Serious scholars have rarely taken Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando,
90 years old this week, terribly seriously. It’s commonly described as
a “romp” — lighthearted and fantastical, stretching more than three
hundred years with an unaging hero who changes sexes midstream — a book
to explain away rather than embrace. The explanation usually goes like
this: From around 1925 until 1928, Woolf had a passionate affair
with the aristocratic, bohemian, bisexual novelist Vita Sackville-West.
In the words of Sackville-West’s son Nigel Nicolson, the novel is “the
longest and most charming love-letter in literature,” and the character
of Orlando a celebration of Sackville-West’s unconventional life.
But
the story of Woolf’s gender-fluid and superhuman heroine is about much
more than a single individual. As a work of political satire and
feminist fantasy, Orlando
laid the groundwork for today’s cultural landscape, in which the
boundaries of both gender and literary genre are more porous than ever.
Through a protagonist who, over the course of several centuries, takes
multiple lovers and writes reams of poetry in every possible style,
Woolf makes a joyful case for the transgression of all limits on desire,
curiosity, and knowledge. Yet at the same time, Orlando constantly runs
up against the limits of that freedom, exposing the persistent
vise-grip of patriarchy even on a character blessed with the privileges
of wealth, beauty, and close-to-eternal youth. Woolf invites us to
imagine what it would feel like to escape, and yet, over and over again,
reminds us that we are trapped. When we talk today about the
tantalizing potential of a gender-agnostic society, of a world in which
masculine and feminine traits are recognized for the performances that
they are, or when we explore such possibilities in fiction and fantasy,
we do so in Orlando’s shadow. ... [mehr] http://www.vulture.com/2018/10/why-virginia-woolfs-orlando-feels-essential-right-now.html
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