In one of the more surprising moments of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Orlando wakes after an inexplicable coma-like sleep of seven days to find himself transformed into a woman. Orlando is the fictional representation of Woolf’s own friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and Orlando’s seemingly easy transition from male to female reflects Woolf and, presumably, Sackville-West’s, own understanding of gender. Both Woolf and Sackville-West were members of the Bloomsbury Group, an elite group of writers and artists who questioned and openly resisted traditional assumptions of gender and sexuality. Orlando—or Vita, for all intents and purposes—possesses both male and female qualities and has affairs with both men and women, completely disrupting popular gender stereotypes along the way. People are perceived differently in Orlando, and, Woolf implies, in broader society as well, based on what gender they are; however, many of the characters in the novel are androgynous and their receptions change with their assumed genders. Through this rather fluid depiction of gender in Orlando, Woolf implies that the dichotomous male-versus-female understanding of gender is merely a social construction, and that no one person is wholly one gender or the other.
One of the ways in which gender is constructed in Orlando is through clothing. Clothes “change our view of the world and the world’s view of us,” declares the fictional biographer who narrates the book, and that is certainly the case for Orlando. When Orlando first sees Sasha, his great love of the 16th century, ice skating during the Great Frost, her “Russian fashion serve to disguise the sex,” and Orlando is convinced that Sasha is a man. But as Sasha skates closer and Orlando can make out the shape of her breasts under her masculine tunic, he knows she is a woman. Orlando is only “curious” about Sasha when he thinks she’s a man, but when he finds out she’s a woman, he falls madly in love with her. This suggests that people’s view of others, particularly on a romantic or sexual level, are deeply influenced by the social norms of how men and women are expected to present themselves. The narrator mentions that Orlando’s legs, which remain completely unchanged from male to female, are one of her best assets. A sailor catches a glimpse of Orlando’s calf and starts “so violently” that he misses his footing and only saves “himself by the skin of his teeth.” Orlando’s legs haven’t changed since she was a man, but the sight of them in a dress distracts the sailor so badly, he nearly trips and falls. This implies it is Orlando’s clothes, not specifically her body, that reflects her gender, and it is largely her clothes that make her attractive to the opposite sex. As a woman, Orlando dresses up as a man and visits a prostitute named Nell. Nell assumes that Orlando is a man because of the way she dresses, and it is not until Orlando reveals herself as a woman that Nell begins to relax. “I’m by no means sorry to hear it,” Nell says of Orlando’s revelation, “I’m not in the mood for the society of the other sex to-night. Indeed, I’m in the devil of a fix.” Nell accepts Orlando and acts differently based on what gender she believes Orlando to be based on her clothing, which again implies that one’s understanding of gender is highly dependent upon social norms.
After Orlando becomes a woman, she understands that society expects her to “be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely appareled.” The only problem, Orlando maintains, is that women are none of those things naturally, and Woolf uses Orlando’s transition to show how these expectations are artificial and socially constructed. Hairdressing alone takes up an hour of Orlando’s mornings as a woman, then “there’s looking in the looking-glass, another hour; there’s changing from silk to lace and from lace to paduasoy; and there’s being chaste year in year out.” The expectations and restrictions placed on women are ridiculous, Woolf implies, and are entirely manmade. “A pox on them!” Orlando says in response to society’s expectations of her as a woman, suddenly “realizing for the first time, what, in other circumstances, she would have been taught as a child, that is to say, the sacred responsibilities of womanhood.” To Orlando—and, by extension, Woolf—“the sacred responsibilities of womanhood” amount to a nuisance, “a pox,” or, more precisely, a disease, which only serves to hinder women and hold them to impossible standards. In Orlando’s experience, being a woman “meant conventionality, meant slavery, meant deceit, meant denying her love, fettering her limbs, pursing her lips, and restraining her tongue”—all things she is not expected to do as a man. Orlando’s profound change places her, and Woolf, in a unique position to critique the existence of men and women respectively in English society, and her conclusion is that women are, in many ways, objectified and marginalized on account of their gender.
While being a woman is obviously different for Orlando compared to living as a man, the novel maintains that the sexes “intermix.” “In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place,” the novel argues, “and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what is above.” Thus, the traditional notions of male and female are invented and imposed by society and do little more than confuse and obscure one’s true gender identity. “Whether, then, Orlando was most man or woman,” the narrator writes, “it is difficult to say and cannot now be decided.”
Related Themes from Other Texts
Gender and Society ThemeTracker
Gender and Society Quotes in Orlando
When the boy, for alas, a boy it must be—no woman could skate with such speed and vigour—swept almost on tiptoe past him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question.
Orlando had become a woman—there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory—but in future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his,’ and ‘she’ for ‘he’—her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it.
With some of the guineas left from the sale of the tenth pearl of her string, Orlando had bought herself a complete outfit of such clothes as women then wore, and it was in the dress of a young Englishwoman of rank that she now sat on the deck of the Enamoured Lady. It is a strange fact, but a true one that up to this moment she had scarcely given her sex a thought. Perhaps the Turkish trousers, which she had hitherto worn had done something to distract her thoughts; and the gipsy women, except in one or two important particulars, differ very little from the gipsy men. At any rate, it was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs and the Captain offered, with the greatest politeness, to have an awning spread for her on deck that she realized, with a start the penalties and the privileges of her position. But that start was not of the kind that might have been expected.
“And that’s the last oath I shall ever be able to swear,” she thought; “once I set foot on English soil. And I shall never be able to crack a man over the head, or tell him he lies in his teeth, or draw my sword and rim him through the body, or sit among my peers, or wear a coronet, or walk in procession, or sentence a man to death, or lead an army, or prance down Whitehall on a charger, or wear seventy-two different medals on my breast. All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour out tea, and ask my lords how they like it. D’you take sugar? D’you take cream?”
And as all Orlando’s loves had been women, now, through the culpable laggardry of the human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man. For now a thousand hints and mysteries became plain to her that were then dark. Now, the obscurity, which divides the sexes and lets linger innumerable impurities in its gloom, was removed, and if there is anything in what the poet says about truth and beauty, this affection gained in beauty what it lost in falsity.
No sooner had she returned to her home in Blackfriars than she was made aware of a succession of Bow Street runners and other grave emissaries from the Law Courts that she was a party to three major suits which had been preferred against her during her absence, as well as innumerable minor litigations, some arising out of, others depending on them. The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a woman, which amounts to much the same thing; (3) that she was an English Duke who had married one Rosina Pepita, a dancer; and had had by her three sons, which sons now declaring that their father was deceased, claimed that all his property descended to them. Such grave charges as these would, of course, take time and money to dispose of. All her estates were put in Chancery and her tides pronounced in abeyance while the suits were under litigation.
The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than usual—openness indeed was the soul of her nature—something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed. For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. Of the complications and confusions which thus result every one has had experience; but here we leave the general question and note only the odd effect it had in the particular case of Orlando herself.
Meanwhile, she became conscious, as she stood at the window, of an extraordinary tingling and vibration all over her, as if she were made of a thousand wires upon which some breeze or errant fingers were playing scales. Now her toes tingled; now her marrow. She had the queerest sensations about the thigh bones. Her hairs seemed to erect themselves. Her arms sang and twanged as the telegraph wires would be singing and twanging in twenty years or so. But all this agitation seemed at length to concentrate in her hands; and then in one hand, and then in one finger of that hand, and then finally to contract itself so that it made a ring of quivering sensibility about the second finger of the left hand. And when she raised it to see what caused this agitation, she saw nothing—nothing but the vast solitary emerald which Queen Elizabeth had given her. And was that not enough? she asked.
