2025-26
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“You’re a man, Orlando!”: Performing Gender and Undoing the Self in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Ariel Zhang
“‘You’re a man, Orlando!’”:
Undoing Gender, Rituals, and Desire in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Ariel Zhang
Dr. Wahl, Ms. Cranston
Written in biographical form, Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando, documents the life of a young man named Orlando, who falls into a deep trance and awakes to find themselves transformed into a woman. As Orlando moves through the shifting political and cultural landscapes over the fantastical span of three hundred years, she finds that the expectations placed upon her change with her gender, influencing both her social roles and the forms of intimacy and relationships available to her. The novel engages in sartorial play; clothing allows characters at times to pass as either extremes of the gender binary, and at other times, to create an androgynous or ambiguously gendered identity. Orlando’s embodied experience as both man and woman raises questions as to which aspects of identity remain constant and which are fluidly changing. Through the tensions and interplay between gender, clothing, and the body, Woolf reimagines what makes a “(wo)man.” In Orlando, Woolf explores the norms of gender through parody, challenging the belief that gender is rooted in a biological essence; instead, she posits gender as a byproduct of cultural norms and expectations, maintained through social performances such as the choice of clothing. Through queer sensibilities, Woolf constructs an androgynous identity for Orlando that lies outside the constraints of the pervasive surveillance of the male gaze.
Orlando’s Genital/Gender Transformation:
To flee the incessant pursuit of the Archduchess, a passionate suitor of Orlando who is later revealed to be an Archduke cross-dressing as a woman, Orlando entreats King Charles to appoint him as an Ambassador to Constantinople, after which the narration breaks into incomplete accounts of Orlando’s life in Constantinople based on rumor and anecdote. In her persona as Orlando’s “biographer,” Woolf structures these accounts to create a backdrop of inherent ambiguity that pervades the scene of Orlando’s forthcoming gender transformation, as
Woolf denies the reader access to any straightforward account of the “truth” of Orlando’s sex change. Thus, the biographer feigns regret at the fragmentation of these records of Orlando’s life in Constantinople and gives a plausible historical explanation: the moment Orlando is crowned as a Duke, the city breaks into civil unrest.
Amid the violence, Orlando falls into a deep sleep, unresponsive to any attempts made to rouse him. When he wakes, Orlando has transformed into a woman. By situating the gender transformation when Orlando is unconscious and asleep, Woolf potentially alludes to the Book of Genesis when God casts Adam into a deep trance to create Eve from one of his ribs:
21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
22 And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. (Gen. 2.21-2.22, KJV).
In Genesis, God “extracts” Eve from Adam, thus positioning the female body as derivative of the male body. Eve’s origin has been historically invoked to justify gender hierarchy and legitimize the subordination of women to men. Orlando’s transformation, however, does not construct or reinforce a hierarchy, as Orlando inhabits and fully becomes the culturally ostracized and “othered” female body. Orlando’s complete embodiment of “woman” resists any attempts to reduce the female body into an alienated object, instead configuring the female body as a site of agency and subjectivity.
Orlando’s nakedness post-transformation furthermore mirrors Adam and Eve’s unashamed nakedness. Standing naked in the room alone, “Orlando look[s] himself up and down in a long looking-glass, without showing any signs of discomposure, and [goes], presumably, to his bath” (Woolf 75). No bodily change substantiates this transformation of sex; Woolf does not draw attention to Orlando’s anatomy or attempt to describe Orlando’s physical transformation. The only evidence of the transformation is present in the mirror, yet Woolf withholds the sight
that Orlando sees from the viewer. As Orlando gazes in the mirror in this private moment, unobserved by outsiders, it ostensibly appears that no change has occurred at all. Woolf questions whether a discernible difference exists between man and woman when removed from social circumstances and context. Orlando’s composure echoes a story about a conversation between two young children standing before a painting of Adam and Eve: “One child asks the other, ‘Which is the man and which is the lady?’ The other child answers, ‘I can’t tell they don’t have any clothes on’” (Shapiro 248). Naked in front of the mirror, Orlando seemingly does not recognize whether s/he has changed genders at all, challenging the gendered systems built upon bodily sexual differences between man and woman. Woolf also emphasizes the degree to which clothing, when interpreted in a given social context, becomes a vehicle for the performance of gender.
Orlando undergoes what Marjorie Garber calls a mere “pronoun transplant” (Garber 134) without the need for surgery. The process seems painless as Orlando’s biographer suggests an effortless transition of pronouns: “In the future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his,’ and ‘she’ for ‘he’” (Woolf 75). Notably, this pronoun transplant occurs during Orlando’s bath; in the scene in which Orlando looks in the mirror, “he” inhabits a female body yet takes on the male pronoun, inviting tension between the pronoun “he” and the biological reality of the female body. Woolf emphasizes that the symbolic representations of gender are socially constructed, revealing the arbitrariness of the “he” pronoun standing for the male body and “she” for the female body.
When Orlando bathes for the first time as a woman, an image conventionally represented as a voyeuristic spectacle for male viewers, the biographer does not follow Orlando’s perspective into the bath but rather “take[s] advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain
statements” (75). Woolf refuses to indulge in fantasies of the female body as a mysterious, foreign entity that must be explored and displayed for the pleasure of a (male) audience, and she neither plays the voyeur nor enables the reader to become one. Orlando shows no discomfort or surprise at his newly gendered body, as Woolf presents Orlando’s fantastical change as a “simple fact” (76):
Orlando had 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 whatever to alter their identity. [Orlando’s] memory … went back through all the events of [Orlando’s] past life without encountering an obstacle. (75)
Initially, the external change does not have an impact on Orlando’s self-identification. Woolf’s use of the pronoun “they” to describe Orlando gestures toward the fluidity of not only gender identity but also the vocabulary through which gender is articulated, suggesting that Orlando takes on a position that synthesizes or exists in between “he” and “she,” and perhaps also anticipating the contemporary use of the singular “they/their” as a non-binary marker. Woolf challenges the belief that sex is an essential characteristic of identity, as only Orlando’s memories mark the continuity of their identity before and after the transformation. Orlando’s “pronouns their, his, her are comfortably accommodated in a single ‘identity’ determined by memory chains” (Burns 350). Woolf suggests that one’s thoughts and desires are not confined to a single gendered body but rather transcend the body, as identity is shown to be separable from the strictly anatomical body.
The absence of psychological tension in Orlando’s perception of herself as a woman stands in contrast to the scenes of female self-inspection captured in the works of Woolf’s contemporaries. In Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, published in the same year as Orlando, Hall develops her theory of sexual inversion, presenting the lesbian protagonist Stephen Gordon as an “invert” with the body of a woman but the internal feelings of a man.
Notably, the theory posits that “inverts” are congenital, giving rise to the assertion that homo/heterosexuality is not a choice and weakening the idea of immorality associated with same-sex desire. By framing same-sex desire as “latent heterosexuality,” sexual inversion contends that gays and lesbians are heterosexual but “born in the wrong bodies” (Eisner 14). The scene in which Stephen gazes at her naked body in the mirror parallels Orlando’s encounter with her transformed body:
That night [Stephen] stared at herself in the glass; and even as she did so she hated her body with its muscular shoulders, its small compact breasts, and its slender flanks of an athlete. All her life she must drag this body of hers like a monstrous fetter imposed on her spirit. (Hall 187)
Both characters confront their nakedness, yet the sight that Orlando, now miraculously but painlessly transformed into a “she,” perceives in the mirror’s reflection is less full of selfloathing than the figure Stephen perceives. While Orlando matter-of-factly observes her undescribed body, Stephen scrutinizes her body in accordance with feminine beauty standards in the 1920s which regard her body as monstrous and inappropriately masculine. Hall depicts the tension of a person with the interiority of a man, with “male” traits and “male” desires, who finds himself unhappily inhabiting the body of a woman and then measured with respect to an idealized female body. Yet for Orlando, who has been a man and who has loved women for thirty years, the moment s/he perceives herself in a female body appears not only free from selfhatred but even from any sense of tension. Whereas sexual inversion theory requires a conflict between the psychological identity of the person and the body they inhabit, Woolf portrays Orlando happily able to experience being in a female body and simultaneously loving women. Orlando only experiences the scrutinizing eye that plagues Stephen when she returns to England, where she becomes aware of “the penalties and the privileges of her position” as a woman (Woolf 83). On board the ship to England, in a satirical exchange between Orlando and
the Captain, the Captain asks permission to give Orlando a slice of corned beef, and Orlando politely refuses the offer, then accepts it, an act she perceives as “the most delicious of all, to yield and see him smile” (84). Woolf caricatures the stifling ideals of womanhood, as Orlando, perhaps naively, delights in the “feminine” performances of modesty and coyness; in refusing to accept the meat, Orlando successfully passes the social test that a woman must not vocalize her desires, and in ultimately accepting the offer, she fulfills the image of a woman whose role is to accommodate and reassure male authority and the male ego. Orlando maneuvers through the balancing act of “femininity,” as in a scripted manner of restraint followed by compliance, she must both reject and accept the offer in order to please the Captain without exhibiting any signs of desire or even admitting to the existence of her own.
Clothing Politics
Similarly, Orlando changes her way of dress when a sailor nearly loses balance and perishes upon seeing her calf: “‘If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow, who, no doubt, has a wife and a family to support, I must, in all humanity, keep them covered’” (85).
In the farcical near-death of the sailor, Woolf parodies Victorian morality and satirizes the idea of the exposed female body as a source of irresistible temptation. Through the absurdity of an ankle becoming “dangerous,” Woolf exposes the flawed logic that demands Orlando to regulate her appearance while absolving men of responsibility for their gaze.
Although women frequently wore shorter dresses in the early nineteenth-century before the Victorian era, the Victorian era’s emphasis on female modesty and decency established longer dresses that swept the floor as the norm, requiring a woman’s legs to remain fully covered; the lower half of a woman’s body was obscured by extra layers of petticoats, cage crinolines, and bustles (“Corsets, Crinolines”). Inventions such as the Victorian skirt lifter
allowed women to modestly and “elegantly” lift their dresses without exposing their ankles (Abijaoude). Because women’s legs were so strictly concealed, the ankle, which mostly remained hidden but could be briefly revealed and visible, became a highly sexualized spectacle.
The fetishistic appeal of the female ankle lies in its elusiveness, as the ankle is the most easily revealed underneath the clothing, making it just within reach yet not quite attainable, which Woolf parodies in the reaction of the sailor to the sight of Orlando’s ankles.
The changes in Orlando’s behavior constitute her becoming a “woman,” as in the words of Simone de Beauvoir, “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one.” Beauvoir distinguishes between the sexed body and the gender of the psyche within it; one is not born with a pre-determined “feminine” essence, but rather, through adopting actions and roles culturally coded as “feminine,” one learns how to perform the role of womanhood. Judith Butler further challenges the construction of gender as biological and innate, instead arguing that gender is a series of behaviors, speech, and dress, where the repetition of these acts creates the illusion of a stable gender identity:
[G]ender is not a noun… gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed… There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results (Butler 34).
The reactions of the other male characters externally impose the “doing” of gender upon Orlando. As Orlando experiments with appropriate social conduct and dress, she tailors her conduct based on trial and error; she molds her behavior to stimulate satisfaction on the Captain’s face and to prevent the sailor from dying, revealing the ways in which the social construction of womanhood in the Victorian era is shaped by male approval and thus takes away female agency and to some degree any independent or authentic female subjectivity. Orlando now reflects upon her previous attitudes, which she held when she was embodied as a man and
believed that “women must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled” (Woolf 84).
Now embodied as a woman, Orlando realizes the falsehood of these ideas. Her proximity to the physical reality of womanhood grants her the awareness, constructed through the double vision she has experienced as both a man and a woman, that these ideals are impossibilities. The distance between the female body and the male perspective enables and perpetuates the illusion of women as effortlessly beautiful, impeccably self-disciplined and self-constrained. Having experienced the embodied realities of a man and a woman, Orlando reflects:
“[W]hat fools they make of us what fools we are!” 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… she was a man; she was a woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. (85)
As Orlando adopts the perspective of the ambiguous “we,” Woolf playfully disturbs the perceived stability of gender identity, as she contends that Orlando is neither a man nor a woman, yet simultaneously both. Orlando, with her new knowledge of “secrets” and “weaknesses” shared by both sexes, bears a resemblance to Tiresias in Greek mythology, whom Hera transforms into a woman for seven years as a punishment before returning him to the body of a man. Tiresias’s unique experience of the embodied realities of both genders leads him to become an arbiter between Zeus and Hera in an argument on whether men or women experience the pleasures of love most deeply. When Tiresias makes the final judgment that women feel love more deeply than men, Hera, in opposition to Zeus and believing the correct answer was men, curses Tiresias with blindness, while Zeus grants him the gift of foresight.
The myth of Tiresias’s sex change suggests that living in the female or male body grants a unique vision of each sex, as Tiresias is seen as an objective mediator between the two sexes. Woolf explores a similar theme in Orlando, as Orlando’s gender transformation causes her to adopt an androgynous and gender-fluid mind. Although Woolf previously claims that the gender
transformation changes “nothing whatever” regarding Orlando’s identity, Woolf now implies that a change has occurred in Orlando, suggesting that “nobody can know what it is to be either a man or a woman without having lived in the body of one” (Helt 256). T.S. Eliot further invokes Tiresias in his poem, The Waste Land, published in 1919 by Hogarth Press, a publishing house founded by Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard Woolf (Hastings). The narrator of the poem is Tiresias, “throbbing between two lives” (Eliot), and Eliot expands in his endnotes that as “‘the two sexes meet in Tiresias[,] what Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem’” (Malone). Orlando is perhaps Woolf’s playful recreation of T.S. Eliot’s question, “What does Tiresias see?”
The pluralistic gendered possibilities open to Orlando also challenge the Enlightenment social discourse and anxieties around cross-dressing. Despite the prevalence of theatrical crossdressing in late seventeenth-century England, the late eighteenth-century saw a shift toward the “emerging construction of femininity along domestic and private lines,” evidenced by the increased criticism of women dressing and behaving too mannishly (Straub 152). Fears surrounding the “masculinization of women” emerged from efforts to guard the exclusivity of masculinity and thereby uphold patriarchal authority. Cross-dressed women were seen as encroaching on masculine territory, exposing the fragility of manhood and men’s inability to fully secure it. As the “function of woman [became] the mirror in which man glimpses his own castration” (152), a rigid gender dichotomy emerged, positioning the “feminine other” as what the “masculine” is not.
Yet Orlando is more than a “castrated man”; Orlando is a woman. Woolf undermines the construction of the feminine as the opposite of the masculine; rather than othering the feminine, Orlando encompasses it, understanding its “secrets” and “weaknesses,” becoming equally a
woman as she once was a man. Woolf further suggests possibilities for the intermixing of gender: “In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above” (Woolf 102). Whereas cross dressing denotes adopting clothing culturally associated with the “opposite” gender within a binary framework, thereby emphasizing the fluidity of gender expression through dress, Woolf proposes a form of reverse cross-dressing, in which the external presentation remains constant while the sex beneath it becomes fluid and unstable. To critical audiences who condemned the cross-dresser as a “monstrosity” for transgressing the boundary between male and female sexuality, Woolf challenges the assumption that clothing serves as a binary predictor of gender, as even when outward dress remains fixed, gender identity resists the narrowing into rigid, opposing categories of the masculine and the feminine.
For most of the early eighteenth-century, female cross-dressed actors playing male roles often carried a playful appeal, serving as “a source of pleasure as long as it did not contaminate or compromise dominant narratives of heterosexual desire” (Straub 145). Favorable public reception of cross-dressing presupposed that it remained in the realm of fantasy and performance; the cross-dressed body was deemed acceptable and benign only insofar as it was clearly artificial and packaged as a theatrical commodity, marketed specifically to male audience members who could see parts of a woman’s body that were normally concealed by female clothing. Particularly for the female actor who masqueraded as a man, to give a convincing performance of manhood was to “enter a no-woman’s-land ‘beyond’ femininity, to exceed the limits of ‘delicacy’” (147), thus giving rise to anxieties around the cross-dressor’s ability to expose the fragility of masculinity. As a result, the public attempted to contain cross-dressing to
the stage to ensure its non-threatening status to patriarchal order. These efforts imply that, for the cross-dresser, clothing is a facade and a performative role that must deviate from some preexisting essence beneath the dress; the costume is perceived as a falsehood, while what is underneath is the “real.” As William Cooke remarks on the theatrics of cross-dressing: “‘Where a woman … personates a man pro tempore … the closer the imitation is made, the more we applaud the performer, but always in the knowledge that the object before us is a woman assuming the character of a man’” (148). A cross-dressed actress is understood first and foremost as a woman, the “real,” and only secondarily as a man, the constructed facade, rendering the external and internal as easily separable.
Yet Woolf complicates this assumption, as she not only suggests that the external and internal are rarely distinguishable, noting they frequently influence each other, but she also contends that this “real” is a performance itself. If clothes are the performance that sustains the “likeness” of man or woman, then a man dressing as a man may be no less a “‘vile and beastly’” (146) transformation than a woman dressing as a man. The performance of masculinity and femininity through clothing belongs neither to the male or female gender. While cross-dressed actresses were commonly perceived as a woman assuming the character of a man, Woolf proposes the possibility of a woman wearing traditionally feminine clothing as a woman assuming the character of a woman
After her gender transformation, Orlando returns to England from Constantinople, where she again encounters her suitor, the Archduchess; yet when the Archduchess sees Orlando embodied as a woman, she reveals that she is an Archduke in disguise, masquerading as a woman to win the affections of Orlando the man. The Archduke/duchess unveils his gender by removing his clothes, presenting his naked body to Orlando. Unlike the sight reflected back to
Orlando in the mirror as she observes her new female body, Orlando is deeply disturbed by the Archduke’s undressing, and she recalls “suddenly to a consciousness of her sex, which she had completely forgotten, and of his, which was now remote enough to be equally upsetting,” (Woolf 96). Whereas Orlando does not seem to register gender in her naked reflection, she not only discerns the Archduke’s gender through his nakedness, but his presence also draws attention to the awareness of her own gender. To the Archduke, clothing becomes a means of deception to court Orlando within a heterosexual framework, as he veils or unveils his body depending on Orlando’s gender expression. Through the “heteronormative hyperbole” of his actions (Detloff 304), Woolf critiques the rigidity of binary gender roles and challenges the perceived stability of heterosexual desire. If the gender fluidity of both characters can be molded to fit a heterosexual narrative, then they also have the capacity to transcend it.
The Idealized Victorian Woman
Orlando enters the nineteenth-century, a period marked by great clouds and “sweating” walls, permeated with “damp.” Critical of Victorian ideals of femininity that confined a woman’s roles to domesticity and motherhood, Woolf satirizes the Victorian era as a period of pervasive “damp” and “fog,” in which the “sexes dr[a]w further and further apart” (Woolf 122). The domestic sphere became increasingly associated with womanhood and the public sphere with manhood, positioning the feminine and the masculine as non-overlapping and sharply delineated boundaries.
In the Victorian era, “the spirit of the age” influences Orlando’s choice of clothing and decision to marry, displacing Orlando from a position of agency as the spirit of the age speaks and acts for her. Woolf satirizes the spirit of the age as a response to her father Leslie Stephen, who believed that respectable literature engaged with and contributed to this cultural spirit, with
“respectable literature” narrowly defined as the works of male writers; he praised Sir Walter Scott for “expressing the spirit of his age” but criticized Charlotte Brontë for neglecting the works of male contemporaries and for “ignoring the status quo by not giving in to the ‘dominant’ ideas of her time” (de Gay 65). Woolf undermines the perceived legitimacy of a male-dominated literary canon, transforming what appears to be a marker of refined taste into a “regulatory ideological force” that overrides personal agency and enforces rigid gender norms through “violent coercion” (65). When Orlando kneels by the window and asks for a partner to lean upon, clasping her hands and “looking the very image of appealing womanhood as she did so,” the spirit of the age speaks and clasps her hands for her (Woolf 130). During the Victorian era, Orlando’s movements become involuntarily shaped by the spirit of the age that molds her into an archetype of Victorian femininity.
Woolf lampoons the constant male surveillance and inspection of the female subject, revealing the patriarchal structures that seek to confine women through public policies and private rituals; clothing functions as a way to police female bodies and surveil women to prevent transgressions of the ideals of femininity. In conversation with Orlando about Queen Victoria, the Widow Bartholomew struggles to finish her sentence as she hesitates to name the Queen’s clothing, even as Orlando helps vocalize the missing word: “crinoline.” The Widow’s restraint from speaking the word suggests that even the word “crinoline” carries an excessive amount of shame and must remain unspoken. She censors herself as if under constant inspection, internalizing the male gaze that appropriates female bodies as sights of aesthetic pleasure; her inner voice limits her vocabulary and expression, functioning as an insidious extension of a patriarchal tool to police women’s thoughts and actions even in the absence of a male audience. Were they not all of them weak women? wearing crinolines to conceal the great fact; the only fact; but nevertheless, the deplorable fact; which every modest woman did her best
to deny until denial was impossible; the fact that she was about to bear a child? to bear fifteen or twenty children indeed, so that most of a modest woman’s life was spent, after all, in denying what, on one day of at least every year, was made obvious (124).
Through a lengthy semicolon list that describes the “fact” without explicitly naming it, Woolf textually creates a crinoline and obscures the explanation that the “fact” refers to childbearing from the reader. The parallel between the Widow’s hesitation to say the word and the biographer’s circuitous description of pregnancy illustrates the way in which the pervasive influence of the patriarchal gaze extends not only into a conversation between Orlando and Widow Bartholomew, but also into the relationship between the biographer and the reader.
Woolf satirizes the mainstream view in the Victorian era that preached excessive modesty and prudery, particularly for women, in order to maintain an image of pure, respectable femininity. By exposing the absurdity of the social pressures that demand women to impossibly conceal a natural bodily process in the name of modesty, Woolf underscores the futile pursuit of the “feminine”; Victorian ideals of womanhood prove inherently unattainable, as they demanded illogical alterations to the body that ultimately erase and deny the realities of female anatomy
The crinoline initially gained popularity as an alternative to the heavier weight of petticoats, providing a relatively more comfortable and hygienic option for female dress in the nineteenth-century, though it soon became associated with promiscuity and was used to slander the women who wore them (Celiberti). A satirical cartoon titled “Cool Request” published in Punch in 1857 depicts a woman wearing a crinoline and a man boarding a carriage, below which the text reads: “Lady Crinoline: You won’t mind riding on the box, Edward dear, will you? I’m afraid, if we both go inside the Brougham, my new dress will get rumpled!” (Celiberti). The satirical ejection of the man from the carriage implies that “a man suffers when a woman takes up space,” a theme constant in other cartoons that illustrate men inconvenienced by the absurdly
voluminous size of the crinoline (Celiberti). By accentuating Lady Crinoline’s “excessive” obsession with appearances and “self-absorbed” desire to keep her dress smooth, the cartoonist mocks her vanity while simultaneously portraying her as impeccably dressed and unmistakably “feminine” and beautiful for his aesthetic pleasure. The geometry of beauty and decorum that constitute the sketch of Lady Crinoline are all standards to which she could not attain or even aspire to become had she not been occupied with these “vain” and “superficial” trifles and taken care to prevent her dress from being crumpled. The cartoonist’s hypocritical portrayal of Lady Crinoline mirrors the critique made by John Berger on the objectification and sexualized display of female nudes in Renaissance art:
You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure. (Berger)
The cartoonist is unaware that he is complicit in the feminine beauty standards to which he vilifies Lady Crinoline for conforming. Crinolines additionally carried undertones of a fetishistic and sexual appeal; novelists including Nicolas Rétif de la Bretonne frequently sexualized these “prosthetic appendages,” as crinolines and other “sartorial extrusions” could accentuate the extremities of the female body, allowing a masculine fantasy to take place in what the clothing obscures (71).
This impulse toward concealment is further reflected in Victorian euphemisms for pregnancy, as the word “pregnant” was considered indecent and crass. More “tactful” ways of describing pregnancy include “in a delicate condition” or “in a state of domestic solicitude” (Leighton and Surridge), both of which attempt to sanitize and culturally “feminize” the matter by evoking delicacy and domesticity. “Lusty” was also colloquially used to describe women who were not only salacious but also “stout or corpulent,” and by association, pregnant (Leighton and
Surridge). Pregnancy presents a paradox for women, as childbearing was a defining role of the model Victorian woman in the domestic sphere, yet it also implied participation in amorous activity, complicating the idealized image of femininity as pure and chaste.
As the spirit of the age impresses upon her the cultural script of femininity, Orlando reluctantly adopts the crinoline:
[Orlando stands] dragged down by the weight of the crinoline which she had submissively adopted. It was heavier and more drab than any dress she had yet worn. None had ever so impeded her movements. No longer could she stride through the garden with her dogs, or run lightly to the high mound and fling herself beneath the oak tree… Her muscles had lost their pliancy. (Woolf 129)
The crinoline not only restricts Orlando’s movements, limiting her access to the public sphere, but it also physically alters Orlando’s body by impairing her muscles. Orlando is wearing a piece of clothing that has transformed into a patriarchal weapon to vilify women. The cumbersome weight of the crinoline reflects the repressive demands of the idealized image of womanhood, fraught with male hypocrisy and double standards, sharply juxtaposing with the sartorial freedom Orlando experiences when she switches between breeches to petticoats in the eighteenth-century.
Woolf again illustrates the way in which “it is clothes that wear us and not we them” (101), as the garments culturally imposed upon Orlando do not necessarily signify her gender; instead, the clothes that she wears regulate her gender, reshaping the scope of Orlando’s agency and redefining the boundaries of what she can or cannot do as a woman in the nineteenth-century.
Yet paradoxically, when stripped from its social context, the crinoline “conceals sexuality more efficiently than any other accessory, for it deforms the body shape” (González 81). By evoking the tension between an appearance-wise ambiguously gendered apparel with the rigid gendered norms embedded within the apparel itself, Woolf divorces female clothing from the female body, further illustrating the way in which clothing is a performance of gender, socially
imposed by patriarchal structures, and not an inherent essence. The crinoline’s ability for concealment is also a source of sexualization from male eyes, as what is obscured also becomes a site of fetishization and male imagination of the feminine ideal. Woolf depicts the crinoline’s ability to simultaneously “deform, conceal, and create the idea of a woman” (81).
Beyond the visible constraints imposed by garments such as crinolines, smaller objects including wedding rings similarly operate as a patriarchal tool to regulate and confine women’s roles. Upon noticing the ring on Widow Bartholomew’s finger, Orlando reaches for the Widow’s hand for a closer inspection, yet the Widow forcefully withdraws and refuses to let the ring leave her possession, as if “it was by the gleam on her wedding ring that she would be assigned her station among the angels and its lustre would be tarnished for ever if she let it out of her keeping for a second” (Woolf 128). Under the doctrine of coverture, married women, the femme couverte, had no recognized rights of their own; as William Blackstone notes: “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.” Unmarried women, the femme sole, were considered an independent entity, as they could own property, enter contracts, and retain wages under their own name, yet the femme couverte was legally subsumed into her husband, rendering her in a state of personal and financial subordination.
In lampooning the patriarchal institutions of marriage that strip women of their agency, Woolf reveals the internalization of the femme couverte identity, as although Widow Bartholomew is legally considered a femme sole, she remains attached to her wedding ring, symbolic of the femme couverte. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft further critiques the institution of marriage that objectifies women as property and legitimizes the dominion over her body and identity by her husband: “To rise in the world, and have the liberty
of indulging their passions, they must marry advantageously, and to this object their time is sacrificed, and their persons often legally prostituted” (41). The Widow is forced to sacrifice her time to oversee the ring and prevent it from being “tarnished,” as she cannot let the ring “out of her keeping for a second.” Restrained by patriarchal structures that define women in relation to marriage, the Widow is involuntarily kept busy by the task of guarding the ring, putting on the performance of a devoted and faithful wife that demands her constant mental attention.
Woolf conveys a similar idea in A Room of One's Own, in which the narrator contemplates a vivid and enticing idea while walking on a grassy riverbank, when she is intercepted by a male guard, who in disgust and abject horror, orders her to walk on the gravel instead because women are forbidden from walking on the grass. Though the act does not cause physical harm and violence to the narrator, it disrupts the narrator’s thinking, leading her to forget the idea she had been contemplating. Woolf reveals the way in which patriarchal structures, though ostensibly benign and nonviolent, impose an invisible, cognitive tax on women, restricting their intellectual pursuits and creative potential.
Through evoking the absurdity of a gendered rule that delineates the geography of where women can and cannot walk, Woolf not only critiques the idea that behaviors are inherently feminine or masculine, but she also detaches the social norm of femininity from the enforcer of these norms. Woolf challenges the tendency to frame ideals of femininity as inherently oppressive, and by imagining these ideals as benign, she exposes the overlooked violence of their enforcement; to the narrator, the greater oppression lies not in the physical act of walking on gravel, but in the relentless policing of womanhood to enforce rigid gender boundaries and thus prevent women from overstepping into the territory reserved for men, including the cognitive territory of daydreaming or engaging in creativity and imagination. In the case of the Widow,
guarding a wedding ring appears trivial, yet the underlying coercion exists in the invisible systems of enforcement that tie a woman’s identity to the institution of marriage. In attempts to preserve her ring and uphold the image of Victorian femininity, the Widow is left with no space to “write fiction” or think and express herself, paralleling the patriarchal limits imposed upon women in A Room of One’s Own
In the Victorian era, a woman’s moral and social standing were tied completely to her role as a dutiful and subservient wife. The Widow’s “station among the angels” is not determined by her character but rather by her marital status and her loyalty to her husband even after he is deceased, symbolized by the luster of her ring. As the ring operates as a synecdoche for marriage, and marriage of womanhood itself, Woolf reveals the way in which a woman’s identity becomes commodified and reducible to a single, material sign. Woolf also alludes to the Angel in the House, which she satirizes as a “phantom” named after the heroine in Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House:
She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily … she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all I need not say it she was pure. (Woolf)
The Angel in the House is a phantom of the idealized woman in the Victorian era; she remains entirely confined to the domestic sphere and is derivative of her husband and the people around her whom she is expected to serve. She must act chaste and have no desire to call her own. A widow’s dower marked her legal right to one-third of her deceased husband’s estate, but the Dower Act of 1833 allowed husbands to bar dower through their wills, reinforcing patriarchal authority over capital (Alexander 610). To Widow Barthlomew, the end of her marriage with her husband does not signify liberation; she is expected to remain in perpetual grief to prove loyalty
and submission to her husband. The rigid rituals of “Victorian morning kept the dead husband symbolically alive” (610), extending the husband’s authority beyond death and sustaining his control over the Widow’s body and behavior.
Intimacy and Sexual Politics
Whereas as a man, Orlando seeks “Life! A Lover!”, the spirit of the age compels her to pursue “Life! A Husband!” (Woolf 129). In this shift, Woolf critiques the power of Victorian institutions to reshape women’s desire to conform to a heterosexual framework with a culmination in marriage. Woolf symbolizes the compulsion to marry as a “tingling” on the third finger of Orlando’s left hand, marking the absence of the wedding ring. The sensations brought on by the ring’s absence reveals the projection of Victorian marital ideals onto the female body, as the unmarried woman is portrayed as somehow “lacking” completion, which can only occur through her acquisition of a male partner and overlord through marriage. This tingling suffuses Orlando’s body:
Meanwhile, she became conscious … of an extraordinary tingling and vibration all over her, as if she were made of a thousand wires upon which some breeze or errant fingers were playing scales … She had the queerest sensations about the thigh bones. Her hairs seemed to erect themselves. (127)
As the scintillating tingling becomes more localized to the ring finger, Woolf depicts a “parody of orthodox sexual maturation” (Hite 23). To Orlando, the “clitoral/phallic organ of desire is the ring finger, now experienced as acutely in want of a wedding ring” (23). The wedding ring visually signifies a woman’s married identity, marking her as an object belonging to her husband as she takes on the new responsibility of a faithful and subservient wife. Yet to Orlando, the ring becomes a private, erotic sensation. Through parodying the wedding ring, Woolf constructs womanhood as an intimate relationship with the self rather than a need that derives from a husband or male figure, and she thus represents female sexuality outside the bounds of a
phallocentric model. By queering the image of marriage, Woolf frees Orlando from the cultural tether to monogamous heterosexuality. Sexual discourse in the Victorian era challenged Renaissance beliefs that experiencing orgasm is necessary for a woman to conceive, marking a cultural shift in understanding the female experience of sex away from clitoral pleasure to exclusively vaginal penetration (Laqueur 1). Thus the clitoral sensations that Orlando experiences on her ring finger are subversive of Victorian ideals of marriage that deemphasized female pleasure and sought to understand sex solely through the phallus.
Moreover Orlando is fully “conscious” of these erotic sensations, and she resists the projection of the trope of an innocent and virginal “female subject [who] cannot perceive or name her own sexuality” (Wahl 64). Social expectations of modesty compelled women to present themselves as ignorant and unaware of their sexuality in a performance of feminine “innocence” that reinforces masculine authority over the supposedly naïve female subject. Particularly in sexual settings marked by the absence of a male figure, a woman’s innocence and inability to understand her carnal experience “negates these actions as a usurpation of phallic privilege” (226); by casting female characters in a position of naïvety, pornographic writers could prevent non-penetrative acts of sex or sensuality from threatening the authority of the phallus and destabilizing the patriarchal assumption of penetration as the defining marker of sex. Orlando, however, does not feign ignorance, and she is fully aware as each sensation is articulated in precise and poetic detail. Orlando becomes an agent of her own experience rather than an object constructed for the (male) audience’s arousal and consumption.
As Orlando searches for a remedy for the tingling, she ultimately yields to the spirit of the age’s demands to marry. Her pursuit of a husband, however, is quickly curtailed when she ambles into the outdoors and breaks her ankle. Unable to walk again, Orlando lies in the meadow
and feels content, claiming to find a partner in the grassy landscape around her and becoming “‘nature’s bride’” (Woolf 131). Distanced from the institutions of marriage, Orlando slips off her wedding ring, rejecting the prescribed gender roles and fixed identity that Victorian marriage attempts to impose on women. Woolf continues her playful narrative by staging an abrupt turn; just as Orlando falls asleep, she encounters a man on horseback, and within minutes, they are engaged.
They only share their names after their engagement; the man on horseback is Marmaduke
Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire, whom Orlando affectionately calls Shel. Woolf playfully reverses the expected progression of courtship, subverting conventional gender roles and ritualistic expectations surrounding desire. Their wedding, too, is a mayhem of sound and movement, as Woolf reveals the artificiality of established traditions and questions the authority of marriage to legitimize relationships. During Orlando and Shel’s wedding ceremony, “no one heard the word Obey spoken or saw, except as a golden flash, the ring pass from hand to hand” (139). Alluding to the open marriage between Sackville-West and Nicolson, Woolf purposefully obscures the word “Obey,” rejecting the strict patriarchal moral codes tied to marriage that considered open marriages as “scandalous.” Woolf also challenges the authority of the ring, describing it as only visible in a flash, de-centering the ring as the sole symbol of devotion and love, thus removing the ring’s patriarchal power to objectify and “prostitute” women into the institution of marriage. By overturning the expectations of marital obedience and rigid gender roles that underpin Victorian weddings in a carnival-like chaos, Woolf invokes the carnivalesque, and she thus “liberates Orlando from the traditional aristocratic chapel ritual by suspending class and gender dichotomies and inequalities” (Gillespie 180). Despite the wedding still acting as a necessary ritual of marriage, Woolf humorously transforms the ceremony into an
event so distanced from the patriarchal institutions that regulate marriage that the wedding is when Orlando feels the most free.
Parody of Gender
The ecstasy and freedom that Orlando experiences during the wedding contrast sharply with the events post-ceremony, as she retreats indoors into the traditionally “feminized” realm of the private sphere. Inside, Orlando lightly plays with the ring, touching it with a “superstitious reverence, taking care lest it should slip past the joint of her finger” (Woolf 140). Reminiscent of her early conversation with Widow Bartholomew, which also occurs indoors, Orlando displays a similar guardedness over her ring, as she is wary of letting it accidentally slip off her finger. The ring is forgotten during the ceremony yet becomes the center of attention and even a mild source of anxiety in the stillness of the indoors; Woolf portrays the oppressive power of the external conditions forced upon women, such as the confinement to domesticity and the private sphere, and their abilities to influence and shape women’s thoughts.
In addition to the widespread critical reading of the novel as a “love letter” to Vita Sackville-West, it also engages in discourse that reflects the differing ideologies between Woolf and Sackville-West regarding sex, gender, and desire. Sackville-West, who maintained relationships with both men and women during her marriage, conceived of identity as containing both masculine and feminine elements depending on circumstances, often changing her dress to reflect the sex she felt she inhabited in a given moment (Helt 256). In line with sexual inversion theory, Sackville-West saw herself as becoming “a ‘different person’ a male person” in her sexual relationships with women, framing her desire for women through the adoption of a male persona (256). Radclyffe Hall’s trial in 1928 further reinforced the idea of the mannish lesbian, a stereotype for women who adopted masculine clothing and behaviors, thereby popularizing an
image of female desire understood through masculine performance as it suggested that “internal” heterosexuality underpinned all “external” homosexuality. However, Woolf “opposed both the reduction of desire to sexuality and the concept of dyadic (i.e., homo/hetero) sexual identity itself” (249). Within minutes of their encounter, Orlando and Shel arrive at a verdict that undermines any specific assignment of gender and underscores the gender fluidity of their relationship:
“You’re a woman, Shel!” she cried.
“You’re a man, Orlando!” he cried. (Woolf 134)
While Woolf oftentimes refuses to prescribe gender binary classifications to Orlando, she now takes the binary to the extreme, as Shel and Orlando identify each other as the binary “opposite” of their respective genders. Orlando vacillates between man and woman and belongs to neither category; she is forced to be a woman in the Victorian era but now reasserts her ability to remain a man in the eyes of Shel. These claims are not contradictions, but rather they reveal the range of Woolf’s parodic explorations of gender. As Orlando inhabits a multiplicity of gender identities, Woolf creates a parody, or a “radical proliferation of gender, [which] displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself,” (Butler 203). Gendered attributes and acts seek to describe the cultural fiction of gender, yet they are not gender themselves. As Orlando naturally, painlessly displaces their current gender to inhabit another gender or permutation of genders, Woolf underscores that an essence of gender does not exist; though Orlando still anatomically remains a woman, she is not the same “woman” in the seventeenth-century as she is in the twentieth-century, as not only do the socially accepted stylized repetitions of “womanhood” change, but Orlando also experiences multiple shifts in gender identity that alters the very label of “woman” she once imagined might apply to her.
Orlando’s “true gender” does not exist: “there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there [is] no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction” (192). The series of genders that Orlando inhabits encircle Orlando’s identity, yet they are not the defining “facts” of her identity, and they can be changed, as she grows out of or discards them for a new one.
Similar to the way in which the fluidity of clothing can perform or displace gender, the fluidity of gender functions like a garment for the identity underneath. The center of Orlando’s multiple gender transformations is Orlando herself, or a collection of selves, which “are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand,” that her various experiences have created (Woolf 163-164). As Orlando calls to herself, “Orlando?”, she discovers all of these selves lodging within her, summoned by different circumstances, people, and time periods. Throughout the three hundred years of Orlando’s life, only her name, “Orlando,” persists and remains constant (Burns 358). Woolf’s eponymous novel is also titled Orlando, which “points up something significant about biography. That is, once the corporeal body is gone, only the textual body remains” (358-359). Moreover it points to the performative nature of gender; once the “corporeal,” gendered body is gone, only the self/selves that respond to the name “Orlando” remain.
In the exchange between Orlando and Shel, Woolf further satirizes sexual inversion theory, which constructed the “invert” figure as a response to alleviate the anxieties caused by lesbian relationships that were perceived as threatening to the heterosexual norm. By inserting an inversion of gender in a heterosexually harmonious union of man and woman, Woolf parodies the role of the invert as a binary structure that perceives sexuality in either/or terms. Instead, in a double inversion that “cancels out” the other, Woolf destabilizes the claim that desire requires
one partner to assume a masculine identity and the other a feminine identity, revealing the unstable and fluid definitions of both categories.
The Poetry of “Ordinary” Desire
Except for this exaggerated and parodied interaction between Orlando and Shel, Orlando is rarely the “opposite” of her partner in any gender binary; after Orlando’s physical gender transformation, the biographer reflects: “It was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man” (Woolf 88). Orlando’s desire is free-flowing, transcending boundaries of sex and gender. As a young man, Orlando is attracted to Sasha before he can even discern Sasha’s gender, and after he transforms into a woman, Orlando remains equally in love with Sasha, as the memory of her continues to haunt Orlando as powerfully as before the transformation (Helt 257). Through portraying the intensity of passion Orlando feels as equal whether Orlando is a man or a woman, Woolf insists on the “reality and profundity of a woman’s love for a woman” (Knopp 31), suggesting one remaining constant in Orlando’s experience of desire. In a letter to Ethyl Smith, Woolf criticizes the “‘narrowing and naming’ of ‘these immensely composite and wide flung passions,’” expressing that a portrayal of desire and love written from the perspective of women is vital to the artistic practice of female writers (Helt 264). Woolf was particularly reproachful of male writers who hyperfixated on the physical aspects of desire, sexualizing female intimacy into a spectacle for voyeuristic pleasure and implying that women were unable to participate in a relationship through any form other than the sexual.
Orlando, however, is “far more interested in desire than it is in sex” (264), as Woolf does not hypersexualize or mystify desire in order to appeal to a male audience. Woof portrays the
intimacy in Orlando and Shel’s relationship through non-sexualized, private conversations, bearing close resemblance to platonic friendship: “For they knew each other so well that they could say anything, which is tantamount to saying nothing, or saying such stupid, prosy things as how to cook an omelette… yet [which] are positively of amazing beauty” (Woolf 135). The connection between Orlando and Shel is more deeply rooted in a common understanding and shared language than the physical manifestations of desire, a type of romantic friendship that also encompasses intellectual and emotional intimacy, which men believed women were incapable of forming. The domain of friendship has been historically constructed as “an exclusively masculine preserve, whose intellectual, moral, and affective qualities were beyond the capacity of women to comprehend or practice” (Wahl 96). As patriarchal expectations confined womanhood to roles centered around child-rearing and maintaining the household, the belief that these roles were a biological and cultural necessity justified and perpetuated female exclusion from relationships outside of the reproductive economy. Relationships between men and women were strictly restricted and understood through the lens of wedlock or sex; men were instructed to satisfy “intellectual and emotional needs through friendships with other men,” a relationship believed to be superior to any possible relationship between man and woman (98).
Through Orlando and Shel’s mutual intimacy and affection, Woolf challenges the notion that one’s capacity to form any type of relationship is determined by their gender. For Orlando and Shel, both of whom fluidly adopt mannerisms, behaviors, and clothing of a multiplicity of genders, their relationship resists the strict categorization of “same-sex” or “opposite-sex.”
Woolf delineates a vision of intimacy and desire that is not contingent upon the arbitrary social codes of gender, nullifying patriarchal arguments that same-sex masculine relationships are more intellectually and emotionally complex than any other on the sole basis of gender.
Orlando and Shel’s conversations are so “ordinary” that they become “the most poetic,” and as “the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down,” the biographer leaves several lines of white space for the reader to imagine that the “space is filled to repletion” (135). By withholding the content of their conversations from the reader, Woolf denies the (male) audience the opportunity to sexualize or objectify their intimacy.
Orlando further displaces any binary sexual orientation labels assigned to her identity as she wanders into Kew Gardens:
So here then we are at Kew… under the plum tree, a grape hyacinth, and a crocus, and a bad, too, on the almond tree; so that to walk there is to be thinking of bulbs, hairy and red, thrust into the earth … and to be taking from its case a cigarette or cigar even … waiting the kingfisher. (Woolf 156)
The imagery of flowers bears strong phallic and vaginal associations, representative of heterosexual sex; yet simultaneously, the passage is “queered,” as Woolf evokes the hyacinth, a symbol for male homosexuality, and the crocus, traditionally associated with virginity, both of which also appear in Mrs. Dalloway to represent Sally and Clarissa’s same-gender love (Helt 263). Orlando also considers smoking, an act historically perceived as scandalous and a sign of “moral decay” for women. By the early twentieth-century, cigarettes, a traditionally masculine symbol, gained popularity among women as a rebellion against traditional gender roles, even marketed as a “torch of freedom” (Hajek). Along with androgynous physiques, short hair, and masculine clothing, cigarettes functioned as an emancipatory symbol to challenge the policing of femininity and forced suppression of female desires, such as the social taboo of women smoking (Hajek). Through the incongruity of the cigarette/cigar with the floral imagery that surrounds it, Woolf rejects the interpretation through male eyes of an idyllic image of a passive female figure surrounded by flowers. Orlando’s defiant musing on smoking resists the projection of the male gaze unto Orlando; instead, Orlando transforms the setting into her own space with queer
undertones and “scandalous” gender-bending actions as she waits for the kingfisher, a symbol for inspiration and insight during the creative process. Woolf suggests that the insight and inspiration for a woman’s writing and creative work can only emerge in a state as such, where desire can and flourish without the categorization into a homo/heterosexual binary and pleasures “reserved for men” can transcend gender boundaries and be freely actualized.
By tracing Orlando’s movement across “feminine” and “masculine” dress, Woolf underscores the performativity of gender through clothing, challenging the notion that gender is an innate, biological “essence.” Woolf grapples with two simultaneous forces: Orlando has the freedom to choose her clothing to perform her identity, yet the cultural scripts and gendered politics embedded within clothing also mold Orlando’s behaviors and shape her thoughts. Through Orlando’s queer and androgynous identity, Woolf parodies the patriarchal institutions that seek to constrain femininity and ultimately subverts them.
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