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¶ … Orlando: A Biography, Virginia Woolf urges her readers to reconsider traditionally accepted constructions of sexuality and gender. Woolf achieves this through a biographical narrative of a man who experiences the true meaning of masculinity and femininity only after he is transformed into a woman. In addition, Woolf succeeds in debunking socially constructed definitions of sexuality and gender by virtue of situating the action in the novel over a period of 400 years. By doing so, Woolf asserts a universal law of Nature, namely, that essential human nature has always been androgynous, or comprising of both masculine and feminine traits.
In fact, Woolf's very introduction of Orlando, more than hints of his feminine traits. Orlando's biographer begins by stating "there could be no doubt of his sex," (p. 13) yet goes on to "admit that he had eyes like drenched violets."(p. 15) Significantly, Orlando's biographer also emphasizes on Orlando's marked love of Nature,...
Orlando's leanings, however, appear to emotionally disturb him because, as the biographer points out, "Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy." (p. 17) Since the term "letters" can be construed as encompassing upbringing, education, and social conditioning, it can be clearly inferred that the biographer was commenting on the difference between social thinking and natural laws. Thus, Orlando's state of conflicted emotions are hardly surprising given the dichotomy between his feminine yearnings and his attempts to live up to Elizabethan society's views on masculinity.
Orlando's feminine yearnings or traits also assert themselves in his sexual attractions. For, undeniably, he is always attracted to and, in turn, attracts women with decidedly masculine traits. Indeed, the biographer's descriptions of the Queen, Sasha, and the Archduchess Harriet make…
Works Cited
Woolf, V. Orlando: A Biography. Harcourt, 1993.
Virginia Woolf to the Light House Biography of the author Virginia Woolf, the British author who made efforts towards making an original contribution to the structure of the novel, was an eminent writer of feminist essays, a critic writer in The Times Lierary Supplement and the prominent person in the Bloomsbury group. Virginia Woolf was born as the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Jackson Duckworth in London. Her father, Sir
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An excellent example of a key component in the sexual identity of a woman is the compulsion to get married which most women (particularly during Woolf's day) are bound to experience. Orlando feels this sentiment as well, which the following quotation demonstrates. Everyone is mated except myself,' she mused, as she trailed disconsolately across the courtyard… I, 'am single, am mateless, am alone.' Such thoughts had never entered her head
When conducting an ideological critique, the researcher must be concerned with the way ideology is evidenced (or repressed) in the artifact, and a useful concept for identifying these "traces of ideology" is the notion of the ideograph, or the "political language which manifests ideology," which, according to Michael McGee, is "characterized by slogans" (Foss 248, McGee 5). McGee argues "that ideology in practice is a political language, preserved in
Women and Gender Studies Of all the technologies and cultural phenomena human beings have created, language, and particularly writing, is arguably the most powerful, because it is the means by which all human experience is expressed and ordered. As such, controlling who is allowed to write, and in a modern context, be published, is one of the most effective means of controlling society. This fact was painfully clear to women writers
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