Orlando Read Free Page A

‘Urnings’ (from Urania, meaning heaven) because they were able to achieve a kind of androgynous transcendence of the narrow limits of heterosexuality. Specifically relating his definition of these privileged beings to the growing movement for women’s rights in which Woolf was herself involved, he declared in 1896 that
    in late years (and since the arrival of the New Woman amongst us)… there are some remarkable and (we think) indispensable types of character, in whom there is such a union or balance of the feminine and masculine qualities that these people become to a great extent the interpreters of men and women to each other. 13
    And that Carpenter’s views would have been known to Woolf is more than likely, because he had met and influenced both E. M. Forster and G. Lowes Dickinson, two important figures who were closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group.
    A theme similar to Carpenter’s was later sounded by the playwright and Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw, who also connected changing definitions of sexuality with the transformative impact of the suffrage movement. ‘People are still full of the old idea that woman is a special creation,’ Shaw commented in 1927 – just when Woolf was composing
Orlando
– but, he observed,
    I am bound to say that of late years she has been working extremely hard to eradicate that impression, and make one understand that
a woman is really only a man in petticoats, or if you like, that a man is a woman without petticoats
[emphasis mine]. 14
    Thus, by 1933, Havelock Ellis, England’s foremost theorist of ‘sexology’ and a friend of both Carpenter’s and Shaw’s, could succinctly summarize such new views of gender in his magisterial book
The Psychology of Sex,
with the comment that
    We may not know exactly what sex is, but we do know that it is mutable, with the possibility of one sex being changed into the other sex, that its frontiers are often uncertain, and that there are many stages between a complete male and a complete female. 15
    Recently, of course, theorists of gender and sexuality have sought to make careful distinctions between transvestism, transsexualism and (male or female) homosexuality. Male transvestites are not necessarily homosexuals. Clearly lesbians need not be transvestites. And homosexuals of either sex are only infrequently transsexuals – people who experience themselves as having been born into the ‘wrong’ sex. For Woolf’s generation, however, such distinctions were less clear. Shortly after
Orlando
appeared, Radclyffe Hall’s controversial
The Well of Loneliness
(1928), an ostensibly realistic portrait of the artist as a lesbian, characterized the ‘invert’ Stephen Gordon, its female protagonist, as a man trapped in a woman’s body.
    An avowed lesbian herself, Hall regularly cross-dressed, was called ‘John’ by her intimates, and moved in the Sapphic salons of Paris and London whose other habituees included such sexuallyrebellious women as her aristocratic lover Una Troubridge and the painter Romaine Brooks, as well as the writers Natalie Barney, Gertrude Stein and Vita Sackville-West. Yet, despite Hall’s own apparently unproblematic repudiation of what the poet Adrienne Rich has lately called ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, the author of the significantly entitled
The Well of Loneliness
gave a tragic cast to Stephen Gordon’s story, describing her as ‘grotesque and splendid, like some primitive thing conceived in a turbulent age of transition’. 16 The bleakness of Hall’s perspective was, in fact, very different from the light-heartedness with which Woolf presented Orlando’s change of sex.
    After her male protagonist has become a woman, Woolf observes insouciantly that ‘in every other respect, [she] remained precisely as he had been’ (p. 98), implying that sexually defined selves or roles are merely costumes and thus readily interchangeable. ‘It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of