Moments of Reading: A Virginia Woolf Reading Group discussion

"One of the main themes of Orlando is transsexualism, bisexualism and transvestism. How much this involves Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, I leave open for discussion, but the topic constantly re-appears in Woolf's novels. " (partial comment from previous discussion - Thanks Wouter!!!) :)

I remember reading somewhere that Woolf once described herself as asexual (though she may have recanted that in later years—I don't know). One of the things that strikes me about that discourse is that so many characters have "traditionally male" and "traditionally female" episodes. We see Orlando act as superficially as some of the women in her other works; we see some of the decisiveness and attitudes in Sasha that we see in the men of her eariler works such as The Voyage Out.

I hesitate to put words in her mouth, as it were, but I have to wonder if she didn't want to explore a mixed or more complex gender identity in her novels' characters after having read authors like Jane Austen, whose characters have a very set mold—the women are this way, and the men are that way. It would fit well with her later ideas in A Room of One's Own that "Shakespeare's sister" would do as well as Shakespeare himself, given the same time and resources. Breaking the mold for her fictitious women and men allows her to toy with the idea that women can be capable and men can be sensitive.

Gender plays such a role in attitudes about what men and women's roles are in society. I think you might be right about her asexual but there is evidence that VW slept with Vita twice. At least according to the forward written by Mitchell A. Leaska in the book "The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf.

I think her depression may have played a role. Or perhaps maybe she was fed up with the status quo of her time?

When I read chapter IV, I understood Jimmy's comments in the general topic where he stated that:

"Towards the middle, the "autobiographer's" voice started sounding very much like the "lecturer's" voice in A Room of One's Own, in fact, I was surprised at the similarity in tonality between the two works. It had that same quality of breaking the third wall, of creating a make-believe scenario that was obviously not true, and also of slightly didactic 'here's what I want to say on the topic of the sexes'"

Woolf often tells about gender difference rather than showing it, but I disagree on Jimmy's claim that the novel is an essay from the very beginning. Orlando is a biography with strong feminist elements not the other way around.

I really liked the part where Woolf states:

"...there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking...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." (Orlando, chapter IV)

Maybe this is one of the main ideas behind Orlando: Orlando changes sex, but not character; s/he remains a human being who develops his/her character throughout his/her life. Being a man or woman only differs because people make them different, .i.e. the clothes that have connotations towards certain ideas of man and woman.