Orlando
OrlandoIn the novel Orlando, by Virginia Woolf, gender plays a complex and important role. However, what makes this role so important is the way Woolf stresses the absolute unimportance of gender. In the three major sexually based relationships of the story in which Orlando participates there is some question as to the gender of the other participant. Orlando, him/herself has issues concerning to what gender he/she actually belongs. Despite the fact that he/she physically changes gender, emotionally and psychologically he/she continues to feel the same. All of these issues in the novel help to portray the theme that gender can be altered psychologically without any physical change, or vice versa in that physical change does not necessarily equate with psychological change. In Orlando’s case, these changes make him/her become a more complex person and consequently a more interesting and enlightened writer. Being either physically male or female actually allows him/her to explore different aspects and views in his/her writing.
Orlando’s first mentioned, and most complex, sexual interest is the Russian princess, Sasha. Even at this early stage in the novel there is some talk about the affect clothes have on determining the gender of a person. As Orlando describes Sasha he cannot determine her sex; describing her as being “a figure, which, whether boy’s or woman’s, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex” (Orlando, 37). However, his desire for Sasha precedes his knowledge of her gender in that even when he believes that the figure is actually that of a boy, he continues to desire him/her, despite the fact that “all embraces were out of the question” (Orlando, 38).
The most complex part of the desire that Orlando has for Sasha is seen later in the novel after Orlando has changed into a woman. Orlando finds that despite her physical change, she is still very much psychologically a heterosexual man in that she feels desire for another woman. “Though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man” (Orlando, 161). This is the most prominent and stark depiction of Sapphic love seen in the novel until this point. Although Orlando is now herself a woman, the fact she still has feelings for Sasha adds yet another dimension to the novel. Before this it was always man loving woman and woman loving man, but saying that a woman loves another woman seems to almost de-naturalize the typical heterosexual view of gender. This is a way of showing that the love or desire of another person can completely transcend gender. By defying the binary logic that “opposites attract” in a sexual relationship, Woolf makes gender seem almost...
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