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The novel Orlando,6F (1928) by Virginia Wolf also deals with love with a foreigner, and that makes it similar with the couples of Mann and Brontë. Unlike them, in Orlando also mixture of sexes/genders takes place within the couple, and this opens a new door for analysis of the performance of the gender and its influences on the structure of the couple and the dynamics of the subjects within.
The first sentence from the Wolf’s novel is: “He, for there should be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of time did something to disguise it” – and this helps us to enter the essence of the novel in which the position of the sexes depends on the clothes that they are wearing. At the beginning of the novel, there is a scene, very indicative of the sign of the gender. It is a harsh winter, Orlando, who is 16 and lives on the court of Queen Elisabeth, meets the princess from Moscow. The winter is hard, everything is frozen, the ship of the Russian embassy is stuck on Thames and the queen organizes a reception for the members of the Russian embassy. The Russian fashion, says Wolf’s female narrator, is such that was used to cancel/ defeat/ de-signify the gender: their wide tunics and trousers, for which one could not say whether they were made for men or women, attracted Orlando.
The first meeting with the Moscow princess happens on the party on skates, where Orlando perceives a figure and is not sure whether it is a boy or a girl, but he is curiously attracted to him/her. When the figure passes closely by Orlando, he realizes that this person is a woman. This is the description of the first love adventure of the young Orlando with the princes from Moscow, Marushka.
I would like to state my definition of Wolf’s Orlando as a novel without gravity! My starting intuition about the absence of gravity in Wolf’s Orlando does not result only from the fact that Orlando lives 400 years and freely travels throughout centuries, as if the gravity doesn’t apply to him, but from the utter description of Orlando as someone with a “floating heart”. Wolf’s narrator says: “Under the summer ephemera, he wanted to feel the earth axis under himself” because he “felt the need to tie down his floating heart to something” (12) Absence of gravity is a condition that repeats in all crucial scenes of the novel. At the first gender confusion in the novel – when Orlando falls in love with the princess– no one walks and everyone skates, because the water on the river Thames is frozen, walking is impossible, and with it, time becomes timeless. The floating, the skating, isn’t only an external signal for not having a fixed identity, but more substantial form of the possible couple. The couple can only exist as a timeless couple. At the moment of defrosting of Thames gravitation is back and the love of Orlando and the princess from Moscow evaporates.
Orlando becomes a woman after a long dream, during his envoy service on the Orient. It is not a coincidence that the birth of the female subject is orientalized. Wolf criticizes not only the strict, fixed Western-European identity, which doesn’t allow the play with the fluctuating identities, especially gender identities, but also it is a criticism of the logo-centrism, ultimately always phallo-centric attitude for the female sexuality which is dislocated beforehand. In other words, the femininity is always in a place that no one can locate. The femininity is always in the area of the nonexistent, unknown, non-fixed, outside of the Language, the Order.
It’s been said that Orlando is a novel about the androgynous. For us, Orlando can only be defined not as the One in the Couple, but as the Couple in the One! As a subject, Orlando is always attracted by androgynous qualities, and he himself becomes a woman in the middle of the novel, who retains all the capacity to remember her male qualities. The androgynous in the novel is not only avoidance to make a choice, but also unification of the identities, because Orlando is not freed from the tyranny of the gender, but only freed of the tyranny of reference, of the mark of the gender, the clothes of the gender. The internal Orlando doesn’t cease to be the same person. The novel plays with the signifiers: not only the Russian, but also the Elizabethan fashion is used to cancel the gender, the differences that transform the essential binary combination: man– woman into multi-polarity, and ultimately to cancel the opposition of the Indo-European grammatology: being and non-being, in the sense that the one is never only one, as the dead is never only dead. In the novel, the queen Elizabeth leaves a message to Orlando: to remain young forever. This is an act of exchange of goods: The queen Elizabeth assigns to Orlando the highest honors and estate, and his task is never to grow old: He had to be son of her old age, hand of her weakness, an oak that she can lean her breakdown on “. In Sally Potter’s film – the filmed version of Wolf’s novel, Elizabeth poses Orlando a concrete task: to remain her son forever. This is not only a question of the Great Queen’s dream for immortality, a dream for loss of gravity, but also a dream for the timelessness of the couple: Mother– Son (The Queen– Orlando), the couple of lovers (Orlando– Marushka) Wolf gives an answer to the question ‘when does a couple become possible?’– a couple is possible when the dynamics of the identities in focus dies out, when the identity instability of the subject becomes its ontological position in the structure, and when the economy of love is no longer a force that is able to level the differences of the identities, but it is a force that confirms them in the phenomenon of the One.
Translated by: Panorea Buklevska
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6. Virginia Woolf: Orlando, 1928, (from the Serbian translation: IP Svetovi, Novi Sad, 1991).