Orlando Romanında Oluşumlar: Zamansallık, Yazarlık ve Kuir Olmak

Abstract

This paper focuses on the relation between the notion of queerness, becoming, and the act of writing in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928). I am employing “becoming” here as an umbrella term to show the relation between queerness and time, and the various mechanisms that are at work in the act of writing by and about women. Queerness and becoming signify a non-monolithic understanding of sexuality, and both terms disrupt the heteronormative norms built around sexual dichotomies, raising awareness of the potentiality of one’s transformative capabilities. Queerness as a mode of becoming and in its capacity to destabilize established norms of gender duality is closely tied to temporality since it distorts the linear understanding of time as well. The perception of time is paramount in understanding one’s existence, both as a writer and as a woman, especially in the last part of Woolf’s novel. This is the moment of modernity in the present, with all its multiplicity, which the writer aspires to capture in order to be the writer of her time. The entire novel is marked by the protagonist, Orlando’s effort to complete and become the writer of her manuscript. As Orlando “becomes woman” in the Deleuzian sense, she also becomes the writer of her incomplete text, “The Oak Tree.” I argue that only in her queerness, and thus in her uneven relationship with time, does Orlando manage to become a writer and, ironically, become timely.