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

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

In a struggle to form and reform his/herself throughout the novel, Orlando writes, revises, and eventually publishes a long autobiographical poem, "The Oak Tree." The poem's title, along with other odd plot devices integrated into Orlando, suggests an allusion on Woolf's part to Locke's philosophy of personal identity in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Deriving his notions of personal identity from essentialist arguments about objects, Locke articulates the belief that "The variation of great parcels of Matter alters not the identity; an Oak, growing from a Plant to a Tree, and then lopp'd, is still the same Oak" (330).(15) He resists the notion that any change of the body might have an effect on one's personal identity. Taking the "oak" as his operable example, he translates his scientific, essentialist paradigm into one suited for a human's identity. In both cases, the exterior's alteration (being "lopp'd," amputated, or - as figuratively in Orlando - castrated) does not effect any change in the person's interior self. Not only does Woolf link Locke's example of an oak tree to the project of autobiographical writing; she also parodically adapts another example from the Essay - his explicit dismissal of the relevance of clothing to personal identity. In a key passage of the Essay Locke argues that the self "will be the same self as far as the same consciousness can extend to Actions past or to come; and would be by distance of Time, or change of Substance, no more two Persons than a Man be two Men, by wearing other Cloaths to Day than he did Yesterday, with a long or short sleep between" (336). Indeed, Orlando's greatest alterations of personality always occur after a long trance in which s/he lies as if dead, in a seven-day sleep. Those sleeps do, in fact, leave Orlando greatly altered, and so, for that matter, does the clothing s/he wears.

When Orlando's narrator despairs that the self is "a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us - a piece of a policeman's trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra's wedding veil," s/he comically postulates that this dissonant collection of various fabrics can be "lightly stitched together by a single thread" (78). Speculating that this thread might be memory, or at least "memory is the seamstress," the narrator comments on how "capricious" a seamstress memory is. "Fabrication" can be unraveled as well as constructed. Orlando himself, as autobiographical author of "The Oak Tree," loses the thread of his memory while trying to add a passage on the betrayal by his first love, Sasha. Memory is, in fact, as fickle a seamstress as Sasha was a mistress and both are tied metaphorically to "fabrication" by Woolf: memory being a "thread" and sash - the root of Sasha's name - meaning in Arabic the turban of cloth one wraps around the head. In Orlando fabric, fabrication, writing, sexuality, and clothing are all interwoven. Through these metaphors Locke's essentialist opposition between outside and inside is broken down; this opposition decays most humorously and explicitly in the scene of Orlando's sex change.