of adventure.” (220-221)
Judith Butler writes in Undoing Gender: “Every time I try to write about the body the writing ends up being about language. This is not because I think that the body is reducible to language; it is not. Language emerges from the body, constituting an emission of sorts. The body is that upon which language falters, and the body carries its own signs, its own signifiers, in ways that remain largely unconscious (198).” When Virginia Woolf as a narrator of Orlando, meditates about the body, sex and gender identity of her hero/ine, at the very beginning, she writes about Orlando’s passion for poetry, literature, language. The only thing Orlando carries with her through centuries and on which she constantly works, as her body and the world around her changes, is the manuscript of The Oak Tree, the poem she started writing as a boy in 1586 and finished as a lady three hundred years later. But Woolf makes the point that despite the changes of the body and the language, the person of the writer is the same. “She had been a gloomy boy, in love with death, as boys are; and then she had been amorous and florid; and then she had been sprightly and satirical; and sometimes she had tried prose and sometimes she had tried the drama. Yet through all these changes she had remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same (237).”
What is the essence of the sameness which Orlando carries with her through centuries? Woolf does not give an unequivocal answer to this question and maybe there is none (Benhabib 343). Woolf avoids identifying Orlando’s sexuality as bisexual, homo- or heterosexual, leaving open a variety of possibilities for her heroine, who does adjust to societal norms as much as her nature allows, nevertheless knows in her heart that she is always the same person who she was before.
Who is Orlando? Neither a woman, nor a man or both; someone who changes gender identity with her clothes and exists without one when she feels like it? Is that possible? “Gender can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived. As credible bearers of those attributes, however, genders can also be rendered thoroughly and radically incredible (Gender Trouble 180).” Woolf does not tell us directly, who Orlando is and from all the clues she gives in the novel, one cannot conclude any one particular, rigid category Orlando could belong to as a gendered, sexual being. Even though some believe that “an ambiguously sexed, gendered, and racialized body is liberatory, because it ruptures dominant codes,” Orlando is far from liberated, trying to pass, get back her privileges and to fit in with the elite (Reed 31). And there is a big difference between culturally and legally sanctioned passing and the one that is not – Orlando could cross-dress and enjoy the love of both sexes, but even she could have not gotten away with wanting to “marry” a woman or wanting legally be a man to be able to marry a woman. “In some cases, cross-dressing may function to consolidate existing power relations, while in other, it may function to disrupt or displace power (Reed 32).” Reed also states that Orlando, the movie, but we might say that the same is true for the book, “examines the (visual) production of reality and questions the (non)correspondence between vision and knowledge in term of the ‘truths’ of sex and gender” (34). In the movie, Queen Elizabeth is played by a man (Quentin Crisp), though detected only by those who know this fact already, a song at the very beginning is song by the British techno-pop singer Jimmy Sommerville, and Orlando himself, is played by Tilda Swinton. Nonetheless, we couldn’t have imagined a better casting. The movie, as Reed points out, goes in great lengths to show how both genders, male and female are based on “manufacturing for public display” (34): “Men, including Orlando, dress and undress, don wigs, primp, and preen…Later, Orlando (as a woman) is fit into a very tight corset and secured with heavy string, her breasts crampingly bound and lifted. Such a juxtaposition present both masculinity and femininity each as elaborate productions of the body that require much effort, and actual work, to maintain (34).” By the end of the movie, the evolved Orlando has an androgynous look – she is a modern woman, who arrived at a state of sameness, as opposed to difference and the movie, as Reed points out, promotes this “naturalized androgyny” as it “denounces the polarities of masculine and feminine tout court without commentary about how these gendered positions – including the mediating term ‘androgyny’ (understood to be a ‘mixed’ and ‘neutral’ position between masculinity and femininity) – function politically and contextually (35).” Reed concludes her article by critiquing among other movies also Orlando for functioning within the dualistic thought of female/male, even if they present a space between the polar opposites, and are therefore “reinforcing existing social relations and cannot function as an ideal end point for a feminist politics” (36).
Gender is performance, Butler insists, a socially constructed one. “That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality (Gender Trouble 180).” It is true that Woolf does not go outside of the heterosexual matrix. She lets Orlando the man, love a woman, even though a man is also in love with Orlando at the time. Lady Orlando, though, in the nineteenth century, realizes the need for a husband and marriage. She meets an unusual man, one that comes and goes according to how the wind blows and who suspects Orlando to be a man (252).
Orlando and Shelmerdine are queer, but what does this mean in terms of their gender? They both perform, for reasons stated below, their particular gender, by which they confirm that the only way to be – even be queer – is to accept the male/female binary. It is surprising, as Biddy Martin points out, that “feminists have reduced the possibilities of gender to just two, that is, men and women, gender has come to do the work of stabilizing and universalizing binary opposition at other levels, including male and female sexuality, the work that the assumption of biological sex differences once did” (104). But some feminists feel constrained by defining women only as other than men and welcomed queer theory as relief from this category. However, Martin argues that “lesbian and gay work fails at time to realize its potential for reconceptualizing the complexities of identity and social relations…” and as Orlando, some queer thinkers rebel “against the normalizing constraints of conventional femininity”, which can easily lead to invisibility (105). Martin emphasizes that “subordination of women does not follow simply from the failure to conform to convention, but also from the performance or embodiment of it” (106).
If Orlando wants to fit in the heterosexual middle class white English society, she must perform all aspects of her gender. Through her gender performance, she must provide the society with proof of her racial, social and national character.
Nationalism, heterosexism, classism, and racism all appear as a subject in Orlando. Feminists like Jaime Hovey are very sensitive to the fact that “Orlando critiques whiteness and heterosexuality ambivalently and unevenly; it uses racially and sexually ‘foreign’ subject to explore the ambiguous national and social identity of a queerly gendered white Englishwoman, excluded from the nation by her polymorphous sexuality” (398). Moreover, Hovey speculates, Woolf lets Orlando “pass as respectable and heterosexual, by displacing her transgressive sexuality onto racial others” (398) and Woolf uses humor and sarcasm to undermine the masculine imperialistic identity of Orlando, which, she insists in the first paragraph of the novel, is without a doubt.
Through gender and the fluidity of Orlando’s gender identity, Woolf ridicules the compulsory heterosexuality by, on the one hand, giving Orlando the desire for a husband, and describing it as an unhealthy neurotic mania, on the other. Orlando enters into her marriage for pragmatic reasons: establishing her national and class legitimacy and restoring her status, land, and titles (Hovey 400). It is the honesty with which Orlando and Shelmerdine share their cultural values, “homosexual, interracial, and cross-class sexual taste” that brings their gender in doubt (Hovey 402). It is in 1928, when women in England, regardless of marital status were granted the right to vote. In this context, Hovey implies, “Orlando slyly invites readers to unmask the ‘joking’ terms under which femininity is produced – as gender identities are often, if not always, produced – as both an adaptation and a contestation of the constraints of national, racial, and sexual inclusion” (403).
Identity is the effect of performance, if, as did Bell, we consider performance as Butler analyzed it in Gender Trouble (3). Thus, it is possible that Orlando, in her transitional period with the gypsies, was not a “woman” yet, and only when she took on the clothes and manners of the women of her time, could she take on the identity of a lady as well. Orlando makes herself visible as a woman, even though, she merely passes as one yet and passing “is a mobile encounter that is not to be collapsed into a becoming, since the one does not become the other: there are two identities mobilized, that which one ‘already has’ and the identity one takes on” (Bell 7). Orlando already had an identity – that of a noble man of privilege - and now must pass as a woman, if she wants to have a similar place in society. “The production of the effect of identity, the effect (and affect) of various models of affiliation, is an embodied process”, Bell writes (8) and we saw that Orlando had to not only learn to wear different clothes, use different gestures and apply different manners from her previous life, but she also had to adjust to a different historical moment with all its technological (the amount of books available), political, commercial, and social realities.
Works Cited
Bell, Vikki. “Perfomativity and Belonging.” Theory, Culture and Society 16
(1999): 1-10.
Benhabib, Seyla. “Sexual Difference and Collective Identities: The New Global
Constellation.” Signs 24 (1999): 335-361.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge, 1999.
Butler, Judith. Undoing gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Hovey, Jaime. “’Kissing a Negress in the Dark’: Englishness as a Masquerade
in Woolf’s Orlando.” PMLA 112 (1997): 393-404.
Martin, Biddy. “Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer utopias.” Diacritics 24
(1994): 104-121.
Reed, Lori. “Skin Cells: On the Limits of Gender-Bending and Bodily Transgression in
Film and Culture.” Educational Researcher 26 (1997): 30-36.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. New York: Harc
Orlando, one of its author’s best known works, is considered by some the longest love letter in the history of modern literature. Virginia Woolf, without hiding this fact, based the main character, the noble Orlando, on her lover Vita Sackville West. West’s pictures appear in the original print of the novel as illustrations of Orlando.
“He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters (13).” We meet Orlando, who is a man, in his early adulthood, when, as a noble man, he is introduced to the Queen and wins her attention, followed by many favors, because he is exceptionally beautiful. Just like in the first sentence cited above, Woolf gives frequent references to the body and the clothes in which the body is dressed, when she talks about the sex or in our modern term, gender of her characters.
Early in his life, Orlando is preoccupied with love of literature, especially poetry. Later, he encounters the pains of romantic love between young adults, when he falls in love with the daughter or niece of the Russian ambassador in London. At the beginning, Orlando does not know Sasha’s gender, but feels that he is attracted to her. “… a figure, which, whether boy’s or woman’s, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him with the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirely in oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish-coloured fur (37).” In this part of the novel - which might be the only part where Woolf points this out directly - Orlando is scared that the person he finds highly attractive might be a male: “When the boy, for alas, a boy it must be – no woman could skate with such speed and vigour – swept almost on tiptoe past him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question (38).” Orlando, with this very simple end of the sentence, fully complies with the conservative tradition of his time and even though he is in despair about the possibility of Sasha being male, it does not cross his mind that love between two males could be acceptable as well.
Unlike Orlando, the character of Archduke Harry is one which does not think that loving another man is a cause not worth pursuing. When he fell in love with the portrait of Orlando, when Orlando was a man, the Archduke, of desperation, dressed as a woman to win Orlando’s love. Orlando flees England partially to get away from the Archdukes Harriet, who is Harry in disguise and they meet again only after Orlando became a woman herself, and came back to England. But Orlando had and has no interest in the Archduke or Archdukes, who as a woman, seemed rather grotesque in appearance to Orlando, suggesting that the Archduke did not perform the role of the female sex with much success. After Lady Orlando declines the Archduke’s marriage offer, he goes back to Romania with another woman.
Orlando undergoes his life altering transformation while being the Queen’s ambassador abroad. He is thirty years old, disappointed and hurt by both poetry and romantic love, lives his life as an important man of wealth when he falls asleep for seven days just to wake up as a woman.
“Orlando has become a woman – there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatsoever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory – but in future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’ and ‘she’ for ‘he’ – her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all.” (138)
Woolf uses the plural “they” to talk about Orlando in changing, as if she suggested that the person is now two people really, one male and one female, in the same body. Lady Orlando lived from this moment on not only with the face, but also with memories of Lord Orlando. With this turn, Woolf takes the opportunity to engage in social critique of the colonial English society of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Orlando, as a woman, questions the society’s attitude towards women, his/her own attitudes towards women in the past and her/his actions based on these attitudes. Similarly to Lord Orlando when it came to poetry and romantic love, Lady Orlando will examine the society with an open mind, just to find that as a woman, more precisely, as an unmarried woman, her status is not comparable with that of the former Lord Orlando and other men of the society.
After her transformation from male to female, Orlando spends time in Turkey among a group of gypsies. Woolf gives her heroine a transitional time to come in terms with what has happened to her. The mental state and the transition itself is helped by clothing, which is gender neutral:
“With some of the guineas left from the sale of the tenth pearl of her string, Orlando had bought herself a complete outfit of such clothes as women then wore, and it was in the dress of a young Englishwoman of rank that she now sat on the deck of the Enamoured Lady. It is a strange fact, but a true one that up to this moment she had scarcely given her sex a thought. Perhaps the Turkish trousers, which she had hitherto worn had done something to distract her thought; and the gipsy women, except in one of two important particulars, differ very little from the gypsy men.” (153)
Nonetheless, it seems that Lady Orlando will never forget that she was a man for many years and she will meditate about the importance and the many functions of sexual identity, clothes and gender performance in social life and her own feelings about identity. Woolf gives Orlando the very unusual choice - at least philosophically - to which sex/gender she wants to belong. Knowing now both, Orlando finds herself wanting to be of none.
“And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being she seemed to vacillate; she was a man; she was a woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses or each. It was a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in. The comfort of ignorance seemed utterly denied her. … Thus it is no great wonder if, as she pitted one sex against the other, and found each alternately full of the most deplorable infirmities, and was not sure to which she belonged – it was no great wonder that she was about to cry out that she would return to Turkey and become a gipsy again…” (158-159)
Orlando was, despite all confusion, very much conscious of her gender and started learning how to perform it correctly. To stress the point, Woolf uses the verb “act” when talking about performing gender roles. One of the first instances when an occasion for this arises is when Archduke Harry unmasks himself to her.
“Recalled thus suddenly to a consciousness of her sex, which she had completely forgotten, and of his, which was now remote enough to be equally upsetting, Orlando felt seized with faintness. … In short, they acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with great vigour and then fell into natural discourse.” (178-179)
Other changes in her actions and behavior due to change of sex/gender, as well as comparison of gender appropriate social norms of the times, are illustrated throughout the second half of the novel, like, for example here:
“Some way out of the difficulty there must be, she supposed, but she was still awkward in the arts of her sex, and as she could no longer knock a man over the head or run him through the body with a rapier, she could think of no better method than this.” (182)
In the following longer passage about Orlando’s gender identity Woolf at first states that men and women are different in appearance and in the way they relate to the outside world. However, in the paragraph following, she disagrees with the previous statement. Woolf seem here to strongly suggest that everybody has a part of a woman and a part of man in them and often it is clothes that give the only clear distinction to an outsider, as to what gender a person is. This is, in my opinion, the single most important passage in which Woolf very clearly explains her views on the perfomativity of gender.
“So, having now worn skirts for a considerable time, a certain change was visible in Orlando, which is to be found even in her face. If we compare the picture of Orlando as a man with that of Orlando as a woman we shall see that thought both are undoubtedly one and the same person, there are certain changes. The man has his hand free to size his sword; the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders. The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same too.
“That is the view of some philosophers and wise ones, but on the whole, we incline to another. The difference between the sexes, is happily, one of great profoundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than usual – openness indeed was the soul of her nature – something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed. For there again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keeps the male of female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. Of the complications and confusions which thus result every one has had experience; but here we leave the general question and note only the odd effect it had in the particular case of Orlando herself.
“For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue how, for example, if Orlando was a woman, did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and something worn rather shabby? And then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man’s love of power.” (188-189)
It is interesting that when Orlando was a man, at the beginning of the novel, it was clear that he was male. Now, after the change of sex, Orlando does not know who she is in terms of gender – although she knows that she is the same person she always was – and as Woolf puts it “cannot now be decided” what her gender is, even though, she clearly is performing the female gender role. He identity, it seems from this sentence, does not fully agree with the gender performance. Woolf seem to suggest that by achieving a certain age and acquiring certain experiences, Orlando transformed into a woman with the memories and consciousness of both male and female, Orlando’s gender must be ambiguous. As we mature and become more conscious of ourselves and the society which we live in, Woolf implies, we must realize that gender is not one or the other and set in stone.
“Whether, then, Orlando was most man or woman, it is difficult to say and cannot now be decided.” (190)
And to live like she felt on the inside, she used the outside to mirror her feelings, performing both sexes with equal ease. As she was both female and male, Orlando found herself changing sex/gender as frequently as she changed from a dress to a suit.
“Now she opened a cupboard in which hung still many of the clothes she had worn as a young man of fashion, and from among them she chose a black velvet suit richly trimmed with Venetian lace. It was a little out of fashion, indeed, but it fitted her to perfection and dressed in it she looked the very figure of a noble Lord.” (215)
And what is more, when she appeared in public dressed as a man, she was perceived and treated as a man.
“..for a man he was to her…” (216)
Orlando enjoys the advantages of changing identity with the clothes she is wearing, multiplying “pleasure of life” and “love of both sexes equally”, which is the only place the possibility of Orlando’s bisexuality is mentioned. Woolf also gives as a detailed account of Orlando’s day, in which she is a woman or a man, depending of the function she performs and the needs she want fulfill; and something in between or both, when in the privacy of her home, she is wearing a China robe, permissible for both sexes.
“… for her sex changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one se of clothing can conceive; nor can there be any doubt that she reaped a twofold harvest by this device; the pleasures of life were increased and its experiences multiplied. From the probity of breeches she turned to the seductiveness of petticoats and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally.
“So then one may sketch her spending her morning in a China robe of ambiguous gender among her books; then receiving a client of two (for she had many scores of suppliants) in the same garment; then she would take a turn in the garden and clip the nut trees – for which knee breeches were convenient; then she would change into a flowered taffeta which best suited a drive to Richmond and a proposal of marriage from some great nobleman; and so back again to town, where she would don a snuff-coloured gown like a lawyer’s and visit the courts to hear how her cases were doing – for her fortune was wasting hourly and the suits seemed no nearer consummation that they had been a hundred years ago; and so, finally, when night came, she would more often than not become a nobleman complete from head to toe and walk the streets in search of adventure.” (220-221)
Judith Butler writes in Undoing Gender: “Every time I try to write about the body the writing ends up being about language. This is not because I think that the body is reducible to language; it is not. Language emerges from the body, constituting an emission of sorts. The body is that upon which language falters, and the body carries its own signs, its own signifiers, in ways that remain largely unconscious (198).” When Virginia Woolf as a narrator of Orlando, meditates about the body, sex and gender identity of her hero/ine, at the very beginning, she writes about Orlando’s passion for poetry, literature, language. The only thing Orlando carries with her through centuries and on which she constantly works, as her body and the world around her changes, is the manuscript of The Oak Tree, the poem she started writing as a boy in 1586 and finished as a lady three hundred years later. But Woolf makes the point that despite the changes of the body and the language, the person of the writer is the same. “She had been a gloomy boy, in love with death, as boys are; and then she had been amorous and florid; and then she had been sprightly and satirical; and sometimes she had tried prose and sometimes she had tried the drama. Yet through all these changes she had remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same (237).”
What is the essence of the sameness which Orlando carries with her through centuries? Woolf does not give an unequivocal answer to this question and maybe there is none (Benhabib 343). Woolf avoids identifying Orlando’s sexuality as bisexual, homo- or heterosexual, leaving open a variety of possibilities for her heroine, who does adjust to societal norms as much as her nature allows, nevertheless knows in her heart that she is always the same person who she was before.
Who is Orlando? Neither a woman, nor a man or both; someone who changes gender identity with her clothes and exists without one when she feels like it? Is that possible? “Gender can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived. As credible bearers of those attributes, however, genders can also be rendered thoroughly and radically incredible (Gender Trouble 180).” Woolf does not tell us directly, who Orlando is and from all the clues she gives in the novel, one cannot conclude any one particular, rigid category Orlando could belong to as a gendered, sexual being. Even though some believe that “an ambiguously sexed, gendered, and racialized body is liberatory, because it ruptures dominant codes,” Orlando is far from liberated, trying to pass, get back her privileges and to fit in with the elite (Reed 31). And there is a big difference between culturally and legally sanctioned passing and the one that is not – Orlando could cross-dress and enjoy the love of both sexes, but even she could have not gotten away with wanting to “marry” a woman or wanting legally be a man to be able to marry a woman. “In some cases, cross-dressing may function to consolidate existing power relations, while in other, it may function to disrupt or displace power (Reed 32).” Reed also states that Orlando, the movie, but we might say that the same is true for the book, “examines the (visual) production of reality and questions the (non)correspondence between vision and knowledge in term of the ‘truths’ of sex and gender” (34). In the movie, Queen Elizabeth is played by a man (Quentin Crisp), though detected only by those who know this fact already, a song at the very beginning is song by the British techno-pop singer Jimmy Sommerville, and Orlando himself, is played by Tilda Swinton. Nonetheless, we couldn’t have imagined a better casting. The movie, as Reed points out, goes in great lengths to show how both genders, male and female are based on “manufacturing for public display” (34): “Men, including Orlando, dress and undress, don wigs, primp, and preen…Later, Orlando (as a woman) is fit into a very tight corset and secured with heavy string, her breasts crampingly bound and lifted. Such a juxtaposition present both masculinity and femininity each as elaborate productions of the body that require much effort, and actual work, to maintain (34).” By the end of the movie, the evolved Orlando has an androgynous look – she is a modern woman, who arrived at a state of sameness, as opposed to difference and the movie, as Reed points out, promotes this “naturalized androgyny” as it “denounces the polarities of masculine and feminine tout court without commentary about how these gendered positions – including the mediating term ‘androgyny’ (understood to be a ‘mixed’ and ‘neutral’ position between masculinity and femininity) – function politically and contextually (35).” Reed concludes her article by critiquing among other movies also Orlando for functioning within the dualistic thought of female/male, even if they present a space between the polar opposites, and are therefore “reinforcing existing social relations and cannot function as an ideal end point for a feminist politics” (36).
Gender is performance, Butler insists, a socially constructed one. “That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality (Gender Trouble 180).” It is true that Woolf does not go outside of the heterosexual matrix. She lets Orlando the man, love a woman, even though a man is also in love with Orlando at the time. Lady Orlando, though, in the nineteenth century, realizes the need for a husband and marriage. She meets an unusual man, one that comes and goes according to how the wind blows and who suspects Orlando to be a man (252).
Orlando and Shelmerdine are queer, but what does this mean in terms of their gender? They both perform, for reasons stated below, their particular gender, by which they confirm that the only way to be – even be queer – is to accept the male/female binary. It is surprising, as Biddy Martin points out, that “feminists have reduced the possibilities of gender to just two, that is, men and women, gender has come to do the work of stabilizing and universalizing binary opposition at other levels, including male and female sexuality, the work that the assumption of biological sex differences once did” (104). But some feminists feel constrained by defining women only as other than men and welcomed queer theory as relief from this category. However, Martin argues that “lesbian and gay work fails at time to realize its potential for reconceptualizing the complexities of identity and social relations…” and as Orlando, some queer thinkers rebel “against the normalizing constraints of conventional femininity”, which can easily lead to invisibility (105). Martin emphasizes that “subordination of women does not follow simply from the failure to conform to convention, but also from the performance or embodiment of it” (106).
If Orlando wants to fit in the heterosexual middle class white English society, she must perform all aspects of her gender. Through her gender performance, she must provide the society with proof of her racial, social and national character.
Nationalism, heterosexism, classism, and racism all appear as a subject in Orlando. Feminists like Jaime Hovey are very sensitive to the fact that “Orlando critiques whiteness and heterosexuality ambivalently and unevenly; it uses racially and sexually ‘foreign’ subject to explore the ambiguous national and social identity of a queerly gendered white Englishwoman, excluded from the nation by her polymorphous sexuality” (398). Moreover, Hovey speculates, Woolf lets Orlando “pass as respectable and heterosexual, by displacing her transgressive sexuality onto racial others” (398) and Woolf uses humor and sarcasm to undermine the masculine imperialistic identity of Orlando, which, she insists in the first paragraph of the novel, is without a doubt.
Through gender and the fluidity of Orlando’s gender identity, Woolf ridicules the compulsory heterosexuality by, on the one hand, giving Orlando the desire for a husband, and describing it as an unhealthy neurotic mania, on the other. Orlando enters into her marriage for pragmatic reasons: establishing her national and class legitimacy and restoring her status, land, and titles (Hovey 400). It is the honesty with which Orlando and Shelmerdine share their cultural values, “homosexual, interracial, and cross-class sexual taste” that brings their gender in doubt (Hovey 402). It is in 1928, when women in England, regardless of marital status were granted the right to vote. In this context, Hovey implies, “Orlando slyly invites readers to unmask the ‘joking’ terms under which femininity is produced – as gender identities are often, if not always, produced – as both an adaptation and a contestation of the constraints of national, racial, and sexual inclusion” (403).
Identity is the effect of performance, if, as did Bell, we consider performance as Butler analyzed it in Gender Trouble (3). Thus, it is possible that Orlando, in her transitional period with the gypsies, was not a “woman” yet, and only when she took on the clothes and manners of the women of her time, could she take on the identity of a lady as well. Orlando makes herself visible as a woman, even though, she merely passes as one yet and passing “is a mobile encounter that is not to be collapsed into a becoming, since the one does not become the other: there are two identities mobilized, that which one ‘already has’ and the identity one takes on” (Bell 7). Orlando already had an identity – that of a noble man of privilege - and now must pass as a woman, if she wants to have a similar place in society. “The production of the effect of identity, the effect (and affect) of various models of affiliation, is an embodied process”, Bell writes (8) and we saw that Orlando had to not only learn to wear different clothes, use different gestures and apply different manners from her previous life, but she also had to adjust to a different historical moment with all its technological (the amount of books available), political, commercial, and social realities.
Works Cited
Bell, Vikki. “Perfomativity and Belonging.” Theory, Culture and Society 16
(1999): 1-10.
Benhabib, Seyla. “Sexual Difference and Collective Identities: The New Global
Constellation.” Signs 24 (1999): 335-361.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge, 1999.
Butler, Judith. Undoing gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Hovey, Jaime. “’Kissing a Negress in the Dark’: Englishness as a Masquerade
in Woolf’s Orlando.” PMLA 112 (1997): 393-404.
Martin, Biddy. “Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer utopias.” Diacritics 24
(1994): 104-121.
Reed, Lori. “Skin Cells: On the Limits of Gender-Bending and Bodily Transgression in
Film and Culture.” Educational Researcher 26 (1997): 30-36.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. New York: Harc
Saturday, May 06, 2006
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