VIRGINIA WOOLF – AN AUTHOR AHEAD OF HER TIME

‘In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place’

Virginia Woolf constructs a mock-biographical novel following the life of the namesake

protagonist and her/his transformation from a young novel boy of 16 in Elizabethan England to a

36-year-old woman who gets out of her car on ‘the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the

eleventh of October Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-Eight.

Through this explicit transformation of sex Woolf makes the entirety of Orlando out to be a

mocking criticism of the fixed gender stereotypes commenting on the nonsensicalness of

gender differences. Woolf ensures to establish that although Orlando is a ‘different sex’ she/he

is still the ‘same person’ subverting historical gender differences.

‘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.’

Of course, given the contextual climate that Woolf was writing in, she had to be careful. Woolf’s

diary itself helps us to understand society’s watchful eye; she confides that she ‘must be careful’

in respect to this subversive depiction of gender. In essence Woolf combats the potential

backlash from the transgressive themes in her novel by ensuring that Orlando had a ‘balance

between truth and fantasy. This can be seen through the time frame of the novel, that spans

over 400 years. Woolf grounds her novel in the fantastical to dilute the distinctive political

undertones, difficult for the contemporary literary stomach to digest.

Woolf Orlando serves as an ally to the transgender movement, reflecting the modern

perspective on gender, that is, that gender is something fluid and changing, unlike the cages of

femininity and masculinity that people are confined within. Orlando is a novel that premeditates

the socio-political make-up of today’s cultural landscape. It interrogates the dichotomous female

– versus – female understanding and practices lending itself to the trans discussion populating

contemporary social, cultural and political thought.