Orlando

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Orlando

• Virginia Woolf

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Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

• English novelist and essayist.
• Daughter of English biographer, Leslie Stephen
  (began the monumental project, DNB in 1885).
• Part of the Bloomsbury Group, a group of writers
  and painters based in London (SW1) that included
  Vanessa Bell (her sister), Leonard Woolf (her
  husband), Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, E. M.
  Forster and Clive Bell, among others. Most of
  the men were associated with Trinity College,
  Cambridge.

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Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

• With her husband, founded the Hogarth Press in
  1917 published her own books, as well as first
  English translations of Freud.
• Orlando was first published in 1928, and was
  widely popular in its day, more popular than
  Woolfs other works of fiction up to that point
  sales of Orlando nearly doubled that of her
  previous novel, To the Lighthouse (1927).
• Woolf cultivated a long-term friendship (and,
  through the 1920s, a sexual affair) with Vita
  Sackville-West.
• She suffered from depression and periodic
  breakdowns committed suicide by drowning in
  Sussex in 1941.

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Orlando (1928)

• Willing suspension of disbelief phrase coined
  by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (derived from
  Aristotle).
• There are two narrative conventions that we must
  accept on their own terms.
• The first is that Woolf bisects story both
  structurally and thematically between male and
  female halves 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
  (171).
• What is the difference between sex and gender?
  How does Woolf play with these?

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Sex and Gender Terms

• Gender A psychosocial construct used to classify
  a person as masculine or feminine (or both, or
  neither).
• Sex The anatomy and biology that determines
  whether one is female/male.
• Gender identity The way that a person sees or is
  seen according to psychosocial constructions of
  gender.
• Sexual identity How a person sees himself or
  herself physically, e.g., as male or female.

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Sex and Gender Terms

• Transsexual An individual who undergoes a sexual
  transition to live full-time in the sex that
  corresponds with their sexual identity.
• Transvestite An individual who dresses in the
  clothing of the opposite gender for a variety of
  reasons.
• Androgyny the state or condition of being neither
  clearly male (or masculine) nor clearly female
  (or feminine), but somehow both at once. The term
  often denotes a subversive alternative to a
  rigidly defined system of sex/gender differences.

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Orlando (1928)

• Willing suspension of disbelief phrase coined
  by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (derived from
  Aristotle).
• There are two narrative conventions that we must
  accept on their own terms.
• The second is that time passes Orlando lives
  through four centuries of history and no
  explanation for his/her longevity is ever given.
• A modernist sense of time not chronological,
  but interior time is psychological, symbolic,
  used as a thematic structuring device.
• What does Orlandos age represent or symbolize?

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Orlando and a room of ones own

• Two books written at approximately the same time.
• A Room a series of essays delivered at womens
  colleges at Cambridge in 1927, on the topic of
  women and fiction.
• Thesis of the essays women need a room of their
  own and 500 a year to write fiction they also
  to abandon male strategies of writing, especially
  about the autonomous self.
• Explores genealogy of womens fiction writing in
  England from sixteenth century, begins with
  imaginary Judith Shakespeare.

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A Room of ones own (1928)

• For my belief is that if we live another
  century or soI am talking of the common life
  which is the real life and not of the little
  separate lives which we live as individualsand
  have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of
  our own if we have the habit of freedom and the
  courage to write exactly what we think...then the
  opportunity will come and the dead poet who was
  Shakespeares sister will put on the body which
  she has so often laid down (Woolf 131-2).
• Woolf, Virginia. A Room of Ones Own. London
  Penguin, 2004.