orienting spectacle: the politics of 'Orlando's' sapphic camp - Dis

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1998 by D.A. Boxwell

This is rooted in Orlando's desire to gain possession of the scene before him. As Said points out, the orientalist "surveys the Orient from above, with the aim of getting hold of the whole sprawling panorama before him" (239). In some sense this opening episode is an example of the "static," "comprehensive vision" of the discourse of orientalism that Said attacks, a vision that "see[s] every detail through the device of reductive categories" (239). This opening scene exemplifies the orientalist "vision" that, as Said points out, "ultimately comes to rely for its coherence and force on the person, institution, or discourse whose property it is. Any comprehensive vision is fundamentally conservative..." (239).

But we need to consider as well the role of fantasy in the desiring occidental's effort to possess the oriental Other that is constructed through such "visions," particularly with respect to what Booth calls "cod-Oriental" representations of Asia and the Islamic world. Perhaps the Algerian writer Malek Alloula has most effectively demonstrated the means by which orientalism specifically "sets the stage for the deployment of phantasms" (3). In his study of photographic representations of Maghreb women at the turn of the century, Alloula encapsulates the kind of projections fueling Orlando's desire to play with, and against, orientalism:

Arrayed in the brilliant colors of exoticism and exuding a full-blown yet uncertain sensuality, the Orient, where unfathomable mysteries dwell and cruel and barbaric scenes are staged, has fascinated and disturbed for a long time. It has been its glittering imaginary but also its mirage. (3)

Alloula here notes the theatricalization of the orient by Europe, the ways in which desire gets displaced and staged on the scene of the Other.

As far as Orlando is concerned, our "biographer" informs us, neatly figuring cultural and national difference, that although "Nothing... could be less like the counties of Surrey and Kent" (120), he identifies with the scene: "That he, who was English root anti fibre, should yet exult to the depths of his heart in this wild panorama... surprised him" (121). It is at this point that the identification is figured fantasmatically, and from a position of class-conscious privilege, in terms of imaginary racial transitivity: "He wondered if, in the season of the Crusades, one of his ancestors had taken up with a Circassian peasant woman; thought it possible; fancied a certain darkness in his complexion" (121). Yet this possibility is immediately undercut by the cool, undisturbed tone with which his next action is described: "and going indoors, withdrew to his bath" (121) in readiness for his ambassadorial duties of the day. Orlando can "fancy" (that is, fantasize) having a different racial or ethnic-tribal identity without actually having it.

Costume, too, enhances the performance of privileged masquerade, as Orlando "wrap[s] himself in a long Turkish cloak" (120). As numerous critics have pointed out, transvestism proliferates throughout Woolf's novel, signaling the instability of sex/gender systems as they are culturally constructed, as well as their coercive power. As Orlando's "biographer" notes: "Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us" (187). Woolf has an acute understanding of clothing as a semiotic system: "Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath" (188). But as Karen Lawrence perceptively asserts, Orlando's masquerade in oriental clothing becomes the symbolic costume for a desired state of gendered ambiguity. Western clothing establishes the binaries of sex and gender identity, and Orlando is permitted to escape from such arrogations of the body by appearing in oriental garb. After Orlando's change of sex, she dresses "herself in those Turkish coats and trousers which can be worn indifferently by either sex," fleeing the rubble of a ruined imperial Constantinople as a "gipsy" (139). On her return to England, Orlando becomes a Restoration rake, who "enjoyed the love of both sexes equally." Her androgyny and bisexuality are outwardly symbolized by her customary morning habille: a "China robe of ambiguous gender" (221). As Marjorie Garber notes, orientalized cross-dressing is "the escape hatch" of repressed fantasies of polymorphous sexuality and multiple identity (321). Terry Castle has detailed the predilection for oriental costuming in eighteenth-century English masquerade as both a "kind of perverse allusion to empire" and "an act of homage - to otherness itself" (61). Thus, it is possible to admire Woolf's delight in complicating fixed constructions of identity; but it is also necessary to remember that her subversive camp is deeply implicated in Britain's imperialist past.(10)