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

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

Clothing, however, is not always just clothing in Orlando. The parallel between the biographer's duty to relay "Truth, Candour, and Honesty" and the necessity of revealing sexual "truths" in the scene of Orlando's awakening suggest another figuration: that of language and, specifically, of writing. The biographer struggles to write the "naked truth" about Orlando, but the revelation of his sex change tells us little. Likewise, Orlando later gets embroiled in the struggle to "say what one means and leave it." What she finds in trying to abandon metaphor, however, is that simple statements get no closer to the truth. Sentences like "The sky is blue," are no more or less true than "The sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair" (101-02). As with Sasha, so with language; Orlando must conclude that both "are utterly false" (102).

In light of this suggestive parallel to language we might notice how cross-dressing happens somewhat unintentionally as well, in Orlando. That is, sometimes the "fashion of the time" obscures a person's sex and gender, and confusion results. The first thing we learn about Orlando is that "There could be no doubt of his sex," although the narrator admits that "The fashion of the time did something to disguise it" (13). Such ambiguity becomes important when Orlando comes of age. His first "true" love, Sasha, is remarked as "a figure, [either] boy's or woman's, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex" (37-38). Orlando is ready to "tear his hair with vexation," so certain is he that the figure is a young man's and "thus all embraces were out of the question" (38). The figure, however, turns out to be that of a woman and an affair ensues. Sexual determination is thus not secured prior to affection in Woolf's novel, but fixing gender becomes an important part of courtship, at least prior to the twentieth century. As Woolf approaches the modern era, she ironizes gender stabilization and comes very close to valuing homosexual love explicitly. At one point, cross-dressing is used to introduce homosexual possibilities when Orlando, as a man, is wooed by the Archduchess Harriet. Harriet later reveals himself to have been Harry all along (178). He confesses that he had been so swept away by Orlando's beauty that he had disguised his sex to press his suit (115ff). Orlando's rejection of Harriet-Harry allows the story to elide homosexual relations; we later hear, however, that Orlando's elaborate cross-dressing allowed her to "enjoy ... the love of both sexes equally" (221). So Woolf writes in some ambivalence around this issue.

While Orlando can participate in the changing re-constitutions and articulations of her gender through her dress, clothes can also sometimes contrarily coerce her behavior. Woolf tests the question of whether "it is clothes that wear us and not we them" when she turns to what was, for Woolf, the most socially coercive of eras, that of the Victorians (188).(20)