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COPYRIGHT 2004 Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN)
This essay will attempt to show how Virginia Woolf's Orlando acts as a parodic contestation againts the late Victorian sexual codes prescribed and enforced upon individuals in the first decades of the twentieth century. Woolf's conceptualisation of androgyny in Orlando (as a prelude to A Room of One's Own) poses a major theoretical problem that this paper will address. The contradictory manly and womanly appearances of Orlando are resolved with the creation of an androgynous being whose gender is constantly mocked. Woolf's fetishistic vision of a genderless being is a desire that supports her idea of the neutralization of gender. Together with androgyny, as a Bloomsbury intellectual, one of Woolf's central concerns in Orlando turns out to be same sex love. The gender binary, the main foundation of heterosexuality, is deconstructed with a critical and subversive impulse similar to those present in Strachey, Wilde, Barnes, Lawrence, and Joyce.
Key words: androgyny, masquerade, neutralization of gender, parody, sexual change, same sex desire.
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[I]t is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman--manly or man--womanly.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf, like a good number of her critics, considered Orlando (1928) to be a minor work when compared with the rest of her literary production. Despite the success and large sales that followed the first printing of the book, (1) Woolf was never fully satisfied with it: "Orlando is of course a very quick brilliant book. Yes, but I did not try to explore. And must I always explore?" (qtd. Bell 1972: 251). Some recent studies, along with Leonard's and Vita Sackville-West's own opinions on the book, have nevertheless emphasized the originality of its style, as well as its innovative treatment of sexuality and gender. Quentin Bell acknowledged Orlando as the one novel by Virginia Woolf that comes closest to sexual, or rather to homosexual feeling. To consider overtly the issue of sexuality and its relation to gender, does not mean, however that erotic impulses have any implicit or explicit presence in the narrative. On the contrary, the seductive tone with which the narrator tells the story is devoid of sexual rapture. Sexuality is in absentia and its deferral shapes the narrative.
Androgyny is an issue that has been largely discussed by most of the critics that have studied Virginia Woolf's works under a feminist prism. A Room of One's Own (1929), the work following Orlando, is the essay that prompts the critical debate on androgyny. The sight of a couple getting into a taxi-cab and melting into London's flowing traffic suddenly triggers a fascinating analogy for the narrator: "For certainly when I saw the couple get into the taxi-cab the mind felt as if, after being divided, it had come together again in natural fusion. The obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to co-operate. One has a profound, if rational instinct in favour of the theory, that the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness" ([1929] 1989: 98). In her vision Woolf reorients feminism with a conciliatory gesture that considers difference fertile and heterogeneous instead of oppositional and univalent.
Both Toril Moi and Makiko Minow-Pinkney argue against Elaine Showalter's view on Woolf's androgyny for whom it represents an escape from the confrontation with femaleness or maleness.2 Elizabeth Abel agrees with Minow-Pinkney and Moi in considering Woolf a feminist. For Abel, Woolf "feminizes" the concept of androgyny: "Despite Woolf's declaration that 'some marriage of opposites has to be consummated,' she calls into question the heterosexual prototypes of women's literary maternity by never representing a marriage with the masculine, and by including no women in her list of androgynous writers" (Abel 1989: 108).
In her endeavour to write an essay about women and fiction, Woolf's first aim is of course to explain why the feminine voice has been silenced in the past in literature. Her essay adopts a subversive form that tries to emulate the hypothetical voice of a female writer who strives to find a place in the exclusive male dominated essayist genre.
In her attempt to rescue the feminine voice and explicate its nature, Woolf privileges the mention of women writers throughout the narrative and she articulates her concept of androgyny. Although "the women writers' list" aforementioned by Abel is not included in the chapter on androgyny, it is true that Woolf emphasizes women's silence in literature, as for instance, when she claims that "Elizabethan Literature would have been very different from what it is if the woman's movement had begun in the sixteenth century and not in the nineteenth" ([1929] 1989: 101). While Abel aptly demonstrates that Woolf privileges the appearance of the female voice, she fails to prove that her concept of androgyny is of a balanced nature.
It is important to point out that Woolf actually mentions male writers by contending that their uniqueness is due to their androgynous mind. Woolf indeed claims that "one must turn back to Shakespeare, for Shakespeare was androgynous, and so was Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge" ([1929] 1989: 103). She even acknowledges Proust as "wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman" ([1929] 1989: 103). Woolf's failure to cite any women writers reflects the exclusion of women from literature. Their absence is thus more pertinent than any possible inclusion, and it reflects a political commitment on the part of Woolf to claim recognition for the silenced women writers.
Moreover, Woolf openly states that androgyny does not originate when overemphasizing the feminine. As Abel wants to demonstrate, it begins when one unites the two sexes into one: "Coleridge certainly did not mean--argues Woolf--when he said that a great mind...
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