¼ÚÄõ¦·¡]¤G¡^
素情自處
Orlando: The Androgynous Oscillation as Lesbian Seduction
As the "longest and most charming love letter" dedicated
to Victoria Sackville-West (qtd. in Knopp 24), Orlando, with
passionate lesbian love implied throughout the whole novel,
displays the first positive and vivid sapphic portrait in literature.
Early in her diary, Virginia Woolf exposed her initial plan for
writing Orlando:
No attempt is to be made to realize the character.
Sapphism is to be suggested. . . . For the truth is I
feel the need of an escapade after these serious
poetic experimental books . . . I want to kick up my
heels and be off. (Diary 3: 131)
Woolf's attempt to seduce Vita by Orlando, or by molding
Orlando the character, is made explicit enough. On the other
hand, when reading Orlando, the lesbian reader is also effectively
influenced by her reading process, sometimes identified with an
sometimes detached from the hero/heroine. In this respect, we
can say that Woolf likewise seduces the lesbian reader, whether
consciously or not, with her narration.
The reason why I confine the reader to the lesbian reader is
not only that her literary status has long been ignored but also that
her responses to Orlando, probably the most fantastic character
Woolf has ever created, are significant to the lesbian reading.
Hence, in order to show how Woolf seduces Vita, I will draw
some information from Woolf's letters, diaries, and the novel
Orlando itself as evidences to prove their lesbian relationship.
Besides, in order to show how the reading process affects the
lesbian reader, I will employ theories of Joseph Zinker and
Wolfgang Iser for my discussion. Finally, because Orlando can
be seen as a standard figure in Woolf's quintessential feminist
text, and thus attracts both Vita and the lesbian reader, I will
especially focus on Orlando's androgynous personality and her
shifting "costume selves" (Gilbert 208).
It was in 1922 that Woolf first met Vita. Two months
later, Woolf wrote in her diary: Vita was a "pronounced Sapphist,
and may, thinks Ethel Sands, have an eye on me, old though I
am" (Diary 3: 235). As is evident, at the outset it was Vita, the
younger sapphist, who seduced older Woolf who had not had any
lesbian experiences at that time. Through several opportunities
to keep Vita's company, Woolf developed an intimate
relationship with her and found in herself a hidden lesbian
tendency which, as Adrienne Rich claims, grew into a "lesbian
experience as a profoundly female experience" (158). As the
physical passion of women for women is central to lesbian
existence, so is the physical relationship to the friendship
between Vita and Woolf. More hints of such intimacy can be
found in Woolf's letter:
Should you say, if I rang you up to ask, that you
were fond of me?
If I saw you would you kiss me? If I were in
bed would you . . .
I'm rather excited about Orlando tonight: have
been lying by the fire and making up the last chapter.
(Letter 3: 443)
In addition to such kind of letter hinting at their sapphism,
the fact that Woolf and Vita labored together to support
Radclyffe Hall, whose lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was
declared obscene and banned in 1928, further testifies and
reinforces their extraordinary emotional affinity (Knopp 28).
The publication of Orlando represents not only Woolf's
production of her artistic venturing but also her ultimate
comment on Vita and the kind of friendship Vita preferred.
In essence, Orlando herself/himself is the very portrait of
Vita. By describing Orlando as someone who lives through
almost four centuries without having reaching the middle age,
Woolf accords Vita a kind of immortality and everlasting youth.
Through Orlando's change of sex, Woolf grants Vita's wish to
lead whatever sexual life she pleased and to "enjoy the love of
both sexes" (Orlando 211). Besides, in order to compensate for
Vita's deprivation of Knole's inheritance right, Woolf enables
Orlando to maintain aristocratic privileges and possess an estate
which resembles Knole, the ancestral estate of the Sackville
family. Furthermore, to compliment Vita on her artistic talent,
Woolf describes Orlando as a creative and nature-loving poet,
whose poem "The Oak Tree," like Vita's prize-winning poem The
Land (Transue 112), is successfully completed near the end of the
novel. As a symbol of Vita's beauty, Orlando's legs are
frequently noticed and praised, even causing a sailor to fall off
the masthead (Orlando 151). Interestingly, Vita in the real life,
just like Orlando in the novel, is a person who shifts between
various roles. As writer, traveller, aristocrat, lesbian, mother,
and diplomat's wife, Vita indeed owns a fascinating personality
which enchants Woolf so much that she creates Orlando, putting
him/her in the narration for seduction.
The narrative of Orlando can be regarded as a kind of
seduction not only for Vita but for the lesbian reader as well.
However, in the beginning we must face a problem: how do we
define a lesbian? Is she a woman whose erotic desires are for
other women? Is she a "woman-identified" woman? Is she a
woman at all, if woman is a heterosexist language construct? Or,
if we put the definition into the extreme, is she/he a biological
man who has a female identity and loves women? The dispute
over the labeling of the lesbian is ontologically confusing and
sensitive since it involves controversial issues such as sexual
identity, biological predisposition, and gender-identity. Yet, as
to the role of the reader, I agree with Karla Jay and Joanne
Glasgow's suggestion that "one can read as a lesbian even if one
is not thus-identified" (5). Reading as a lesbian is different
from what happens when a lesbian reads. Although sexual
identity is central to our reading process (Kennard 157), reading
as a lesbian can flee us from our limited and familiar world,
opening up the possibility of enjoying the widest range of literary
experience. In this sense, a lesbian reader can refer to anyone
who reads with a lesbian consciousness and identity, regardless
of his/her own sexual predisposition. Nevertheless, I want to
confine the lesbian reader to the woman reader because Orlando,
being a lesbian love letter with lesbian implication, influences the
woman reader in a way that Jane Marcus terms "Sapphistry,"
which means a rhetorical seduction by which the woman writer
(Woolf) seduces the woman reader (169). In the reading
process, the lesbian reader is directly and indirectly forced to
formulate herself. Before discussing how Orlando affects, and
even seduces the lesbian reader, we should in advance pay
attention to the reader's role and the reading process. The
theories of Zinker and Iser will be helpful in this respect.
The concept of the individual as a composite of
"polarities" or opposing characters is central to Zinker's theory:
In an oversimplified example, we might say that
a person has within him the characteristic of
kindness and also its polarity of cruelty, the
characteristic of hardness and its polarity, softness.
(Zinker 197)
Zinker recognizes that all these qualities may, in a given
case, generate different opposing characters. The opposites
flow in a flux; each has a chance to predominate over the other.
One's innate reality consists of both those qualities in oneself that
one finds acceptable and those that are unacceptable and
therefore often hidden or denied. Here, Zinker provides a clear
explanation: "We often identify ourselves with one characteristic
and not its counterpart, e.g. I see myself as peaceful and not
aggressive, or stingy and not generous, or honest and not
devious" (33). In everyday life, we are used to putting people
into different categories according to the way they identify
themselves. It seems that the qualities we possess are the only
criteria by which others can judge or categorize us. In fact, we
only recognize some parts of our polarities as "true" self. We
identify ourselves only with certain parts of our inner reality
which Zinker calls "light polarities." Contrary to the emergence
of light polarities, "dark polarities" are frequently repressed and
made silent, but they still keep exerting influences latently and
continuously (Zinker 33). Health and self-awareness can be
achieved only through realization of the coexistence of polarities.
As Zinker asserts, healthy people may not approve of all their
tendencies, but their acknowledgement of them indicates "inner
strength" (200). Reading, an actively cognitive activity, is an
efficient way for us to bring the light in to our dark polarities
which, though hidden and mute, can be emancipated into our
consciousness.
Then, what is the dark polarity of the lesbian in terms of
her sexual identity? For a long time, women are considered to
be innately heterosexual. Subservient to male hegemony and
patriarchal law, "[s]exuality between women, including erotic
mutuality and respect," is marginalized and neglected (Rich 149).
The lesbian potential of loving and being loved by women in
integrity submerges beneath the surface of consciousness and
thus becomes the dark polarity of the lesbian. While in the
reading process, there exists an opportunity for the dark polarity
to appear and contest with the light one. "We can only bring
another person's thoughts into our foregrounds," Iser explains, "if
they are in some way related to the virtual background of our own
orientation" (155). On the one hand, in reading Orlando, the
lesbian reader associates Orlando's experiences bound to male-
dominated society with her own familiar life experience,
recognizing the similarities and seemingly sharing the same fate.
With her concealed lesbian tendencies, the lesbian reader is likely
to identify herself with Orlando who is compelled to conform to
sexual polarization and social restriction imposed upon women.
On the other hand, as Iser asserts, "[e]ach new text calls on
slightly different aspects of ourselves and thus strengthens
different parts of our identity" (157). Seeing the reading
process as a transaction, Iser emphasizes the capacity of the text
to open up an inner world in the reader and allow him/her to
probe his/her own true self. It is the text's capacity that can
liberate the hidden personality from immurement and therefore
helps the reader achieve his/her self-realization.
When the lesbian reader participates in the reading activity
and reads with a lesbian consciousness, she will be aware that
two polarities, the heterosexual self and the lesbian self, are
conflicting with each other. This is the reason why reading can
be regarded as a therapy which excavates the unconscious terrain.
Woolf, like Iser, also "recognizes two 'selves' involved in the
process, that other self elicited by the text and the reader's
predefined self . . ." (Kennard 162). In effect, not only the
reader but also Orlando is a composite of polarities. During
his/her life as long as four centuries, Orlando keeps vacillating
between man and woman, heterosexual and lesbian. As a
portrait of Vita, Orlando owns a bisexual tendency and
undergoes the shifting of identities, repressed as a woman in the
nineteenth century and reborn in an androgynous marriage with
Shelmerdine in the twentieth century. In the reading process,
the polarities of the lesbian reader correspond actively to those of
Orlando on the one hand; on the other, Woolf's plan of sexual
revolution through the idea of androgyny and costume selves also
seduces both Vita and the lesbian reader. Woolf's comic
treatment of sexuality manifested in Orlando's sex-change
implies a lesbian possibility which is realized in her lesbian
relationship with Vita. Moreover, her toying with the idea of
androgyny and her attempt to subvert sexual identity extricate the
lesbian reader not only from her limited reading experiences but
also from gender imprisonment caused by rigid binary
oppositions.
The idea of androgyny, in addition to its ancient origin, has
been playing a crucial role in feminist sexual politics. Carolyn G.
Heilbrun, in her brilliant book Toward a Recognition of
Androgyny, offers us a clear definition of the term:
This ancient greek word--from andro (male) and
gyne (female)--defines a condition under which the
characteristics of the sexes, and the human impulses
expressed by men and women, are not rigidly
assigned. Androgyny seeks to liberate the
individual from the confines of the appropriate. (x)
It is "the confines of the appropriate" that drive Woolf to
progress toward a mode in which one can flee from fixed
polarities and rigid categories. As a practitioner of the feminist
practice, Woolf resists not only a compulsory way of life which
stresses the distinction between the sexes but the restrictions and
injustice imposed upon women by the patriarchal tyranny.
Eager to seek a world away from stereotypical sexual identity,
Woolf, in A Room of One's Own, creates a famous scene of
androgynous union:
For certainly when I saw the couple get into the
taxi-cab the mind felt as if, after being divided, it
had come together again in a natural fusion. . . .
The normal and comfortable state of being is that
when the two live in harmony together, spiritually
cooperating. . . . Coleridge perhaps meant this
when he said that a great mind is androgynous.
(102)
With her adoption of the idea of androgyny, Woolf gives us
the illusion of moving from the unnatural separation to the
natural union. The psychic synthesis of masculinity and
femininity is typical of Woolfian utopia. Besides, "the
imaginary merger, the containment in the taxi" also "frees Woolf
to transgress the stalement of opposition and separation" (Meese
98).
In spite of Woolf's attempt to question the unsatisfactory
norm of sex-typed identities, some critics nevertheless defy the
idea of androgyny. Elaine Showalter regards it as representing
Woolf's choice of a "utopian" and "inhuman" androgyny over
feminism because "it represents an escape from the confrontation
with femaleness or maleness" (289). Daniel A. Harris, seeing
the myth of androgyny as "a microcosm of heterosexual power
relations within the dominant culture," claims that the concept of
androgyny "cannot entail a corresponding alternation in social
attitude or behavior" (172). Still some other critics, such as
Cynthia Secor, regard androgyny as a failure to consider
historical context and thus to be materialized (165). When
applied to feminist sexual practice, androgyny cannot but
perpetuate the categories of masculine and feminine, reinforcing
the gender boundaries instead of eliminating them. However,
as a strategy on the level of fiction, Woolf's androgynous
representation in Orlando the character is a success. Not only
does it expose the identity as changing and fluid but open a larger
possibility on the level of reading for the lesbian reader to
approach unfixed conclusion.
From the very beginning, there is something androgynous
about Orlando. When we first see him, his clothes make it
difficult to determine his gender. With his "true" sex disguised
by the fashion of the sixteenth century, Orlando's sexual identity
refuses to be rigidly defined. Even Sasha, his first love,
expresses an indeterminacy in her sexual appearance: "He
(Orlando) beheld . . . 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" (Orlando
46). In effect, Orlando's freedom of vacillating between the
sexes is virtually acquired after his sex-change happens. For
Orlando, such sex-change at first does not necessarily generate
complete happiness and satisfaction:
And here is would seem from some ambiguity in
her term that she was censuring both sexes equally,
as if she belonged to neither . . . 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 whirling state of mind to be
in. (Orlando 152)
Orlando wonders to which sexes she belongs. Once a
man, he was free to experience the world in all its varieties and to
speak those experiences freely. Now as a woman, however, she
is forced to be perpetually false to both feeling and experience.
Living in the Victorian society which stresses decorum and
hypocrisy, Orlando is hampered by the disjunction between her
true self and her outward appearance and behavior. Her
creative talent in literature is repressed to some extent; even her
clothing restricts and imposes upon her multiple layers of social
bondage.
If Orlando accepts the fate of being a submissive woman
without making any efforts to resist the male dominance, Woolf
can neither create successfully an androgynous Orlando nor
seduce effectively both Vita and the lesbian reader on the level of
reading. Therefore in order to emancipate herself from the
existent restrictions, Orlando recognizes the relationship between
costume and identity. Although clothes seem to be "vain trifles,
"[t]hey change our view of the world and the world's view of us"
(Orlando 179). Just because costume is inseparable from
identity, costume creates identity and thus we are what we wear.
"Costumes," as Sandra M. Gilbert suggests, "are selves, and thus
easily, fluidly interchangeable" (207). When we put on a new
costume, we put on a new identity. In this way, the distinction
"between men, and between men and women, would seem to be a
superficial one" (Caughie 45). But is it true that costume
determines our self-identity? Does the outward appearance
correspond to the sex underneath? Woolf's clothes philosophy
goes on:
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.
(Orlando 181)
On the one hand, clothes are natural and fitting because
they are "a symbol of something deep beneath" (Orlando 180);
on the other hand, clothes are deceiving and misleading because
there is "no stable correspondence of clothes to the underlying
sex" (Bowlby 54). Just because changing clothes is as easy as
changing gender, Orlando symbolizes "an eternally living doll
whose wardrobe of costume selves enables her to transcend the
constraints of flesh and history" (Gilbert 208). Sometimes
dressed as a man and sometimes as a woman, Orlando possesses
a dual personality which not only enables her to establish lesbian
rapport with the street prostitutes but also drives her to recognize
the androgynous quality of Shelmerdine. As a woman, Orlando
gains new insight into why women behave as they do, the insight
which was denied to him when he was bound to heterosexual
polarization. As a woman, Orlando is able to vacillate between
the sexes "as if femininity is an inherently unstable position"
(Bowlby 59). With the ideal of androgyny realized in Orlando,
Woolf indeed transcends the male-centered world and opens up
new possibilities in the fixed division of gender.
Orlando emerged from the period in Woolf's life when she
was most experimental and venturesome. Her personal
venturing was epitomized by her relationship with Vita. In this
respect, Orlando can be read as a lesbian love letter meant to
seduce Vita and convey Woolf's love for her. On the other hand,
the polarities of the lesbian reader react actively to those of
Orlando in the reading process. By positing Orlando in a
persistent androgynous oscillation, Woolf succeeds not only in
lighting up the hidden lesbian tendency of the lesbian reader but
also in seducing her, intentionally or unintentionally. Evidently,
with changeable costume selves and the unstable identities of
androgyny, Orlando emblemizes a kind of power that escapes
from sex-typed standards and achieves a reality beyond gender.
Works Cited
Bowlby, Rachel. Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destination. New
York: Basil Blackwell, 1988.
Caughie, Pamela L. "Virginia Woolf's Double Discourse."
Discontented Discourse: Feminism/Textual
Intervention/Psychoanalysis. Eds. Marleen S. Barr and
Richard Feldstein. Chicago: Illinois UP, 1989. 41-53.
Gilbert, Sandra M. "Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as
Metaphor in Modern Literature." Writing and Sexual
Difference. Ed. Elizabeth Abel. Chicago: Chicago UP,
1982. 193-219.
Harris, Daniel A. "Androgyny: The Sexist Myth in Disguise."
Women's Studies 2 (1974): 171-84.
Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Toward a Recognition of Androgyny.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1982.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic
Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.
Jay, Karla, and Joanne Glasgow, eds. Lesbian Texts and
Contexts: Radical Revisions. New York: New York UP,
1990.
Kennard, Jean E. "Ourself Behind Ourself: A Theory for
Lesbian Readers." The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs.
Eds. Estelle B. Freedman, Barbara C. Gelpe, Susan L.
Johnson, and Kathleen M. Weston. Chicago: Chicago
UP, 1985.
Knopp Sherron E. "'If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?':
Sapphism and the subversiveness of Virginia Woolf's
Orlando." PMLA 103 (1988): 24-33.
Marcus, Jane. Virginia Woolf and the Language of Patriarchy.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.
Meese, Elizabeth A. Crossing the Double Cross: The Practice
of Feminist Criticism. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP,
1986.
Rich, Adrienne. The Signs Reader: Women, Gender, and
Scholarship. Eds. Elizabeth Abel and Emily K. Abel.
Chicago: Chicago UP, 1983.
Secor, Cynthia. "Androgyny: An Early Reappraisal."
Women's Studies 2 (1974): 161-70.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women
Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1977.
Transue, Pamela J. Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style.
Albany: State U of New York, 1986.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Eds. Anne
Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. Vol. 3. London:
Hograth, 1980. 5 vols. 1977-84.
---. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Eds. Nigel Nicolson and
Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. New York: Harcourt, 1975-
82. Vol. 1: 1888-1912, 1975. Vol. 3: 1923-28, 1978.
---. Orlando: A Biography. Ed. Pachel Bowlby. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1992.
---. A Room of One's Own. Ed. Morag Shiach. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1992.
--
☆ [Origin:椰林風情] [From: ppp01-076.modem.att.net.tw] [Login: **] [Post: **] [0m