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Rory Fleming SCHC 352J 501 11/11/10 Cohen Gender Performativity and the Complexities of Androgyny in Virginia Woolfs Orlando Simone de Beauvoir famously stated on the issues of sex and gender that One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. The counterargument to Beauvoirs claim is found in the doctrine of essentialism, which assumes that gender differences correspond directly to physical sex of individuals and are hence inflexible. Constructivism, the idea that Beauvoir and her contemporaries helped generate, states that these observable differences are a result of the cultural reiteration of norms. Female fiction writers active at the turn of the century played with
enskost nije the idea that womanness is not itself inherent, and one of the most recognizable examples of uroena

this can be found in Virginia Woolfs Orlando. In this novel, Woolfs theoretical fluidity of gender fits neither the stark essentialist ideology nor complete constructivism. Her answer is more akin to the more contemporary theory of gender performativity, codified by poststructuralist philosopher Judith Butler. While it seems that there is an undisturbed kernel in Orlandos sense of self, she instinctually adapts to social roles imposed upon her while critiquing both her firsthand experience and that which she observes. Orlando is a nuanced exploration into how a unique identity is formed while enduring the current of social pressures and the safety of conformity. Orlando is told from the perspective of a nameless biographer, who claims to not be a writer of fiction but of facts. The narrator constantly reminds the reader of his presence and his distaste for sentimentality and non-historical narrative developments. Indeed, we can assume that this biographer, generally interpreted as male, chose to write on the topic of Orlandos life under the impression that it would be a high-profile, aristocratic and masculine topic filled with beheadings and political maneuvers: the meaningful acts of important men, constructed as

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separate and superior to the deeds of women. Ambiguity also makes him profoundly uncomfortable, preferring exceedingly clear dividing lines between phenomena. His job as a biographer, supposedly a recorder of true histories, is always at risk of becoming hopelessly complex until he draws a linear path through the life of the individual. In Orlando, the nebulous quality of life in practice is represented in the titular character, who the biographer is writing about. Orlando is an artist and poet, first of all. These qualities are hard to accept for the biographer; the trade of the poet is the expression of the ambiguity that complicates his work. He encounters this conflict of interests after providing the impressionistic description of Sashas betrayal and Orlandos subsequent removal from courtly affairs. Orlando enters a trance for seven days, something that the biographer wishes to fulfill his duty when outlining it and nothing more. He states that the first duty of the biographer is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth (Woolf 65). Even though the next part of the story is dark, mysterious, and undocumented, he has to make do with the information he is provided as that is his role and profession. What actually follows is a mythical account of the tribulations of an aspiring artist, which the biographer has no choice but to divulge because there is no other information on that time of Orlandos life. Making matters even worse for the biographer, Orlando transforms into a woman without warning halfway through the novel. When Orlando switches biological sex in Chapter Three, the biographer-narrator is flabbergasted by the fact that the characters mannerisms do not change notably as a result. Rather, Orlando the woman reacts very little initially. The biographer states in his bafflement that We should not have blamed her had she rung the bell, screamed, and fainted. But Orlando showed no such signs of perturbation. All her actions [] might have indeed been thought to show tokens of premeditation (Woolf 139). She decides almost
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immediately afterward to leave her post at Constantinople as an ambassador to spend some time at a Gypsy camp before deciding on her next move. Why is the biographer made so obviously uncomfortable by the transformation that occurred, and what opposition does it set in place? Besides the fact that it undermines his initial project to recount the life of a more noteworthy male figure, it forces him to revaluate divisions that he previously took for granted. Language fails him in his quest to write a rigidly determinant narrative on even the pronoun level (he, she, their). Thereafter, Orlando lives a life marked by the experience of both genders, and her commentary frequently deals with gender relations in her current historical moment. The biographer gradually includes Orlandos personal statements, perhaps so to illuminate the narratives actual fact: the very ambiguity he used to fear.
jezik!!!

Pamela Caughies essay locates Orlando as a text that defines itself in accordance with this very indeterminacy. Since there is nothing out out there to measure [gender, language] against, categories such as male or female are defined based on what they are not (Caughie 43). In other words, the distinctions have the appearance of being arbitrary: the difference is constructed. Cultural discourses based on varying levels of accuracy widely disseminate the myth that personality traits and emotional dispositions belong primarily within one gender or another, and are generally pseudo-scientifically justified via biological inference. However, once a person is developed it is virtually impossible to determine whether development in a certain direction occurred during biological stimuli or conditioning. If a girls parents tell her to play with dolls, wear frilly dresses, and stay in the house to help bake while the boys play outside, then other interactions will occur as a result: the identity becomes sedimentary. This is what Judith Butler describes to be the performativity of gender. Changing the person down to their dominant system of perception, molded and built upon since his or her first interactions

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with others, is vastly different than putting on a different genders clothes. In this sense, gender identification is not a choice. Based upon a complex network of affirmations, reward vs. punishment cycles, media images, performances of others, sexual desires either understood or not, and far enough in history practical necessities, a gender identity is formed. Since everyone is performing their gender, it is reasonable to think of gender as a chain of performativity. People act in accord to the precedent of the image present, which is either personally learned or explained by others. The sea captain on the trip back to England flirts with Orlando but would have assumedly not done so if she did not handle herself as a woman or appear female. This performance of the courting ritual simultaneously affirms Orlandos new identity. The act, situation and context inform the positioning of the self, which is radically apparent in Orlandos case due to her relationship with biological sex and gender. As a result, Orlandos relation with her self is crucial to understanding what Woolf is doing in this novel. To see how Orlando should be positioned in terms of essentialism and constructivism, one must observe how Orlando situates his or her own gender at different times and if there is any unalterable element in her character. In the universe of this novel, Orlando defeats the requisite system of precedents. Orlando does not become a woman in Beauvoirs gradual sense; she does not have the experience of aggregate images slowly sinking in from birth based on a set biologically-determined gender. On the contrary, he becomes a she at the age of thirty, having already experienced the gender-coded lifestyle of a courtly Elizabethan male. Her subsequent life among the gypsies allowed her time to process her surroundings and poetic feelings because there was a less defined gender dichotomy in the society of the gypsies. It is explained that the gypsy women, except in one or two important particulars, differ very little from gypsy men (Woolf 153). She had to buy

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clothes fitting of English women when assimilating later into mainstream society, abandoning trousers for petticoats. This calls attention to her new sex in an external way, but her internal self does not alter strictly because of the donning of a new wardrobe. S/he learns what it feels like to be a woman as a result of events that would not occur if she was not an attractive lady following social norms. The gentlemanly interest of the sea captain Nicholas Benedict Bartolus generates a flood of reservations, but Orlando cannot deny certain romantic pangs when he cuts her meat at a meal. In the moment, she is no longer certain that she wont throw [herself] overboard, for the mere pleasure of being rescued by a blue-jacket after all (Woolf 155). Her whiplash reaction when realizing the power that her legs can have over working men is to decide that it is possibly more flattering to be a subordinate but free female than a male individual always bound up in lust, though she laments all the care a woman must take in her appearance. She also has a strong epiphany about the nature of love, which justifies her conflicted reactions to these new, specifically female circumstances. She is still the same character she was as a man, regardless of the fact that her loves have always been female in the past. Her feelings for women carry over; she just feels a greater kinship and understanding as an individual who has experienced the social perspectives of both sexes. This productive and wise androgyny is the requisite trait that
androginost!!!

Virginia Woolf outlines in A Room of Ones Own for the highest caliber writers. If gender is performed here as an aggregate of past experience, then we can prescribe to Orlando the androgynous soul or artists soul A Room of Ones Own describes. Woolf seeks in that work the secret to why great works of literature have not been yet accredited to or even (publically) written by women by her time. The answer she reaches is both integrally social and aesthetic. A balance of minds was decided to be intrinsic to one who writes the most enduring

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works: an artist not bound by their sex, but keeping in mind both the female and male segments of personality. However, this balanced aesthetic is barred from the vast majority of both men and women due to the pressures of the prejudicial male-dominated canon. Her ideal androgynous mind is not hermaphroditic, just undivided, and not limited in mind by rigid social norms that limit experience and insight. When analyzing Coleridges comment that the great mind is androgynous, Woolf comes to the conclusion that He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided (Woolf 98). The great mind has its female and male elements in open communication with each other, reaching a greater degree of sympathy for both halves, and understanding both halves shortcomings for any given individual. Having the flexibility of a liminal character, Orlando can see the flaws of any one category or way of life, as well as the benefits, and can have experiential dealings with each. It goes beyond just gender; Orlando has the ability to see with her own eyes the ways and customs of multiple regions (as an ambassador) and multiple eras (as an individual with a much longer lifespan). When we consider Orlandos liminality, we can begin to understand the scope of her freedom of mind despite her physical sex and whichever era of time she inhabits. How, then, does Orlando conceptualize her own gender and place, and how does her life and art reflect Virginia Woolfs philosophical speculation? Is it as simple as stating that Orlando is an androgynous model, an archetype to follow if wanting to escape the restraints of mind associated with gender? If we into consideration the dynamics of Orlandos alleged androgyny, the answer is no, or at least not as simple as that. What, then, is a functional alternative? In the preface to her book Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler clarifies what is meant by her theory of gender performativity. She strikingly asks herself, If I persisted in this notion that

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bodies were in some way constructed, perhaps I really thought that words alone had the power to craft bodies from their own linguistic substance? (Butler x). To Butler, the notion that there is some self independent of the constraints of gender is both idealistic and functionally impossible. Essentialism assumes that there is some more pure state that existed before cultural manufacturing of the social self. It then implies that something which is constructed is somehow dispensable or negligible. But categories such as gender and sex inform our everyday experiences, and, without these indispensable markers, the self that has come to exist will cease to be or collapse. Gender is performed in that it reiterates cultural messages and images, and that behaviors associated with gender are implicitly or explicitly cultured into a person from birth. Gender is not escapable then because it is constructed; it is something to be reflected upon, perhaps reconceptualized, but is never negligible. We can then see the idea of Orlandos androgyny representing a rebellious form of selfmastery become irrelevant; first of all, that self included in the term cannot be separated by the gender which is ascribed to an individual at her time based on biological circumstance, and the idea of complete mastery ignores the pervasiveness and inextricable quality of cultural immersion. Putting on an androgynous act is simply another performance of gender based on the expected performance of gender determined by the overarching bias of the time and place. If more androgynous as a result of development, that development is still a result of external circumstance and experiences that extend out beyond the self: that gender-neutral sense of self is still developed over time based on expectations, and emotional and intellectual reactions to others reactions. The way self is used in Butler or Caughie does not lend to its creation separate from the whole of society. Kaivolas ideas on Woolfs androgyny suggests that androgyny as some sort of separate, transcendent principle is a sign of repression and the fear to

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actually engage with actual political and social questions (Kaivola 239). Androgyny as a marker in A Room of Ones Own seems to erase difference. In Orlando, Woolf seems to be qualifying her own writing on gender in a way both tongue-in-cheek and profound. In the narratives of daily life, there is no divine de-gendering of experience that sets one person aside in enlightenment; that person still needs to cope with the repercussions of his or her own gender identity as perceived by other people who do not immediately understand the identity by visual observation. Orlando acts like anyone else would and people treat her like a normal woman until they get to know her on a deeper level like Shel does. It is no wonder then that they would have married and both would have achieved fluidity in their own role. This is the subversion that Woolf seems to suggest.
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Virginia Woolfs Orlando explores gender in a way that is not liberating in an explicitly rebellious fashion, and does not give in to social expectations as to what a woman or man should be. Instead, it plays an illuminating game with the reader, challenging him or her to trace Orlandos route to individualization through a series a balancing acts between conformity and subversion. Through this, the reader can hopefully make note of an internal gender politik that is both too flexible to be punished and conducive to growth beyond a state of reductive categories. Not only has society developed over time rigid gender lines that are reinforced categorically by linguistic structures that rely on opposition (this is man, this is woman), but there is very arguably no self externalized from the context which the self was created (that is, society). Orlandos particular conceit gives the titular character a liminality that is almost ideal
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for exploring issues of not only the limitations of essentialism, but the place for critique that breaks the dualism of something like gender while still functioning within the confines of a mainstream existence.

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Works Cited Burns, Christy L. Re-dressing feminist identities: Tensions between essential and constructed selves in Virginia Woolfs Orlando. Twentieth Century Literature. 40.3 (Fall 1994): 342-365. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993. Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolfs Double Discourse. Discontented Discourses: Feminism/Textual Intervention/Psychoanalysis. Ed. Marleen Barr and Richard Feldstein. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998. 41-53. Kaivola, Karen. Revisiting Woolfs Representations of Androgyny: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Nation. Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature. 18.2 (Autumn 1999): 235-261. Moi, Toril. Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. From Sexual/Textual Politics. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2000. Second Edition. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of Ones Own. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1989. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: a biography. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1992.