Re-Dressing Feminist Identities: Tensions between Essential and Constructed Selves in Virginia Woolf's Orlando

Abstract

Discussing source of self is never an easy task. Autobiographical desires get displaced into biographical sketches, which are then readily transformed into broad historical portraits. Ultimately, task of re-narrating all these simultaneous strands slips into genre of fiction, as Virginia Woolf's parodic biography, Orlando. If Orlando can be characterized as Woolf's exploration of her own theory of sexuality (Holtby), it is also a fictionalized biography of Woolf's friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and still again it functions as a broadly sketched history of English literature and politics. One can imagine how write a biography of one's lover would be undergo process of a powerfully mute identification and realization, one that calls up denials and displacements as well.(1) As desire for identification draws Woolf toward genre of biographical fiction, need for differentiation following upon such a mimetic project propels her back into parody.(2) If text is true to Sackville-West's personal history, is still quite unfaithful genre of biography. How can one be both faithful facts and unfaithful and tell more of truth without exactly telling it same? While book's incompetent narrator may issue misleading imperatives find the single thread that ties together personal identity, effects of Orlando's transformation through ages - marked especially by his/her changes clothing - execute a parodic deconstruction of essentialist claims tentatively offered text. The tension of these issues centers on breakdown of inner and outer spaces Woolf's writing. Woolf plays on a twentieth-century conception of truth, derived from Greek notion of alethea, unveiling. In her truth is destabilized and turns into parody through an emphasis on period fashions, cross-dressing, and undressing of essential bodies. Because of nature of parody - implement very concept that is being distorted and undone - confusion prevails current criticism as Woolf's position on subjectivity and essentialism Orlando. Critics tend toward one of two extreme positions with regard Woolf's theory of subjectivity Orlando, with Fredric Jameson, on one hand, using Orlando as an example of a that portrays an unchanging, constant personality passing through centuries, bearing marks of only external re-shapings;(3) Makiko Minow-Pinkney, on other hand, argues that social and historical factors are . . . fully admitted as constitutive for human subject novel (135). This question of whether some innate human can surmount historical effects or whether only essence we know as personality is fully shaped by world around one - this problem is comically re-figured by Woolf as question of whether clothes make (wo)man. At one point Orlando's narrator suggests that in every human being a vacillation from one sex other takes place, and often it is only clothes that keep male or female likeness (189). While one must remain persistently wary of narrator's authority this text, this claim at least points importance of such a possibility.(4) Moreover, advocates of gender studies will recognize an early formulation of contemporary questions about extent which society - and not biology - delineates distinction between men and women.(5) As Bette London has pointed out, Woolf has become American feminist's favorite cultural icon, mother whom we turn hope of finding a mirror of ourselves.(6) It begins look, on London's review of often contrary receptions, as if Woolf's figure admits of so many identities that Woolf is merely a mirror her reader - another bad cliche of woman who can mutate become whatever society demands of her. My point here is that Woolf is hardly so obliging, and that contemporary feminist debates do violence Woolf's texts whenever they try create her as icon of their cause, as they struggle fix her identity as one identity alone. …