2 - ‘Something intricate and many-chambered’: Sexuality and the Embodied Sentence

Summary

Slowly there had opened within her something intricate and many-chambered, which one must take a torch to explore, in prose not verse; and she remembered how passionately she had studied that doctor at Norwich, Browne, whose book was at her hand there.

Woolf wrote in her diary that Orlando taught her ‘how to write a direct sentence’ (D3 203). It was intended as ‘an escapade’ from her ‘serious poetic experimental books whose form is always so closely considered’ (D3 131): Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse – works which openly explore the nature of consciousness and the problem of alterity while probing the boundaries of literary representation. Written around the same time as her polemic A Room of One's Own, the whimsical Orlando has been the object of studies of sexuality, gender, and gender politics, performativity and genre. Underlying and uniting these questions, however, is the novel's interrogation of what constitutes the sameness and difference of a gendered mind, and in many ways Orlando is both the embodiment of Woolf's sexual aesthetics and of her philosophy of mind.

With its ‘satirical’ spirit and ‘wild’ structure (D3 131), Orlando is a highly political work engaging questions of sexual identity, gender inequality, and personal freedom. As Pamela L. Caughie has argued, Orlando's modernist narrative provides ‘a different temporality of embodiment’ to offer ‘new configurations of gender and sexual identity’. These reconfigurations take place at the level of language as well as that of plot, making Orlando an aesthetically challenging work on a par with Woolf's other, more formally experimental novels, despite its ostensibly ‘plain’ style, written ‘so that people will understand every word’ (D3 162). The novel's play with metaphor and synecdoche in particular destabilises the boundaries between identity and otherness, body and mind, and questions both the ontological and ethical adequacy of simple gender binaries. Patricia Waugh has shown how Woolf's literary aesthetic sought to overcome Cartesian dualism by ‘banishing the soul’ as a ‘closed individuality’, favouring instead an ‘extended or distributed idea of mind’. This refusal to accept binary oppositions follows from a deeper concern with the relationship between mind and body in Orlando – a relationship which, I propose, is at the heart of its textual exploration of gender, sexuality and sexual identity.