Orlando’s life is followed over a 400-year span, starting during the reign of Elizabeth I when Orlando is sixteen and ending in real time in 1928, when she is in her thirties. In the novel, Queen Elizabeth falls in love with the young Orlando and brings him to her court, where he is showered with great favors, only to betray the queen. After falling in love with the Russian princess Sasha during the reign of King James—and being betrayed by her in turn—Orlando is sent to Constantinople as Ambassador during the seventeenth century. Earning high honors for his services to the Crown, Orlando, in the hinge of the book, turns into a woman and goes to live in the Turkish mountains with a tribe of androgynous gypsies. Soon longing for her ancestral estate, Orlando dons the petticoats of an English noblewoman and sails home. In Restoration England, Orlando dresses as a woman, then as a man, while having multiple adventures through the eighteenth century with writers, poets, and lovers, before bowing to the cultural pressure of Victorian times and marrying Shelmerdine, who is also of questionable gender. Woolf creates Orlando as a man, castrates him, and then uses the character to romp through fantasies of genre and gender. There is a multiplicity of discourse in Orlando, a play of forms that are doubled, redoubled, and redoubled yet again: self/other, love/hate, masculine/feminine, biography/novel, fantasy/reality, chaos/order, and delight/revenge. HUMILIATION AND THE DISRUPTION OF MEANING Although the theme of revenge was neglected for many years in the psychoanalytic literature, Lansky’s article on the impossibility of forgiveness in Euripides’ Medea brought attention to bear on shame fantasies as instigators of vengefulness. Lansky (2004) explores “Medea’s unfolding humiliation and helplessness” (p. 438) when her husband, Jason, abandons her for the princess of Corinth. Medea’s quest for revenge is set in motion by this betrayal by her husband—the loss of a loved one to a rival—as well as by her social isolation. She is no longer loved, sustaining a catastrophic narcissistic injury, and loses her place in the social order. Her “devastation and rage” (p. 438) propel Medea to murder the king and princess of Corinth and her own two sons. As the play closes, she taunts the now-devastated Jason, refusing to give him their children’s bodies for burial. Lansky argues that Medea’s situational shame escalates into anticipatory paranoid shame as she is “convinced she will be mocked by the community” (p. 452). But she is so attached to Jason that she cannot separate from him physically or emotionally; she cannot leave him. “Her humiliation has become utterly unbearable” (p. 451, italics in original), and this realization crystallizes her plan for revenge. After murdering their children and thus projecting her feelings of humiliation, helplessness, and desolation onto Jason, Medea is able to depart “in a state of self-sufficient omnipotent completeness, leaving her distressing mental states with him” (Lansky 2004, p. 460). LaFarge (2006) adds “another critical dimension” (p. 449) to the quest for revenge, characterizing it as
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