Orlando Read Free Page B

woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex,’ she explains later, in a clarification of this point, noting that ‘Different though the sexes are, they intermix’ (p. 132). Indeed, not only is Orlando him/herself a multiply sexed being who happily transcends gender because her ‘form combine[s] in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace’ (p. 98), but her lover and her husband also appear to have available rich wardrobes of multiform sexuality. After Orlando has become a woman, the Archduchess Harriet of Scand-op-Boom becomes Archduke Harry; he/she and Orlando act ‘the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with great vigour and then [fall] into natural discourse’ (p. 126). Similarly, after she has wed the comic but magical sea captain Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Orlando affectionately accuses her
simpatico
husband of being a woman, and he cheerfully accuses her of being a man, for ‘it was to each… a revelation that a woman could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle as a woman’ (p. 179).
    Despite the pain explored in
The Well of Loneliness
and the pleasure represented in
Orlando,
the two works have in common an assumption about gender, fostered by the theories of suchsexologists as Carpenter and Ellis, which radically contradicts Sigmund Freud’s famous assertion that ‘Anatomy is destiny’. Hall sees it as Stephen Gordon’s doom that her sexual destiny has been, as it were, detached from her anatomy, while Woolf defines Orlando’s ability to choose her own sexual destiny as a triumph over anatomy. But both at least implicitly protest against the notion that social or erotic gender roles are inevitably determined by biological sexuality. Thus, although Woolf thought
The Well of Loneliness
merely a ‘meritorious dull book’, 17 she offered to testify on its behalf when the work was seized and confiscated by government censors. Her defence of Hall’s project must have been impelled as much by a sense of kinship with the rejection of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ as it was by a commitment to freedom of speech.
    Nor was Woolf alone among Bloomsbury intellectuals in her desire to disentangle anatomy from destiny. Quentin Bell notes that just before she was inspired by her romance with the Sapphic Vita Sackville-West to begin producing her own fantastic portrait of the artist as what we now call a transsexual, she had become fascinated by sex change at a social event where gender fluidity was virtually thematic:
    … early in September [1927], Maynard and Lydia Keynes gave a party at Tilton. Jack… Sheppard enacted the part of an Italian
prima donna,
words and music being supplied by a gramophone. Someone had brought a newspaper cutting with them; it reproduced the photograph of a pretty young woman who had become a man, and this for the rest of the evening became Virginia’s main topic of conversation. 18
    When Woolf decided, therefore, that the ‘writer’s holiday’ devoted to her friend Vita’s life as ‘Orlando, a young nobleman’ should be simultaneously ‘truthful’ and ‘fantastic’, she was quite accurately articulating a particular vision of gender as well as of history. For if it was ‘fantastic’ to conceive of Vita living for 300 years, from the age of Elizabeth to the ‘present day’, it was, in Woolf’s opinion, perfectly ‘truthful’ to imagine Vita changing her sex as easily and casually as she might change her clothes.
    *
    If Woolf’s romantic fascination with Vita and with Vita’s Sapphism was one of the major forces that compelled her to write
Orlando
with unprecedented speed and exhilaration, her long-standing interest in history and biography was another crucially influential factor. Her father, Leslie Stephen, had become the first editor of the prestigious
Dictionary of National Biography
in the year she was born, so she had been preoccupied with the personal but often ‘official’ genre of biography and its relationship