The reader of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando plunges into a world
of suspended disbelief as the individual wanders alongside the protagonist,
Orlando, who begins the book ensconced in a courtly life of British nobility
and then after a “long sleep” transforms into a female version of Orlando,
relegated to face the challenges of operating as a female in a male-dominated
world. Extending over a 400-year time
span, the reader reels through decades, making observations about social
customs, gender disparities and the atmospheres for women and men.
For reference material for Orlando’s homestead, Woolf relied
heavily Vita Sackville West’s writing of her personal experience at her
childhood estate in the work, Knole and
the Sackvilles. In light of this connection some scholars have said, “It
has been one of the sentimental commonplaces attached to Orlando criticism that
it is the “longest and most charming love letters in literature.” (Woolf, 1928) . Sackville West was
prohibited from inheriting Knole from her father, and watched with anguish as
the property was transferred to her father’s nephew instead. We further find
strains of this in Orlando as the female Orlando faces peril over land claims.
Now, through the pages of Orlando, we see the male, and then
female version of Orlando walk the grounds, participate in courtly activities
and ponder literature, politics, gender role and the like. From a space and
place perspective, we once again see the formulation of a domestic space. Woolf
literature contains a multitude of contexts that underscore the separation of
the public sphere and the private, domestic sphere. For example, readers
observe Mrs. Dalloway in the book with the same title, take command of the domestic
sphere with her parties and we see Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse guide the home and all those who meander under
the roof.
Scholars refer to this phenomenon as a “veiled sacredness”
or an invisible dynamic. “I refer here
to opposites that we take for granted, such as the contrast between public and
private space, family and social space, cultural and utilitarian space and the
space of pleasure and the space of work – all opposites that are still actuated
by veiled sacredness. (Poststructuralism)
By breathing life into one character, first as a man and
then as a woman, Woolf creates Orlando and advances the he/she binary to
overtly addresses the dichotomy between male and female activities in social,
political and economic spheres. “The
binary division is so deeply implicated in the social production of space, in
assumptions about the ‘natural’ and built environments and in the set of
regulations which influence who should occupy which spaces and who should be
excluded,” according to McDowell in Gender,
Identity and Place. (McDowell, 1999)
Woolf’s literary transformation of the body of Orlando from
male to female offers a vehicle for discussions about the gender roles of men
and women. “Work on the body has also altered understandings of space, as it
has become clear that spatial divisions – whether in the home or in the
workplace, at the level of the city or the nation-state – are also affected by
and reflected in embodied practices and lived social relations,” McDowell
states. (McDowell, 1999)
French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu stated that “men are
presence in space and women are insignificance.” (McDowell, 1999) . We see this
dichotomy in Orlando as the protagonist moves from a stately, noble man, to a
woman who strives to engage in the social scenes of London.
In the poststructural discussion of Foucault, Woolf’s
Orlando typifies a breakthrough a heterotopias: “Heterotopias are linked for
the most part to bits and pieces of time i.e., they open up through what we
might define as pure symmetry of heterochronisms. The heterotopias enters fully
into function when men find themselves in a sort of total breach of their
traditional time.” (Poststructuralism) . With chronological
time interrupted by an individual who lives for several hundred hears, the
heterotopia of Orlando emerges. Despite the dichotomy of he/she-ness found
throughout the book, Woolf also leaves us with markers to indicate the sameness
of men and women.
Woolf points to the individual’s memory and the character as
devoid of altering a person’s identity. “The change of sex, though it altered
their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained,
the portraits prove, practically the same. His memory – but in the future we
must, for convention’s sake, say “her: for “his” and “she” for “he” – her
memory then, went back through all of the events of her past life without
encountering any obstacle. (Woolf, 1928)
Bibliography
McDowell, L. (1999). Gender, Identity and Place.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Poststructuralism. (n.d.).
Woolf, V. (1928). Orlando. Orlando, FLA:
Harcourt.
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