Andronogy: Virginia Woolf

Orlando emerges from the period of Virginia Woolf's life when she is most experimental and venturesome. After finishing her best novels, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Woolf decides to change the style and write something "delighted to read¡±. Her personal venturing is epitomized by her relationship with her closet friend Vita Sackville-West, a bisexualist and the original model of Orlando. Orlando is as much a product of her personal as her artistic venturing and is her ultimate comment of Vita and the kind of friendship Vita prefers.

In this witty fantasy, Virginia Woolf creates the unforgettable character, Orlando, who is first masculine, then feminine, and whose life spans three centuries. He is introduced in the Elizabethan age as a chivalrous male, slashing away at a dehydrated Moor's head. The Queen is charmed by his beauty and innocence and confers on him the Order of the Garter. In the Jacobean age, he passionately falls in love with Sasha, the Russian ambassador's daughter. Her betrayal to him results in his first trance, which lasts for seven days. Then he completely devotes himself to literature, but again he is cheated by a p

Then he goes to Africa in order to escape from a woman, Archduchess Harriet Griselda¡¯s love. Here he changes his sex into female, however, the masculine opinion continues to influence her and makes her refuse to obey the rules that the society forces on woman-to take ¡°the sacred responsibilities of womanhood¡±, and she exclaims, ¡°What fools they make of us-what fools we are!¡±(P111)

As well as having masculine characteristics, Orlando shows feminine characteristics when he is still a male. His beauty and innocence deeply strikes Queen Elizabeth, who notices the beauty of his legs. Archduchess Harriet Griselda falls in love with him at the first sight of his portrait because it is the image of a sister of her who is long since dead. Also Orlando does not show strong longing for fame as other males do, instead he loves solitude, nature and literature, and, after experiencing Greene¡¯s ridicule of his tragedy he decides, ¡°I¡¯ll write, from this day forward, to please myself,¡± (P73) which coincides with Woolf¡¯s opinions that women¡¯s works should be read by themselves and judged by their special standard, but not the male¡¯s.

First, her thoughts deepen after the sex transformation. Her admiration towards her ancestors and their conquest turns into another feeling when she know the weakness of both sexes. She begins to realize that what her ancestors have done is meaningless: they just rob from the poor to make themselves richer and richer, their greediness makes them accumulate land and fortune by violence. In stead of being proud of this, she is ashamed for what her ancestors have done, and realizes that they are not heroes or great benefactors of human race.

This is the clear explanation of androgyny given by Woolf, and in Woman and fiction Woolf further explains this theory by taking androgyny as the appropriate attitude towards art and literature. On the one hand, she admits the female are different from the male, emphasizes the identity of women; ¡°It is probable, however, that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man. Thus, when a woman comes to write a novel, she will find that she is perpetually wishing to alter the established values-to make serious what appears insignificant.¡±(p5)On the other hand, she points out that a single-sex-minded is an obstacle to creating high-value works: ¡°The vision becomes too masculine or it becomes too feminine; it loses its perfect integrity and, with that, its most essential quality as a work of art.¡±(P5) Establishing a special standard for women art and literature, Woolf reveals the importance of combining the two sexes together, which is the essense of androgyny.

Some topics in this essay:
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