Othello’s Sister: Racial Hermaphroditism and Appropriation in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

Abstract

Like any writer worth her salt, Virginia Woolf had a gift for first sentences. Her most fanciful novel, Orlando (1927), begins: He--for there be no doubt of his sex, though fashion of time did something to disguise it-was in act of slicing at head of a Moor which swung from (13). As an opening, this is on par with that of her most famous work, A Room of One's Own (1929), for its sly wit and rhetorical innovation: But, you may say, we asked you to speak about and fiction--what has that got to do with a room of one's own?(3). In each case, Woolf breaks with conventions of English composition to very different--although theoretically linked--effect, crafting on one hand an overtly self-deprecating, yet covertly sarcastic feminine persona, and, on other, a bombastic and ultimately specious male biographer-narrator. He, Woolf writes, then adds a dash--putting term under erasure syntactically, if not in strictly Sausserian sense. It is a bold move--as is her beginning her book-length essay on women and fiction with a con] unction. first sentence, though, does much more than catch our attention. The gendered pronoun immediately undercut by typographic violence of dash both introduces hero/ine and ironically foreshadows his magical transformation into a woman not quite halfway through novel's three-and-a-half century romp. In other words, Woolf's dash enacts on her protagonist's gender very sort of violence she describes (as I'm similarly doing when 1 call him a hero/ine). But genius of sentence does not stop there. For crystallized in these thirty-eight words we not only find Woolf's critique of gender norms and imperialism, but also her indictment of relationship between them. There could be no doubt--the narrator confidently declares-of biological gender because ... well, look at what he's doing, he's playing with something the color of an old football, and everyone knows only boys play with footballs. That football was once a man's head is not, in biographer's deadpan description of this puerile mock-violence, any more remarkable than the fashion of time--because Orlando's fathers ... had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders ..., as we quickly learn, and [s]o too would Orlando, he vowed (13). As I am not first critic to point out, pointless brutality with unfeeling skull parodies brutality that placed it there in rafters of his ancestral manor--and that brutality is deeply gendered, and deeply British (see, for instance, Phillips 186 and Hovey 398). For a novel Woolf herself dismissed in her diaries as a joke, as frivolous, and as mere childs Isicl play, this opening reference to racist violence is disturbing (Diary 177, 264). Sally Potter's filmic interpretation omits it entirely, choosing instead to begin with composing poetry. I myself did not know at first what to do with it--or indeed with any of other seemingly offhand references to people of color in Woolf's oeuvre. Is decapitated Moor in Orlando yet another instance of Anglophone obsession for which 1 coined term Othellophilia?' Indeed, Shakespeare's tragedy of interracial love and murder seems to be everywhere and nowhere in novel. The hero's name alludes to As You Like It (one of Shakespeare's most gender-bending comedies) as well as Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (from whence Woolf derived her hero's love-madness), but it also closely resembles another seven-letter name beginning and ending in round vowel: Othello. If resemblance is accidental, Woolf's shorthand for novel in her letters-O--o--hints further at an unconscious association (Vol. 4 23, 27). Only after viewing a performance of play does Orlando determine to elope with his Russian princess, and that plan's failure sets up ensuing events of novel as a kind of anti-Othello. …