Orlando (No...Not Bloom)

When I first read Virginia Woolf's Orlando I hated it.

It was really weird. I mean really. The protagonist starts out as a young man in Elizabethan England and then decides that he will never grow old. And he doesn't. He just continues living until one day--poof!--he's no longer a man (physically), he's a woman (physically). She then continues living and the book ends with Orlando a woman in the 1920's. That's not a storyline I'm used to.

However, after reading the essay on androgyny from V. Woolf's A Room of One's Own, I have a better appreciation for what was happening in Orlando.

The character Orlando is fascinating, once you move beyond the supernatural sex change. When Orlando is physically a man, he seems effeminate, more emotional and submissive than one generally assumes a man to be. And when Orlando is a woman, she seems masculine: less emotional and more assertive than one generally assumes a woman to be. (What one expects of the time period, I mean, or perhaps what one stereotypically expects.)

Gender is a complicated problem throughout the novel. The book begins in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, a grotesque character in the book, but in real life a woman succeeding, peculiarly, in the post generally held by a man. Orlando's first major love interest, Sasha, is a very masculine woman. Indeed, when Orlando first spots Sasha (while Sasha is ice skating), he is unsure whether she is a man or a woman, for she appears androgynous. In addition, Sasha is Russian, which makes her name even more interesting, as it is usually a name used for Russian men. Compared to (man) Orlando, Sasha is far more masculine; in their relationship, it is almost as if the typical "roles" were reversed, with Orlando playing the woman, and Sasha the man.

Later, (woman) Orlando will marry Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire: a fellow who, like Orlando (and Sasha), does not fit neatly into gender categories--for just as Orlando is “as tolerant and free spoken as a man” and Shel is “as strange and subtle as a woman.” In one scene, Orlando exclaims: "You're a woman, Shel!" to which he replies "You're a man, Orlando!"

The above, I fear, barely touches the surface of the issue of gender in Woolf's Orlando, but it is necessary, I think, to even be able to begin talking about her opinions on androgyny.

Woolf asks "whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness" (1025). She seems to answer her own question with a yes, for she goes on to state that "a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties" (1025). In Orlando, Woolf presents many of her characters as androgynous. Some are more "man-womanly," others more "woman-manly," but many of the major players defy the typical ways of thinking about gender.

In light of all the gender issues in today's world (homosexuals, bi-sexuals, transsexuals, transgender, etc), I wonder whether Woolf didn't have it right. Can we clearly label men as simply masculine and women as simply feminine, or is the distinction far less concrete. Is there a distinction between the genders at all, or merely distinctions between individuals?