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Dienstag, 16. Oktober 2018

Orlando Is the Virginia Woolf Novel We Need Right Now / Joanna Scutts. In: Vulture Oct. 12, 2018

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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