Woolf Or Orlando?

Virginia Woolf is the well-acknowledged British woman writer in the twentieth century.Orlando,Woolf’s representative fantasy work in the form of a biography,traces the life and the conflicts of aristocrat Orlando,who transformed from a man to a woman over the span of four centuries.Most studies on Orlando focus on the theories of androgyny and homosexuality to analyze the relationship between sex and gender,without the acknowledgments of the different aspects that influence Orlando’s behaviors and thoughts.This thesis builds on Butler’s gender performativity,in combination with Woolf’s feminist theories,Beavoir’s theory of second sex,Hegel’s subject of desire and Freud’s psychoanalysis,reading Orlando via textual analysis.Butler argues in her theory of gender performativity that a person’s sex,gender,and sexual orientation undergoes continuous changes,in the flux of acting and performing out gender rather than in a static encapsulated identity attribute,which perfectly explains the changes of Orlando.The order and process of Orlando’s transition of gender is the focus of the paper,contributing to the research of Woolf in the aspect of Woolf’s view of emotions and her reflections on society in which homosexuality is depressed by the tyranny of heteronormativity.This thesis is divided into three parts.The first chapter mainly discusses the features and the emotional affections under the biological sex of both male and female respectively.And it also digs into the gender construction of Orlando to analyze the difference between sex and gender.In the second chapter,the social gender construction of Orlando being man and woman is divided into two parts respectively.The analysis of Orlando as man deals with the transition where Orlando begins as a male and its meaning to Woolf.Orlando’s emotional and mental conflicts and development is also analyzed under the biological man and social male identity.The character’s potential of resistance by Butler’s gender performativity explains Orlando’s conflicts during his gender development,to point out that the potential resistance of the Self aims not only towards the society but also the self,foreshadowing his/her changes,as shown in Orlando’s later transaction into a female.In the analysis of Orlando as woman,the conflicts between her biological sex and social gender become the prime focus,which helps to project Woolf’s sense of personal identification.The third part turns from subjective textual analysis to the objective analysis on how Woolf’s mental depression under the patriarchal society is displayed through the setting where Orlando starts as a male.It also articulates how Woolf’s self-projection is expressed after Orlando’s transition into a female.This thesis argues that the setting where Orlando is born as a blue-blooded male is the result of a patriarchal society and Woolf’s exemplification as a depressed homosexual affected by heteronormativity—she was eager for open relationship with women yet ended up with heterosexual marriage and childbirth.