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

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

Woolf thus again takes a form of mental pressure and turns it into a palpable, physical effect; the heavy crinoline of the Victorian age imprisons Orlando's person and weakens her resolve for independence. In her final attempt to avoid social transformation, Orlando rushes out onto the heath (a favorite sport in English literature), she trips (for Orlando is rather ill-coordinated), she breaks her ankle, and gives herself up for dead in the fields. Just at this moment, in parody of Jane Austen, Jane Eyre, and the novel that closes in marriage, a young man rides up. Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine jumps off his horse and exclaims, "Madam . . . you're hurt!" to which she stunningly replies, "I'm dead, Sir!" (250). Resurrection immediately occurs, and "A few minutes later, they became engaged." The snap effect of this capitulation to the Victorian spirit is played up as parodically extreme here, and is tinged with a certain horror. After Orlando's long resistance, her instant and gleeful reversal marks a feminist shock.(22) As it turns out, however, Orlando's conformity is not absolute, nor was her capitulation ever complete.

Eventually Orlando achieves a comfortable gender ambiguity in the modern era. This ambiguity, or androgyny, is remarked by Orlando's spouse, Shelmerdine, shortly after their engagement: "You're a woman, Shel!" Orlando cries. "You're a man, Orlando!" he cries. And, after "a scene of protestation and demonstration," they settle back into their assumed sex roles and sexes (252). But not precisely. Soon after, Orlando reflects on the way her marriage - which turns out to be strikingly nontraditional - has given her an odd freedom:

She was married, true; but if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts. (264)

Although she conforms by virtue of marrying Shelmerdine, Orlando resists the particular demands of Victorian marriage and womanly roles. She finds that she has conformed just enough to slip by unnoticed in the age, while she may also maintain a resistance to further constraint.

After her marriage, Orlando asks herself if she has satisfied the demands of the age and if she might again write in her own hand. She reflects that "the transaction between a writer and the spirit of an age is one of infinite delicacy" and finds to her great relief that "she need neither fight her age, nor submit to it; she was of it, yet remained herself" (266). It is the degree of conformity (and nonconformity), unmeasurable as it is, that determines the space left for resistance to an undesirable paradigm. That is, Orlando takes the category that is forced upon her (marriage), but she subverts it by negating many of its more traditional constraints.

Our inability to mark what is world and what the individual has lent great anxiety to contemporary debates about the constructedness of subjectivity. Paul Smith, for example, has voiced concern that Julia Kristeva's more recent philosophy of the subject leans away from a dialogically constituted subject - one that identifies with a range of possibilities and responds to the world - and tends toward a description of a subject who would "understand and accept that its own crisis is not out of phase with the social but is more nearly the truth of the social." Smith argues that the imperative to "stop worrying and love your crisis" would "make the analysand conform to a pregiven social world." What Smith and others like him are concerned about is conformism or forced collaboration, the collapse of heterogeneous drives. Judith Butler attempts to answer such concerns, as well as to take issue with a view that post-structuralist theories of the subject threaten to undermine the possibility of political action. She sharply identifies a problem for movements of social change, emphasized in Michel Foucalt's recognition that institutions and juridical systems of power produce the subjects they eventually come to represent. "Feminist critique," Butler argues, "ought . . . to understand how the category of 'woman,' the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought" (2). What Butler offers as a possible avenue away from such a cyclical dilemma is an awareness that one does not necessarily just imitate the model, and hence is not deterministically bound to repeat the conventional model of "woman." Rather, one can "locate strategies of subversive repetition" and parodically repeat, yes, repeat - but with a difference (147-78). "The task," as Butler notes, "is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself" (148). Butler labels this form of subversive repetition "parody." While I would not go so far as to say that all parody is subversive(23) (it is not clear whether Butler believes this or not), I do believe that the form of parody that Butler describes - one that presses toward heterogeneous mixtures of the norm and the contranormal - carries with it the politics she describes.(24) Her model offers parody and cross-dressing, in particular, as acts that cross boundaries and allow one to perform subjectivity in a dialogue with social expectations for conformity - to resist without fully breaking with, to remain politically active within the system without conforming to it. Butler addresses the same early philosophical debates over humanist individualism and determinism to which Woolf responds; moreover, Butler's concerns about subjectivity, as they inform contemporary feminism, are interconnected with Woolf's own ambivalences, embedded as they are in American feminism's current identity crisis.