Virginia Woolf’s Orlando - A Biography And Queer Theory

1. Name: Khushbu Lakhupota
MA Sem2 Batch 2020-2022
The Twentieth Century Literature 1900 to WWII
Email Id. khushbu22jan93@gmail.com
To: Department of English, MKBU
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando - A Biography And Queer Theory

2. MEANING OF THE WORD ‘QUEER’
● The origins of the term ‘Queer’ are ambiguous.
● It is assumed that the term entered into English in the 16th century
from German, where it originally meant strange, odd, peculiar or
eccentric.
● In the late 19th and early 20th century, the expression was used as a
slang or pejorative for the homosexuals. Later, “by the late 1980s,
however, some gay people began to deliberately use the word queer in
place of gay or homosexual, in an attempt, by using the word
positively, to deprive it of its negative power.”

3. ORIGINS OF QUEER THEORY
● It has its origins in gay & lesbian studies as well as women's studies.
● Both lesbian and gay studies began as “liberation movements” in the
late 1960s and 70s, but essentially were incompatible to each other.
● Gays often consider themselves as males refuting the need of women,
hence, exhibit misogynist temperament.
● Lesbians, principally being the proponents of feminism, showcase
misandrous mindset while denying the reigning patriarchal culture.
● Later on, with the emergence of a broader inclusive theory, they
adopted a “queer” identity realizing the purpose they share as
oppressed minorities.

4. Definitions
● The term is not confined to homosexual entities only. It has gradually
evolved into an umbrella term which denotes a coalition of sexual
identities that are socially and culturally deserted.
● An LGBT academic and fiction author Annamarie Jagose, in her book
entitled Queer Theory: An introduction (1996) states, “Queer focuses
on mismatches between sex, gender and desire. (...) Unknown to many,
queer is in association with more than just gay and lesbian, but also
CROSS DRESSING, hermaphroditism, gender ambiguity and gender
corrective surgery.”
● Queer theory, thus, widens its peripheries to incorporate any kind of
sexual activity or identity which is deviat to heteronormative model of
society.

5. POST STRUCTURALIST IN NATURE
● Queer theory is greatly influenced by post structuralist and
deconstructive ideas of Derrida and Foucault.
● Derrida, Foucault & other post - structuralists challenged the
notion of a systematic & stable structure, which incorporates a
“center” serving as the organizer & regulator of the structure.
Inspired by the post structuralist tenets, queer theorists
interrogated the stable structure of identity.

7. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando - A Biography
● The story of Orlando spans over 300 years (1588 - 1928). During
this time Orlando ages only 36 years, & changes gender from a man
to a woman.
● Genre - Fictional biography
● Date Of First Publication – October 11, 1928, the date given in the
last line of the novel
● A work of queer life writing
● “Writing about the ‘self’ or the ‘individual’. Marlene Kadar
● Life writing should encourage “the reader to develop and foster
his/her self-consciousness.”

8. Cross-dressing
Cross-dressing in Orlando occurs fairly frequently. Archduke Harry
dresses as a woman but reveals himself to be a man in chapter four.
Similarly, even after Orlando's actual sex change, he continues to switch
between clothes of both genders. This motif functions in the novel to
emphasize the similarities between men and women, despite the different
clothes (and different roles) society would have them wear. Once she has
experienced what it is like to be a woman, Orlando does not want to give
this up, yet she longs for the freedom she had as a man. Here, Woolf
suggests that perhaps society is too rigid with regard to the roles it forces
men and women to play. Because they are so alike underneath their
clothes, the genders should be allowed more freedom in their actions.

9. ORLANDO A Work of traditional
life writing
● As Marlene Kadar notes, the life
writer does not “pretend to be absent
from the text.”
● Where Orlando's life truly establishes
itself as a work of life, writing is in
the middle ground between the
extraordinary & the mundane,
between what's worthy of being
written & what should have been
glossed over.

10. Orlando - As Queer life writing
● Transgenere, as Pamela Caughie explains “reconfigures in life
writing narratives not only notions of gender but also of time,
identity, history.”
● Woolf addressed Orlando to her female lover, the poet &
bisexual socialite Vita Sackville-West, she was the model for
the androgynous Lord Orlando, in what has been described as
“the longest love letter in the world.”
● “Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old" by Queen
Elizabeth I to Orlando.

12. Works Cited
● Caughie, Pamela L. "The Temporality of Modernist Life
Writing in the Era of Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando and Einar Wegener’s Man Into Woman." MFS
Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 59, no. 3, 2013, pp. 501-525.
● Kadar, Marlene. Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to
Critical Practice. U of Toronto P, 1992.
● Wingenroth, Leah. Exploring the art of queer life writing
through Virginia Woolf’s Orlando a biography. PhD
dissertation.
● Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. Oxford UP, USA,
2014.