Name : Nidhi P. Jethava
Paper : The Twentieth Century Literature: 1900 to world War II
Roll No. : 13
Enrollment Number : 306920200009
Email ID : jethavanidhi8@gmail.com
Batch : 20-22( MA SEM- 2 )
Submitted to : S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja KrishnaKumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Q. Discuss Orlando: The Biography and Transgender theory in both Orlando and Vita Sackville-West.
Answer :-
Introduction:-
Orlando, novel by Virginia Woolf, published in 1928. The fanciful biographical novel pays homage to the family of Woolf’s friend Vita Sackville-West from the time of her ancestor Thomas Sackville (1536–1608) to the family’s country estate at Knole. The manuscript of the book, a present from Woolf to Sackville-West, is housed at Knole.
The novel opens in 1588. Young Orlando, a 16-year-old boy, writes a poem called “The Oak Tree.” He finds favour at the Elizabethan court and love in the arms of a Russian princess. A garrulous poet, Sir Nicholas Greene (said to be modeled on Sir Edmund Gosse), discusses literature with him. During the reign of Charles II (1660–85), Orlando was named ambassador to Constantinople and was rewarded with a dukedom. One night he stays with a dancer and cannot be awakened. Seven days later Orlando rises, now a beautiful woman. She returns to England and savours intellectual London society in the age of Addison, Dryden, and Pope but turns to bawdy street life for relief from this cerebral life. She marries to achieve respectability during the Victorian years, and by 1928 she has returned to London, where she is reunited with her friend Greene, who offers to find a publisher for “The Oak Tree.” Back at her country estate, she stands under the great oak and remembers her centuries of adventure.
The novel is also an affectionate portrait of Sackville-West, who, because she was a woman, could not inherit Knole. Written in a pompous biographical voice, the book pokes fun at a genre the author knew well: her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, had edited the Dictionary of National Biography, and her friend Lytton Strachey had written the revolutionary Eminent Victorians. Woolf also parodies the changing styles of English literature and explores issues of androgyny and the creative life of women. Orlando marked a turning point in Woolf’s career. Not only was it a departure from her more introspective works, but its spectacular sales also ended her financial worries. Readers praised the book’s fluid style, wit, and complex plot.
What does mean by Transgender theory?
Transgender theory is an emerging theoretical orientation on the nature of gender and gender identity in understanding the lived experiences of transgender and transsexual individuals. It is distinct in emphasizing the importance of physical embodiment in gender and sexual identity. Transgender theory integrates this embodiment with the self and socially constructed aspects of identity through the lived experiences of those with intersecting identities. Thus, it provides a theoretical basis for reconciling feminist and queer theoretical scholarship with social work practice and advocacy, with regard not only to issues of working with transgenders but also to larger issues of group identity and social oppression. This article describes the emergence of transgender theory from feminist and queer theories that used social constructivist approaches to challenge essentialist ideas that maintained the oppression of certain gender and sexual identities. Transgender theory is also applied to specific issues of understanding, working with, and empowering transgender persons and building coalitions between them and other socially oppressed groups.
Tansgender Works:-
Orlando is not the first piece of fiction about a sex change. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a playful and serious treatise on the shiftability of form – especially human form, as humans turn into trees or animals, or the gods embody themselves as human to pursue their love interests. In The Arabian Nights, there are both gender switching plots and cross-dressing. Shakespeare loved gender disguises – a girl who’s a boy who’s a boy who’s a girl – and of course as women were not allowed on the London stage in Shakespeare’s day, every female role was cross-gender. Every romance is a bromance.
It is likely that the title of Woolf’s novel comes out of As You Like It, where the heroine Rosalind disguises herself as Ganymede, and in that guise teaches the man she loves – Orlando – how to love in return.
Tangender of Orlando and Vita Sackville-West :-
The protagonist in Virginia Woolf’s fifth novel, Orlando, has continually drawn the attention of feminist and queer theorists as a model for the subversive role androgyny and transsexuality can play regarding dominant heterosexual hierarchies of power. Many of these theorists valuably discuss Orlando’s transformation in terms of a heteronormative gender binary1 , viewing his/her transition as a single crossing from man to woman.Examining the ways in which Orlando’s gender embodiment and Woolf’s unique presentation of temporality aligns with those described in transgender autobiographies and other trans texts, I attempt to reveal the truly subversive nature of Woolf’s work, as throughout the novel the main character often abandons the gender binary altogether and embodies a fluctuating and unique gender presentation. Further, Woolf’s entanglement of non-normative temporality and non-normative gender presentation works toward an expanding understanding of non-linear gender temporalities, particularly within narratives of gender transition.
Orlando's sex change mid-way through the novel plays an important part in his character development. While s/he starts out as a young, wealthy nobleman who takes interest in dallying about the royal court with lovely noblewomen, Orlando ends the novel as a deep, reflective woman. The change is reflected in Orlando's writing; what was once overly ornate mythological drama turns into a beautiful, mature epic poem. As Orlando ages, and lives through many ages, and realizes that s/he is composed of hundreds of selves and experiences. All of these experiences and selves combine to form the person s/he is at the present moment. S/he is a part of nature, and thus, not immortal; s/he realizes that this self too, will die. Finally, by maturing and by reaching middle-age, Orlando finds that s/he has gained what s/he was looking for: life and a lover.
While contemporary critics initially disregarded Woolf’s Orlando as a playful attempt at fantasy or, as Cervetti (1996: 171) has noted, a form of “therapy, a ‘love letter’ or a tribute to Vita Sackville-West,” towards the end of the 20th century, critics began to recognize the novel’s subversive political power. As feminist theory has continued to question and pressure binaries, especially the sex/gender binary, Orlando became a model for the transgressive potential of dissolving the male/female binary, with Karyn Z. Sproles (2006: 87) applauding “Orlando’s insistent distinction between sex, gender, and sexuality” as “deliberately subversive.” In more recent discussions of the novel and trans theory, critics like Pamela L. Caughie and Jessica Berman interrogate and expand upon the use of trans in relation to the novel. In her article examining temporality in modernist life writing, Caughie (2013: 502) comments on the transness of Orlando’s narrative in relation to the narrative structure of “trans life writing,” claiming the novel fits into the category of “transgenre,” meaning “narratives treating transgender lives that transfigure conventions of narrative diegesis.” Berman (2017) similarly examines the prefix “trans” as she asks in her title “Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender?” which serves to examine Orlando’s transition in relation to “his/her transnational movement” through a post-colonial reading. While these critical interventions have brought discussions of Orlando forward into the realm of trans theory, I aim to further analyze Woolf’s novel as a text filled with subversive potential by examining both Orlando’s magical transition and the character’s existence outside of linear temporality in relation to the material aspects of trans autobiography and theory.
Regardless of Orlando having “become a woman,” per the biographer’s previous declaration, the character’s gender does not remain rigid – his/her vacillation between masculine and feminine are seen in his excursions into the city. After some time back in her home country, Orlando is seen “open[ing] a cupboard in which hung still many of the clothes she had worn as a young man of fashion…cho[osing] a black velvet suit richly trimmed with Venetian lace” which “ fitted her to perfection and dressed in it she looked the very figure of a noble Lord” (Woolf 1928: 215). While dressed as a “noble lord,” the character meets and flirts with a young woman as the narrator expresses, “[t]o feel her hanging lightly yet like a suppliant on her arm, roused in Orlando all the feelings which become a man. She looked, she felt, she talked like one…she suspected that the girl’s timidity and her hesitating answers and the very fumbling with the key in the latch and the fold of her cloak and the droop of her wrist were all put on to gratify her masculinity” (Woolf 1928: 217). Here, Orlando presents and passes as a man, as demonstrated through his/her clothing (gender presentation) and the behavior of the woman he/she courts. Not until the dawn of the Victorian Era is Orlando’s gender fluidity further challenged, as it is left to the English judicial system to decide both the state of Orlando’s estate and to define his/her ambiguous and fluctuating gender once and for all. Here, as in other places throughout the novel, the ruling of the law greatly impacts Orlando’s ability to exist as a citizen and to retain his/her inheritance, including Orlando’s aristocratic title and family estate. It is also worth noting here that while Woolf allows Orlando to keep the family estate in the fictional imagining of Vita Sackville-West’s life, the real woman was not given the same privilege. Though the “law” eventually declares Orlando to be female, the fictional character retains their title and returns to their family’s large estate without much fuss. Sackville-West, however, like her close ancestor Anne Clifford, was ultimately denied the inheritance of her family estate Knole despite having grown up on the property and being the direct heir via her father. Mihoko Sizuku (2001) discusses Clifford’s legal proceedings in her attempt to regain her estate, drawing connections between the early modern woman and her Modern descendent. Sizuku (2001: 227) argues that “[f]or Clifford’s twentieth-century editor…Clifford provided an example of a woman who was denied inheritance because of her gender,” an occurrence that was not uncommon even in the transition between the Victorian and Modern eras.
The scene which reveals the judicial system’s legal decision and announcement of Orlando’s sex resonates with Feinberg’s experience in obtaining a passport and dealing with other legal instances in which one must declare their sex. Feinberg (1998: 1), “a person who faces almost an insurmountable difficulty when instructed to check off an ‘F’ or ‘M’ box on identification papers” must similarly rely on the government to advise hir how sie must identify in order to be seen as a valid citizen. Feinberg (1998: 20) describes hir dilemma, explaining “I called the State Department official in charge of the categories on passports and asked her what transgender people like myself were supposed to do” to which the official responded that unless Feinberg had documentation confirming that sie was a transsexual man, sie must check the Female box on hir legal papers despite identifying outside the binary and presenting more masculine. Neither Feinberg nor Orlando have much say in how they are identified or read in the eyes of the law, as upon receiving the decision from the legal trial that would decide both the status of her estate and her fluctuating gender/sex, Orlando anxiously searches the document as Woolf (1928: 255) writes, “‘…Sex? Ah! What about Sex? My sex,’ she read out with some solemnity, ‘is pronounced indisputably, and beyond the shadow of a doubt…Female” Following the legal declaration of her “Female” sex, Orlando, who until this point existed somewhat outside the heteronormative temporal expectations of marriage, children, and family, fully bends to the “indominable spirit of the age,” seeming to no longer fluctuate between masculine and feminine as often or as freely as before the intervention of English law (Woolf 1928: 244).
Conclusion :-
Orlando has sometimes been dismissed as a romp. As a less important book than Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. This is to misread it. It was far ahead of its time in terms of gender politics and gender progress. Consider it not only as the first trans novel in English but in the light of another 1928 publication: The Well of Loneliness.
Radclyffe Hall, who liked to be known as John, was a rigid lesbian who believed that women who loved women were born in the wrong body. This condemned all lesbians to eternal suffering. Her novel was like a depressing version of Orlando. The writing style is terrible – I’d say if you don’t believe me, see for yourself, but that would mean actually reading the thing. Following the sexologist Havelock Ellis, Hall calls lesbians “inverts”. Carol Ann Duffy told me that when she first read this she thought it meant lesbians had sex upside down.
The novel was banned in the UK and there was a court case. Woolf agreed to testify, in the interests of free speech and against censorship, but fretted at the thought of having to say The Well of Loneliness was a work of literature. She was right to fret; it isn’t.
Two novels. Same year. Controversial subject matter. What happened? Woolf, because she can write, because she can charm, because she is funny, perhaps because she was in love, and her style flies along with such ease and grace, managed to smuggle past the censors and the guardians of propriety the most outrageous contraband – a hero who becomes a heroine, who loves women and men, who rails against the system, and whose experiences reflect those of a real-life woman who had numerous same-sex affairs and who went to the opera with slicked back hair wearing evening dress. The Well of Loneliness reinforces every depressing stereotype about gender and sexual desire. It was banned. Orlando exploded all the stereotypes – and became a bestseller.
Orlando smashed up literary categories. Woolf called it a biography – in fact it is a novel. This was a direct hit at her dead father, Sir Leslie Stephen, the Victorian patriarch who had been the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, a dead white male heterosexual enterprise. Women hardly existed in the DNB. Woolf’s father was one of the senior figures wiping out women from history. And claiming the truth. Now Woolf struck back. She started the postmodernist fashion for mixing up fact and fiction, history and invention. We’re used to it now. She’s our pioneer.
When Woolf chases Orlando through continents of history and geographies of time, she is giving herself the freedom to explore the different ages of England, and the changing role of women.
“Did you feel a sort of tug, tug, as if your neck was being broken on Saturday at five minutes to one?” Woolf wrote to Sackville-West, as she finished the book on 20 March 1928. Woolf, of course, dedicated the book to her and sent her a copy on publication day, 11 October 1928. The love affair was nearly over by then. It had lasted three years, beginning at Christmas 1925, and Sackville-West had altered Woolf’s mind. The author had used every ounce of the affair to propel her own writing, and to alter how fiction could be written – and, in A Room of One’s Own, to discuss how women might soon alter the world with their writing. Not bad, for what she called “a little book.”
Citation :-
Banisalamah, Ahmed. "Fashioning Orlando: Fantastic Irony and Gender Performativity in Virginia Woolf's Orlando." Arab Journal for the Humanities 35, no. 140 (2017): 301-17.
Berman, Jessica. "Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender?" Modernism/Modernity 24, no. 2 (2017): 217-44. Bhanji, Nael. “Trans/scriptions: Homing Desires, (Trans)sexual Citizenship and Racialized Bodies.” Transgender Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition. 157- 75: Routledge Press, 2012.
Blair, Kirstie. "Gypsies and Lesbian Desire: Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis, and Virginia Woolf." Twentieth Century Literature 50, no. 2 (2004): 141-66.
Booker, M K. “What’s the Difference? The Carnivalization of Gender in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.” Techniques of Subversion in Modern Literature: Transgression, Abjection, and the Carnivalesque. 162-85: University of Florida Press, 1991.
Bornstein, Kate. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. xi-xiv: Vintage Books, 2016.
Caughie, Pamela L. "The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf's Orlando and Einar Wegener's Man into Woman." Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 3 (2013): 501-25.
Cervetti, Nancy. "In the Breeches, Petticoats, and Pleasures of 'Orlando'." Journal of Modern Literature 20, no. 2 (1996): 165-75.
Julie L. Nagoshi, Stephan/ie Bruzuzy. "Tansgender Theory: Embodying research and Practice ." SAGE journals (2010).
Winterson, Jeanette. "Different sex. Same person: how Woolf's Orlando became a trans triumph ." The Guardian (2018).
Characters:17, 678
Words: 2814
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Paragraphs:46
