| Virginia Woolf is a famous British female writer at the beginning of the 20 th century and an important leader in modern feminist literary criticism.She devoted her whole life to women’s writing,and created many female images with distinct characters in her works.Orlando is one of Woolf’s works.Orlando,the protagonist,was a man before he was thirty years old.After sleeping for several days and waking up,his face remained unchanged and his body turned into a woman.Since then,Orlando has been living as a woman.Orlando experienced confusion,frustration,resistance,and false compromise.Orlando is the writing practice of Woolf’s “androgyny” theory,and is a legendary work on the practice of “female writing”.Hélène Cixous inherited Woolf’s feminist thought,proposed “the other bisexuality”,put forward (?)criture Féminine,and called on women to use body writing to promote female characteristics to awaken women’s subjective consciousness.Based on Cixous’ s (?)criture Féminine,this paper discusses the female body writing in Orlando from costume,action and “nonlinear language”,and mainly answer the following questions: the representation of female writing in Orlando;the oppression of women’s bodies,as well as the social factors and power relationships behind the oppression;the relationship between female body and writing;the method of women’s free writing.This thesis is divided into six parts,the first part is the introduction.The second part is the theoretical basis,and the main part is chapters 1 to 3.Chapter 1 analyzes petticoats and breeches.The petticoat is the new tyranny of the patriarchal society over the female body,while the breeches are Orlando’s cross-dressing to avoid the oppression of the patriarchal system.Successful cross-dressing shows that gender is a product of social culture,while Orlando challenges patriarchy and constructs its female identity.Chapter 2 analyzes behavior and countenance.Gender stereotypes and cultural etiquette inhibit women’s bodies and desire for writing.When Orlando found that compromise and pandering only brought heavier repression,she used her body as a carrier to confront the binary opposition of Logos culture.Chapter 3 analyzes nonlinear language and explores Orlando’s sexual dreams and desire for writing.Orlando uses poetic and rhetorical language to construct her discourse and reshape the identity of a female writer.Finally,this thesis concludes that Orlando is the ideal state for female writing.Women have long been in a negative position in history.Orlando’s body is the focal point of power.The control of body decoration,behavior,and language is the control of power.The construction of body discourse can enable Orlando to transcend gender identity and reshape its subject through the adaptation and transformation of discourse.This thesis has found that Orlando attempts to reveal the oppression of patriarchy on women’s bodies and writing,which is a textual realization of the written body,demonstrating Woolf’s advanced female consciousness,and advancing the theory of“body writing”.This research is not only conducive to the textual practice of applying the body writing theory,providing a new perspective for the study of Woolf’s novels,but also has important significance in encouraging contemporary female writing,and is beneficial to the spiritual awakening of female writers. |
