Пасічник Наталія

Чернівецький Національний Університет

ім. Ю.Федьковича

Androgyny. A puzzle that need to be solved.(On the basis of the novel “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf)

For a common reader “Orlando” seems to be a magic novel about the English nobleman, whose personality and career as a poet and an ambassador underwent many psychological and social changes. One of them is his sexual transformation, when being a young man during the Elisabethan court period one morning after a revolt in Turkey he wakes up a woman. We can trace two approaches of this phenomenon. The first is that this unnatural conversion was planned by Virginia Woolf in order to distinguish two sexes and to describe them separately. The second is that the author was aimed to create the androgynous hero, a special mixture of two sexes, that can be treated both as a man and a woman. So we get a puzzle: are there some hints of Orlando’s androgyny in the text itself and what are they?

Firstly, who is Orlando?

“He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it…”

From the first pages of the novel we can observe a young man, who admires poetry and nature, birds and death. He is fulfilled with feelings and passions and enjoys loneliness.

‘So, after a long silence, ‘I am alone’, he breathed at last, opening his lips for the first time in this record. He had walked very quickly uphill through ferns and hawthorn bushes, startling deer and wild birds, to a place crowned by a single oak tree.’

Virginia Woolf uses irony when describing his appearance especially his legs. The symbol of a feminine beauty, legs play an important role in the decoding Orlando’s sex.

“ The long, curled hair, the dark head bent so reverently, so innocently before her, implied a pair of the finest legs that a young nobleman has ever stood upright upon”.

‘When he put his hand on the window–sill to push the window open, it was instantly coloured red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly’s wing. Thus, those who like symbols, and have a turn for the deciphering of them, might observe that though the shapely legs, the handsome body, and the well–set shoulders were all of them decorated with various tints of heraldic light, Orlando’s face, as he threw the window open, was lit solely by the sun itself.’

As for the psychological aspect Orlando is an introvert, whose libido is aimed at writing poems and then at his diplomatic career. He is a lovable character. His passion to Russian princess is not his first experience of romance, but the strongest one.

“ He had indeed just brought his feet together about six in the evening of the seventh of January at the finish of some such quadrille or minuet when he beheld, coming from the pavilion of the Muscovite Embassy, a figure, which, whether boy’s or woman’s, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him with the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirely in oyster–coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish–coloured fur”.

So, Virginia Woolf gives us a hint of his androgynous nature, and we can observe here a parallelism with “The Black Prince” by Iris Murdoch, in which the main hero fell in love with a girl only when she wore a men’s garment.

“We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. 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”.

Having become a woman, Orlando doesn’t change neither his appearance, nor his character. But he preserves his rational nature that is shown in his transformed opinion about men. Perhaps, it is connected with the social background and position of a woman in society. When Orlando becomes a woman, court deprives her of her property for two reasons: she is dead and she is a woman which Virginia Woolf says “amounts to much the same thing”.

“ And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being, she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in”.

Her femininity is not pure and her sexuality proves it.

“ 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.”

Her only sweetheart is sexually ambiguous Shelmerdine, who is also a mixture of male and female. His attraction to Orlando is reasonable: the author wants to find an equal partner for her heroine and to prove that even androgynous persons are incomplete and need someone similar.

‘‘Can it be possible you’re not a woman?’ and then they must put it to the proof without more ado. For each was so surprised at the quickness of the other’s sympathy, and it was to each such a revelation that a woman could be as tolerant and free–spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle as a woman, that they had to put the matter to the proof at once.’’

As a fair way out of Orlando and Shelmerdine’s relation and a natural aspiration of a woman Virginia Woolf makes her heroine give birth to a baby.

‘‘It’s a very fine boy, M’Lady,’ said Mrs Banting, the midwife, putting her first–born child into Orlando’s arms. In other words Orlando was safely delivered of a son on Thursday, March the 20th, at three o’clock in the morning.’’

When tracing this, we have got a supposition that the author deliberately chose baby’s sex in order to give readers a hint of his future sexual transformation as a process that would exist forever.

So, the mystery of androgyny, traced in our article, belongs to the most interesting phenomena of sexuality. We have found that Orlando’s sex was not pure neither when he was a man, nor when he transformed into a woman.

Having united male and female features, Virginia Woolf’s protagonist lives a successful life and even becomes a famous poet. By his ambivalent nature Orlando expresses a sacred idea of a writer about androgyny of a genuine artistic personality who can share both male(rational) and female(sensitive) features.

Literature

1. Kenneth Brodey, Fabio Malgaretti „Focus on English and American Literature”.- Москва.: Айрис - Пресс, 2003. - 400с.: ил.

2. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, sixth edition, the major authors.- London.: w.w Norton & Company, 1996. – 2665p.

3. www. virginiawoolfsociety.com