Gender as a key theme in Orlando

Gender is one of the most important themes in the novel Orlando which is developed through various aspects of the novel particularly under the effects of societal changes and also through the voices of the narrative.  Throughout the long period of time, Orlando lives in many different societies. In one instance during the mission as ambassador in Constantinople, and following the rise against the Sultan of Turkey, Orlando’s circumstance changes rapidly from the prestigious position of ambassador to the inevitability of living in the primitive community of gipsies. Subsequently, she is exposed to experience a completely different life among gipsies. In the gipsy camp gender does not play any role at all. Orlando “milked the goats; […]; she herded cattle; she stripped vines; she trod the grape;”[1] there is nothing distinctive about her gender in all these activities. On the contrary, right after Orlando leaves the gipsies, on the English ship “she felt the coil of skirts about her legs”[2] she suddenly begins to feel the difference with regards to her gender. Therefore, Orlando signifies that gender relates to society. Orlando suggests that various societies consider gender differently, and there is a direct relationship between the level of civilisation and gender in a society. In this respect, the novel develops gender by examining Orlando’s life among gipsies and then in the English merchant ship as a rather civilised setting. The fact that gender is intrinsically a social construction implies that the more civilised a society becomes, the more gender-based values are invented and applied. Thus, the novel enacts different living conditions for Orlando under fundamental changes at the society level to make gender central and represent its developments in this way.

Gender is also developed through the voice in this novel. Orlando applies an approach of parodying the biographer in which the male-dominated genre of biography is criticised. The inherently ironic voice of the narrator provides with the possibility to reflect upon femininity and masculinity “[d]ifferent though the sexes are”[3]. Orlando develops gender through the sarcastic comments on distinctive desires of both man and woman: “the gentlemen took the very words out of our mouths”[4]. Although Krouse mentions “[t]he sarcasm in the narrative voice”[5] to contextualise it in relation with love, we can also consider that this sarcastic voice of Orlando signifies the differences of attitude and ideas which ultimately develops gender. The narrator frequently ridicules the biographer and emphasises the conventional rigid dichotomy between the spirit of the age and the chronology. Similarly, gender is reflected in Orlando’s artistic desire, particularly in her lifetime attempt of writing ‘The Oak Tree’. As a result of literary progress over the course of four centuries, ‘The Oak Tree’ seems important. Ironically, it is subject to verification by the male authority, and that leads Orlando to come along with Nick Green whose “article had plunged her [Orlando] in the depths of despair”[6]. Although Orlando occupies ambiguous genders, a contrast of different desires in relation to literature has provided the novel with the voice in which gender is central. Orlando establishes opposing attitudes in regards to representing different desires and consequently emphasises gender’s pivotal role in the novel.

Bibliography

Krouse, Tonya. “Orlando and the Discourse of Love.” In The Opposite of Desire: Sex and Pleasure in the Modernist Novel 101-16. Lanham: Lexington, 2009.

Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. Vintage Classics. 2004.

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[1] Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, 89.

[2] Ibid, 97.

[3] Ibid, 120.

[4] Ibid, 114.

[5] Krouse, Orlando and the Discourse of Love, 101.

[6] Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, 188.