Quote:
What Woolf called in her diary “a change about from one sex to another” opens up into a comical-but-serious examination of the role of women in historical and contemporary society: a project she would continue in A Room of One's Own (1929). After she becomes a woman, Orlando sees the folly of much of her behaviour as a man; and, because she has once been a man, her present situation now serves to highlight the quite unreasonable expectations that men appear to have imposed upon women through the ages. Quite subtly, and with great humour, the arbitrary and “unnatural” status of gender roles is exposed. The presentation of gender in Orlando can be summed up as an anticipation of the argument Simone de Beauvoir would later put forward in The Second Sex (1949): “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature”.
One particularly interesting question raised by Orlando's change of sex is the question of sexuality. In a diary entry that prefigures both Orlando and The Waves, Woolf describes her plan for a book entitled “The Jessamy Brides”. One of its key features, she notes, is that ”Sapphism is to be suggested”. Writing about same-sex desire in England in the 1920s was not something that one did lightly. Critics frequently make the link between Orlando and another “Sapphic novel” published in 1928, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. Hall's novel, notoriously and shamefully, was banned for “obscenity” (seemingly on account of the line, “and that night they were not divided”, which refers to the nocturnal activities of its two female protagonists). The prosecution of The Well of Loneliness spoke volumes about the misogyny and patriarchal bias of early twentieth-century British society. Even Woolf's own friends were not immune. She noted in her diary that the novelist E. M. Forster (who was, incidentally, homosexual), “thought Sapphism disgusting: partly from convention, partly because he disliked that women should be independent of men”. But the fact remained, as Woolf was moved to point out in A Room of One's Own (written in the aftermath of the Well of Loneliness trial), “sometimes women do like women”.
Look at this passage from "Orlando":
Quote:
Different though the sexes are, they intermix. 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 and female likeness, while underneath
the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. Of the complications
and confusions which thus result every one has had experience; but
here we leave the general question and note only the odd effect it
had in the particular case of Orlando herself.
And here is what Sparknotes says about the above passage:
Quote:
In this passage from chapter four, the narrator draws a general
statement from the particular situation of Orlando. She suggests that
gender identity is not fixed, but can change throughout life
independently of biological makeup. The novel explores many
permutations of this idea. Woolf believes that sexes are intermixed,
that though an individual may seem a woman, she really has the
qualities of a man, and vice versa.
This idea applies not only to the literal gender of individuals, but more
broadly to the gender roles within society. Once Orlando becomes a
woman, she realizes all the opportunities and rights that are now
closed to her. Though she feels no different at all, society treats her
differently because of the clothes she wears. Encouraging the equality
of gender roles is a point that Woolf makes in many of her novels.
