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

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

In Bakhtinian terms, Sackville-West depicts a carnivalesque experience for Persian men, but one that excludes Persian women as active participants, as Teheran is turned inside out: "carpets were hung against the walls of the houses, carpets closely touching, so that the mean buildings disappeared behind the arabesques of Kirman and the blood velvets of Bokhara" (125). By means of such decorative masquerade and bouleversement, "the city ceased to be a city of brick and plaster, and became a city of texture, like a great and sumptuous tent open to the sky" (125). Yet it is the tribesmen who put on their finest costume for the spectacle presented - women are denied a role in the spectacle altogether. The only carnivalesque figure is Madame Dieulafoy, whose presence at the same court a half-century before is brought into being only through the power of Sackville-West's imagination. The Persian women throughout are mere spectators "herded together" along the parade route, disempowered by both Persian patriarchy and Sackville-West, who acknowledges "from the black veiled figures, a sudden, charming twittering, as from a lot of birds or children" (134). Since the native woman is either infantilized or concealed from sight, the beneficiary of the orient as a carnivalized location is the upper-class European woman. This was true of Sackville-West herself, as Virginia Woolf recognized.

On a personal level, as we have seen, Sackville-West was long associated with glamorous excess in Woolf's mind and in 1920s British culture, and after Sackville-West's first return from Persia, Woolf was increasingly attuned to her orientalized self-presentation. In a telling diary entry (23 January 1927), Woolf expresses her fascination for the intriguing mixture of the exotic, the aristocratic, and the domestic-maternal that Sackville-West embodied: "Vita stalking in her Turkish dress, attended by small boys, down the gallery, wafting them on like some tall sailingship - a sort of covey of noble English life: dogs walloping, children crowding, all very free & stately..." (Diary 3: 125). A bravura performance for an appreciative audience, so to speak. The appropriation of Turkish style affirms, and even magnifies, Sackville-West's class status. Two months after this performance, while Sackville-West was on her second trip to Teheran, Woolf noted in her diary (14 March 1927) that she felt the need for an "escapade" and Orlando's genesis as "The Jessamy Brides" was inscribed in these terms:

Two women, poor, solitary at the top of a house. One can see anything (for this is all fantasy), the Tower Bridge, clouds, aeroplanes... Everything is to be tumbled in pall mall... No attempt is to be made to realise the character. Sapphism is to be suggested. Satire is to be the main note - satire & wildness. The Ladies are to have Constantinople in view. Dreams of golden domes. My own lyric vein is to be satirised. Everything mocked. And it is to end with three dots... so. (Diary 3: 131)

Thus, from its very inception, Orlando was to establish a carnivalesque and fantasy-laden matrix of exoticized sexuality and location through "dream"like displacement. Everything was grist for Woolf's bright, satiric mill, and her intention that the novel would defy a complete sense of closure, although not the eventual ending, is carried through in the novel's spirit of open and inconclusive inquiry and ludic historiography, in which the boundaries establishing class, race, and gender, and sex differences are deconstructed and rearranged.