Re-dressing feminist identities: tensions between essential and constructed selves in Virginia Woolf's 'Orlando.'

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1994 by Christy L. Burns

Discussing the source of the self is never an easy task. Autobiographical desires get displaced into biographical sketches, which are then readily transformed into broad historical portraits. Ultimately, the task of re-narrating all these simultaneous strands slips into the genre of fiction, as in Virginia Woolf's parodic biography, Orlando. If Orlando can be characterized as Woolf's exploration of her own theory of sexuality (Holtby), it is also a fictionalized biography of Woolf's friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and still again it functions as a broadly sketched history of English literature and politics. One can imagine how to write a biography of one's lover would be to undergo the process of a powerfully mute identification and realization, one that calls up denials and displacements as well.(1)

As desire for identification draws Woolf toward the genre of biographical fiction, the need for differentiation following upon such a mimetic project propels her back into parody.(2) If the text is "true to" Sackville-West's personal history, the novel is still quite unfaithful to the genre of biography. How can one be both faithful to facts and unfaithful and tell more of the truth without exactly telling it the same? While the book's incompetent narrator may issue misleading imperatives to find "the single thread" that ties together personal identity, the effects of Orlando's transformation through the ages - marked especially by his/her changes in clothing - execute a parodic deconstruction of essentialist claims tentatively offered in the text. The tension of these issues centers on the breakdown of inner and outer spaces in Woolf's writing. Woolf plays on a twentieth-century conception of truth, derived from the Greek notion of alethea, unveiling. In her novel truth is destabilized and turns into parody through an emphasis on period fashions, cross-dressing, and undressing of "essential" bodies.

Because of the nature of parody - to implement the very concept that is being distorted and undone - confusion prevails in the current criticism as to Woolf's position on subjectivity and essentialism in Orlando. Critics tend toward one of two extreme positions with regard to Woolf's theory of subjectivity in Orlando, with Fredric Jameson, on the one hand, using Orlando as an example of a novel that portrays an unchanging, constant personality passing through the centuries, bearing the marks of only external re-shapings;(3) Makiko Minow-Pinkney, on the other hand, argues that "social and historical factors are . . . fully admitted as constitutive for the human subject in the novel" (135). This question of whether some innate human essence can surmount historical effects or whether the only "essence" we know as personality is fully shaped by the world around one - this problem is comically re-figured by Woolf as the question of whether the clothes "make the (wo)man." At one point Orlando's narrator suggests that "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" (189). While one must remain persistently wary of the narrator's authority in this text, this claim at least points to the importance of such a possibility.(4) Moreover, advocates of gender studies will recognize an early formulation of contemporary questions about the extent to which society - and not biology - delineates distinction between "men" and "women."(5)

As Bette London has pointed out, Woolf has become the American feminist's favorite cultural icon, the mother to whom we turn in hope of finding a mirror of ourselves.(6) It begins to look, on London's review of often contrary receptions, as if Woolf's figure admits of so many identities that Woolf is merely a mirror to her reader - another bad cliche of the woman who can mutate to become whatever society demands of her. My point here is that Woolf is hardly so obliging, and that contemporary feminist debates do violence to Woolf's texts whenever they try to create her as icon of their cause, as they struggle to fix her identity as one identity alone. Woolf's style is a persistent if subtle playing out of tensions, a negotiation of Victorian mores and modernist experimentation that results in a double mirror, a parodic displacement of any essential and "true" position. I am returning to Orlando (1928) as a preferred site of analysis, for that text carries within it the initial map of concerns that extend into A Room of One's Own (1929), the "literary feminist bible," as Jane Marcus has called it (5).(7) I do not aim to treat Orlando as a mirror to any single vision of contemporary feminism, so much as to mark it as a historically significant text that informatively examines the tensions between notions of essential personal identity and contextually re-defined subjectivity, tensions that are replicated in contemporary debates between essentialist and post-structuralist feminists.

In the process of writing her novel, Woolf weaves together two competing approaches to biography: the attempt to define an essential self and the modern project of retracing the construction of a changing subjectivity, which stems most recognizably from Freud's influence. One need always remember that Orlando is a parodic biography,(8) and several strands of biographical beliefs prevalent in the Victorian era are being parodied throughout the novel. Influential to Woolf's re-thinking of the factual exploration of a fixed identity was the work of her close friend Lytton Strachey, who emphasized psychology in his own work on biography. Strachey met with great success in the 1920s, inspiring others to introduce Freudian notions of constructed subjectivity into biography. In "Women and Fiction" Woolf refers to "our psychoanalytic age" in which thinkers are increasingly aware of the "immense effect of environment and suggestion upon the mind" (45). If Strachey's work began to move Woolf toward a more contextual understanding of identity, she was still turning half toward that and half away from the earlier influence of her father's essentialist notions.