Assignment paper no.106

 Assignment : paper no. 106

Topic: Gender and Unity of  the Self  Wirginia Woolf's Orlando

Name: Bhavna Sosa

Paper- The Twentieth Century Literature: 1900 to World War ll 1922

Roll no- 02

Enrollment no- 4069206420210034

Email ID - bhavnasosa211@gmail.com

Batch-2021-23(MA Sem-2)

Submitted to- S. B. Gardi Department of English. Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University. 

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.

"A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen."

Overview of the Orlando :-

Orlando is the connection between fact and imagination. In Woolf's review of Harold Nicholson's Some People, she opened with this analogy: "if we think of truth as something of granite-like solidity and of personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the aim of biography is to weld these two into one seamless whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need not wonder if biographers, for the most part failed to solve it." The metaphor of granite and rainbow emerges again in her own novel when she discusses Nature "who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case."

Woolf suggests that there is no realm of imagination separated from a realm of fact; "rainbow and granite" are stuffed into one case. Everything (internal and external, fact and imagination) are linked together by our memory, and we will grow to "understand" when we realize that neither memory nor history can be easily ordered and divided. Fact is a subjective quality, and the 'truth' emerges when we realize the interconnectedness and relativity of everything and everyone around us. It is such a unity of experience, not a triumph of "fact" that emerges victorious over time

Orlando's sexuality seems to play no role in her life at all. But when she travels on board the English ship, in women's clothes, she immediately begins to feel the difference. The skirts that she is wearing, and the way that people react to her make her feel and act different. What Woolf is suggesting here is that gender roles are not biological, but societal. Gender is a concept imposed on people who live in society. When Orlando goes out into the night, a woman dressed as a man, she finds herself taking on traditional male mannerisms. The point is that when society allows the freedom of gender neutrality, people will be more free as individuals to act according to their nature and personality.The determination of difference between the genders is a main theme in Orlando. Are men and women really different? If so, why? Orlando's sex change is a very important scene for determining the answers to these questions. As Orlando wakes up a woman, she looks at her body in a full-length mirror and composedly walks to her bath. She is not at all disconcerted by her change in gender because she feels no different than she did before. At first, she acts no differently, either. When she lives in the gypsy camp in the hills of Turkey, away from society and civilization.

But such conformity becomes oppressive to Orlando. She grows tired of changing herself to fit those around her. Ultimately, when she reaches maturity in the twentieth century, she resists conforming, choosing instead to exist in her own internal world. She realizes that though she has matured, as people do, she has always been the same person all along. This theme of 'conforming to society' plays an important role in the novel. As Orlando grows to be an independent mind, she rejects the idea of conformity, choosing to remain however she chooses to be.

Gender and Unity of the Self:-

The confluence of biography and fiction in Virginia Woolf's Orlando raises the question, of which the book is highly aware, of which genre facilitates the proper perception of the truth. As Woolf writes, “Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer” (267).1 In this book (there’s no point in defining it as novel or biography) Woolf has attempted to find truth through an examination of her friend Vita Sackville West, and has decided upon synchronicity as a more meaningful apparatus of illumination than chronology and causality. The difficulty of such an undertaking lies in the necessary relation of the seemingly fantastical events, as implied by Jungian synchronicity, into a unified Truth—in this case, the self. Woolf believed, as she indicated numerous times, in a “granite and rainbow” approach to biography—that the reality of the self lay in understanding both of “solid facts and intangible personality,”2 and in Orlando, the first of her works to bear the subtitle “A Biography,” we see her first and perhaps most liberated opportunity to test her belief: the change of sex and confusion of gender forces us to question the degree of federation between the duplicitous and often paradoxical manifestations of the self, and more importantly, to ask how the relation of such fantastical events facilitates our understanding of the subject.

Woolf’s ultimate confrontation of the différance of identity3 appears on pages 308-314, an epic passage through Orlando’s thoughts with lengthy interjections of free indirect discourse by the biographer.4 In the course of this passage, each of the multifarious episodes of Orlando’s life is called upon as an individual manifestation of the self. The context of this call proclaims a great deal of independence for each manifestation: “It is the most usual thing in the world for a person to say, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one’s name) meaning by that, Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another” (308). Orlando calls for numerous versions of herself, detailed on page 309 and again in the book’s index: numerous people who participated to different degrees in society, added stylistic variance to “The Oak Tree,” and called their lovers by different names. We find the character longing for another self, and able to transition relatively easily and quickly between various different identities, and we wonder to what extent these different people are governed by the name ‘Orlando’ and their shared heritage and physicality.

A simplification of the first sentence on page 310 shows that indeed Orlando is governed by a hierarchy of selves: “what appeared certain…was that the one she needed most kept aloof,…as happens when…the conscious self…wishes to be nothing but one self.”5 She continues that this conscious self is in turn governed by “the Key self, which amalgamates and controls them all,” but this thought is weakened by the phrase “they say,” and so Orlando’s search for her true self continues in ambiguity. Like the reader, Orlando has been fooled by literature into believing in the one true identity, but hearsay evidence won’t facilitate actualization, and the biographer goes on to chide the reader for reading too far into her “rambling talk” (310). At the end of the page we still have no idea who the unified Orlando might be—if such a person exists—and whether or not the speech of the conscious self—the one self to acknowledge and engage with the multiplicity of its brethren—is leading us any closer to such an actualization.

Conclusion :-

In this way finally, “the Orlando whom she had called came of its own accord…she was now darkened, stilled, and become, with the addition of this Orlando, what is called, rightly or wrongly, a single self, a real self” (313-314). This would seem to solidify at least the biographer’s notion of an essential self (though the shape and context of the passage would indicate Woolf as well, as will be shown), except that this passage does not affirm any hierarchy of identities. The key lies in the following sentence, with the slightly anachronistic application of différance: “it is probable when people talk aloud, the selves…are conscious of disseverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said.” Woolf was clearly thinking along the same lines as Georg Hegel in this deconstruction; her understanding of the alienating effects of difference is paralleled only by her facility in self-definition through the very same phenomena.

Reference :-

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Orlando". Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 Mar. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Orlando-by-Woolf. Accessed 7 May 2022.