“A Most Bewildering and Whirligig State of Mind”: Alternative Utopian Space in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

Abstract

From its birth in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to the present day, thinkers tend to regard utopia as either eutopia (“good place”), a blueprint of an ideal state which exists or can be made to exist, a critique of contemporary society, or utopos (“no place”), a mere escapist’s fantasy. These opposing views converged when utopia was revived as a trend of sociological thought in the early to mid-twentieth century. Karl Mannheim in the 1920s and Ernst Bloch in the 1960s share the idea that whether utopia is a dream or a reality might not be so important an issue as its being a sure sign of human ability to dream and hope for a better place. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), with its defamiliarisation technique and its aim to put readers in “a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind” of a manly woman/womanly man character living through five centuries as an English male aristocrat striding in a country estate to a female gypsy wandering in a desert, proposes a groundbreaking mental utopia which embraces the mentality of men and women across time, the positions of all social castes and classes, the bustling city and the calm countryside. Orlando not only marries the “granite-like” eutopia with the “rainbow-like” utopos but also questions the existing social norms and order.