Gender issues in the novel Orlando and its film adaptation: questions of sexual and gendered identity-ies

Universidade do Minho Instituto de Letras e Ciências Humanas Noémie Alloza julho de 2020 Gender Issues in the Novel Orlando and its Film Adaptation: Questions of Sexual and Gendered Identity/ies Noémie Alloza Gender Issues in the Novel Orlando and its Film Adaptation: Questions of Sexual and Gendered Identity/ies UMinho|2020 Universidade do Minho Instituto de Letras e Ciências Humanas Noémie Alloza julho de 2020 Gender Issues in the Novel Orlando and its Film Adaptation: Questions of Sexual and Gendered Identity/ies Trabalho efetuado sob a orientação da Professora Doutora Margarida Isabel Esteves Silva Pereira Dissertação de Mestrado Mestrado em Língua, Literatura e Cultura Inglesas ii DIREITOS DE AUTOR E CONDIÇÕES DE UTILIZAÇÃO DO TRABALHO POR TERCEIROS Este é um trabalho académico que pode ser utilizado por terceiros desde que respeitadas as regras e boas práticas internacionalmente aceites, no que concerne aos direitos de autor e direitos conexos. Assim, o presente trabalho pode ser utilizado nos termos previstos na licença abaixo indicada. Caso o utilizador necessite de permissão para poder fazer um uso do trabalho em condições não previstas no licenciamento indicado, deverá contactar o autor, através do RepositóriUM da Universidade do Minho. Licença concedida aos utilizadores deste trabalho Atribuição-CompartilhaIgual CC BY-SA https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ iii Acknowledgments Firstly, I want to thank Mrs Margarida Isabel Esteves Silva Pereira, professor at the University of Minho, for her understanding towards my situation, for her patience, her advice and her availability. I want to thank the staff of the University of Minho, particularly the staff of the library, and the staff of the university library Paris 8, of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) and of the library of Cachan, for their help. Lastly, I want to thank my family, particularly my mother and my cousin, for their emotional support and each person of my circle for their constructive criticism. iv STATEMENT OF INTEGRITY I hereby declare having conducted this academic work with integrity. I confirm that I have not used plagiarism or any form of undue use of information or falsification of results along the process leading to its elaboration. I further declare that I have fully acknowledged the Code of Ethical Conduct of the University of Minho. v Gender Issues in the Novel Orlando and its Film Adaptation: Questions of Sexual and Gendered Identity/ies Abstract This thesis deals with gender issues in Orlando by Virginia Woolf and its film adaptation by Sally Potter. It aims at studying the social place of women through the centuries, the implications of the change of sex, the construction of an identity and the fluidity of gender and sexuality. The change of sex, and by extension of gender, lived by Orlando (who was inspired in the person of Vita Sackville-West) is a way to reveal her own identity, her true self. Reading Orlando , one wonders if the gender identity defines the identity of a person, if the gender can reveal an identity. We will deal with these questions with reference to gender theory and criticism, namely, framing the analysis within the work of Judith Butler. Moreover, the originality of the character Orlando, who becomes a woman after being a man, reinforces the ambiguity of the identity and leads one to ask oneself about the representation of the sexual and gendered identity, male and then female, and about the differences in the treatment of a man and a woman, both in writing and in film. It seems fundamental to reflect upon androgyny, since Orlando could represent an androgynous mind. The fact that Orlando begins in the end of the sixteenth century and finishes in the twentieth century presents a good illustration for the study of the representation of an identity through the centuries; one can understand the impact of the centuries on an individual, firstly male, then, female. Finally, Orlando accounts for the place of the woman through the centuries and it seems relevant to mention that Virginia Woolf was a feminist. As such she might expose some of her ideas in her work and writing the story of Orlando is a way to show the differences between the genders and the inequities lived by the women over time. Keywords : androgyny, gender, identity, Orlando, sexuality. vi Questões de género no romance Orlando e na adaptação cinematográfica: questões de identidade(s) sexual e de género Resumo Esta dissertação trata de questões de género em Orlando de Virginia Woolf e na adaptação cinematográfica de Sally Potter. Visa estudar o lugar social das mulheres ao longo dos séculos, as implicações da mudança de sexo, a construção de uma identidade e a fluidez de gênero e sexualidade. A mudança de sexo, e por extansão, de género, vivida por Orlando (que foi inspirado na pessoa de Vita Sackville-West) é uma maneira de revelar a sua própria identidade, o verdadeiro ser. Lendo Orlando , nós perguntamo-nos se a identidade de género define a identidade de uma pessoa, se o género pode revelar uma identidade. Trataremos dessas questões com referência à teoria e à crítica de gênero, enquadrando a análise no trabalho de Judith Butler. Parece fundamental refletir sobre essas noções de identidade e género mas também sobre a androginia, dado que Orlando poderia representar uma mente andrógina. Além disso, a originalidade do personagem Orlando, que se torna mulher depois de ser homem, reforça a ambiguidade de identidade e leva-nos a questionar a representação da identidade sexual e de género, masculina e feminina, tanto na escrita como em filme . O facto de Orlando começar no final do século XVI e terminar no século XX apresenta uma boa ilustração para o estudo da representação de uma identidade ao longo dos séculos; pode-se entender o impacto dos séculos em um indivíduo, primeiro homem e depois mulher. Finalmente, Orlando explica o lugar da mulher ao longo dos séculos e parece relevante mencionar que Virginia Woolf era feminista. Como tal, ela pode expor algumas de suas idéias em seu trabalho e escrever a história de Orlando é uma maneira de mostrar as diferenças entre os sexos e as desigualdades vividas pelas mulheres ao longo do tempo. Palavras-chave : androginia, género, identidade, Orlando, sexualidade. vii Contents table Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 1 1. How and why was Orlando written? ....................................................................................... 4 1.a) Contextual setting ........................................................................................................................ 4 1.b) Gender issues in the novel ........................................................................................................... 6 2. The reconstruction of Orlando’s identity ............................................................................. 14 2.a) The notions of sexual and gendered identities ............................................................................ 14 2.b) How Orlando changed by becoming a woman ............................................................................ 19 3. The fluidity of gendered and sexual identities .................................................................... 24 3.a) Gender is a construction ............................................................................................................ 24 3.b) The notion of androgyny ............................................................................................................ 28 3.c) Sexuality and gender.................................................................................................................. 40 4. The film adaptation Orlando .................................................................................................. 47 4.a) Purposes of Sally Potter and her choice of actors ....................................................................... 47 4.b) Focus on the gender issues ....................................................................................................... 51 Conclusion..................................................................................................................................... 57 References .................................................................................................................................... 60 Appendix ........................................................................................................................................ 63 viii List of Figures Figure 1: A photograph of the agender Tyler Ford, an agender ........................................................... 63 Figure 2: A photograph of the actress of Orlando, Tilda Swinton ........................................................ 64 Figure 3: The scene of the change of sex in the film .......................................................................... 64 Figure 4: Extracts from the screenplay and the script of the film Orlando ........................................... 65 Figure 5: A photography of Tilda Swinton, which shows her androgynous appearance ........................ 72 7 and then in writing, especially poetry. For this very reason he invited the poet Nicholas Greene who mocked him and wrote a satire about him, after that Orlando declared: “I have done with men.” (Woolf, 1993, p. 67). He devoted his life to his dogs, to nature and to his house until his meeting with the mysterious Archduchess Harriet, who will be discussed later. Due to this meeting Orlando preferred to run away and become Ambassador in Constantinople. It was during this period that he changed sex. The night after his crowning as a Duke, Orlando married a gipsy dancer and remained asleep for the second time, but this time, he woke up as a woman. As told by the biographer “Orlando remained precisely as he had been.” (Woolf, 1993, p. 98) This change of sex impacted only the sex of the character, not his/her identity. The rest of the story, Orlando’s life as a woman, will be explained later, but at the end of the novel Orlando became a mother and a writer, she published her poem ‘The Oak Tree’ and won a Prize. For a better understanding of the dissertation, one needs some kind of summary of the gender issues present in the novel. First of all, as a boy, that is, as a male, Orlando inherited the monastic house through his father’s inheritance, his mother was not even mentioned because of her gender, as a woman she could not inherit the property. At the age of Queen Elizabeth I, the women, particularly in the gentry, depended on their family and then on their husband. Virginia Woolf wanted to show the inequality of the female dependence on men, which she discussed in her essay A Room of One’s Own . Firstly, the intellectual dependence – “nothing could be expected of women intellectually” (Woolf, 1995, p. 61); secondly, the social dependence – “they [the women of fiction] are shown in their relation to men” (Woolf, 1995, p. 88); and, finally, the financial dependence which she denounced by taking the example of Mrs Seton and her mother (Woolf, 1995, p. 31): in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money they earned. It is only for the last forty-eight years that Mrs Seton has had a penny of her own. For all the centuries before that it would have been her husband’s property. Even if a woman earned money, this money would be her husband’s property, thus it was impossible for a woman to have her own money in the nineteenth century (“about the year 1860”). Virginia Woolf was probably inspired by the story of Mrs Seton when she wrote Orlando, since as a woman she could not possess her money and her property, she would depend on her husband or on their male heirs or she would lose all that she had. To come back to the life of Orlando, when he was still a young man, shortly after the death of his father, the Queen made him her Treasurer and Steward and considered him her son. Orlando had this privilege thanks to his sex, because as a young girl he would never have been the protégé of the Queen. At the Court, he was predestined to an ambitious career but he got lost 8 because of love, as one will see later. Virginia Woolf approached the question of gender from a social and cultural point of view but also from a physical point of view. In the novel the motif of Orlando’s legs is indeed recurrent, even as a young man, and the biographer often wrote about this physical aspect of Orlando, but the other characters are also fascinated by his legs, particularly women, as the Queen Elizabeth I or the King’s mistress. For example, when he went to Constantinople to become an Ambassador, Nell Gwyn, the King’s mistress, stated that it was “a thousand pities (…) that such a pair of legs should leave the country.” (Woolf, 1993, p. 83). When he became Duke the envious people told it was thanks to his legs, so everyone was obsessed by his legs, and besides, from the very first pages, the biographer reinforced the beauty of his legs: “the shapely legs, the handsome body” (Woolf, 1993, p.12), “a pair of the finest legs that a young nobleman has ever stood upright upon” (Woolf, 1993, p.17). As a woman, her legs became an object of desire that she should keep covered because of men, she indeed almost killed a man when she showed off her calf aboard the Enamoured Lady, and here again the biographer mentioned that “her legs were among her chiefest beauties” (Woolf, 1993, p.110). It is interesting that, even if as a man he already had beautiful legs, it is only as a woman that her legs become a body part she had to cover, it becomes almost dangerous to show them. In this case the gender is connected with the sexuality, the same attributes - the legs - are handled differently depending on the gender and on the sex. Besides his legs, Orlando had a “manly charm” (Woolf, 1993, p.17), a body made, in a way, to fight and as a little boy and then as a man, he always admired his elders for their war careers. At the age of sixteen he already imitated them and trained by slice a head of a Moor in his attic room and “he vowed” (Woolf, 1993, p.11) that he would go to war, as they did. Once adult, he became Ambassador and even Duke, “he did what any other young man would have done in his place” (Woolf, 1993, p.82), therefore it was logical to become an Ambassador in relation to his sex and his social rank. Orlando indeed belonged to an affluent family and as a young man he had to represent his family by going to war and by becoming Ambassador abroad. By making Orlando Ambassador, Virginia Woolf questions gender at ‘work’. Indeed, Orlando could be Ambassador because he was a man, if he were a woman at this time, he would be obliged to stay at home and take care of the house and the family. Virginia Woolf denounces this inequality in her essay “Professions for Women” (Woolf, 2015, p. 192): I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and 9 wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her — you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it — in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all — I need not say it —-she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty — her blushes, her great grace. In those days — the last of Queen Victoria — every house had its Angel. (…) Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: “My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.” And she made as if to guide my pen. (…) I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in selfdefence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must — to put it bluntly — tell lies if they are to succeed. Here, Virginia Woolf explains that to be able to write, thus to work, she had to kill the Angel in the House. She explains to her audience, who probably did not know the figure of the Angel because it existed more in the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, that the Angel in the House prevented women from working and earning money on their own. She describes the Angel as “intensely sympathetic”, “immensely charming” and “utterly unselfish”, this is the description of the ‘perfect’ woman and wife at the time. She emphasises that the Angel in the House sacrificed herself for her family and never had a mind of her own, she always followed her husband or her father’s mind. She adds that the Angel of the House is defined by her purity, thus she could not write about subjects as human relations or sex; moreover it would be necessary to have a personal opinion, which the Angel does not have. At the age of the Queen Victoria, in the nineteenth century, almost all the women were the Angel in the House, they could not work, or even have an opinion because they had to be dedicated 10 to their husbands and their children. In Orlando , Virginia Woolf alludes to the Angel in the House, since Orlando, as a woman, had to find a husband with the aim to keep her own property. She is dependent on the men, as the Angel in the House. The fact that Orlando lived through the centuries enables Virginia Woolf to show these inequalities suffered by the women and the gender inequalities in the nineteenth century. Even if Orlando inherited the monastic house, she could not own it as a woman. As mentioned previously, Orlando was from a wealthy family, even a royal family since his father inherited from the Queen Elizabeth I, but this rank did not have only benefits and he realised it as a man and even more as a woman. As a young man he could not write poetry because he had to fight for England and furthermore it was not seen as honourable, it was more reserved to the poor. So he was mocked, he had to read and write poetry in secret. But if during that period - the sixteenth century - Orlando had been a woman and had wanted to write poetry it would have been worse, as explained by Virginia Woolf in her essay A Room of One’s Own : “To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her.” (Woolf, 1995, p.57) and she reinforced this idea by writing that “no woman could have written poetry then.” (Woolf, 1995, p.65). However, Orlando succeeded in writing poetry as a woman, but only in the twentieth century, as if her immortality and her change of sex had been aimed at the opportunity of publishing her poem ‘The Oak Tree’. But, in the nineteenth century, as a woman she lost the properties she inherited as a man; she had the same rights as a dead man. Virginia Woolf used the change of sex, in part, to prove the inequalities between men and women, and this loss of property showed the unfairness of the law for the women at that time. Orlando changed sex at the age of thirty, when he was Duke, after sleeping a whole week. The first time he slept for a week, it was after his love disappointment with the Russian Princess, Orlando “showed no consciousness of any such trance” (Woolf, 1993, p.48) even if it seemed that he forgot a part of his past. The biographer reflected upon this sleep and made an interesting assumption, he asked “had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again?” (Woolf, 1993, p.49) If this sleep is a sort of death, the awakening would be a rebirth. In the case of his second sleep, if one considers the biographer’s theory, Orlando revives, he was born a second time, with a different sex, perhaps he was born with the wrong sex, he had to revive to be his/her true self, with the sex that corresponds to her. Even if the sex does not define his/her identity, one feels that Orlando could be herself more as a woman than as a man. But when he changed sex, at first, there were no changes in her personality or even in her identity, in the film she says “Same person. No difference at all. Just a different sex.” (Potter, 1992). So, Orlando changed sex when she woke as a woman, after sleeping for a week, but she 11 realized this change aboard the Enamoured Lady, few weeks later. She indeed stayed with the gipsies, where thinking was poorly looked, before returning to England, and for the first time during the trip she took time to think about her change of sex. She began to realize “the penalties and the privileges of her position” (Woolf, 1993, p.108). Thus the position of being a woman, she listed the obligations of women but also the pleasures of being a woman and she deduced that the “greater ecstasy” (Woolf, 1993, p.109) is the woman’s; she also understood the power she had over the other sex, the men, when she showed her calf unintentionally and caused the fall of a sailor. Virginia Woolf used Orlando’s awareness to illustrate the thoughts that everyone had of women in the eighteenth century, as the fact that the women needed the men to be rescued, that they could not swear, that they had to spend hours getting ready, and Orlando finished by emphasizing “All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour out tea and ask my lords how they like it” (Woolf, 1993, p.113). Once again, the author denounced the women’s dependence on men, the women were made only to serve the men, to ‘pour out’ their tea. Then, on her arrival in England, Orlando discovered that she was a party to three major suits and she could lose her properties, firstly because she was considered as dead, secondly because she was a woman, thirdly because she was married and his wife Rosina Pepita from Constantinople had three sons who wanted to inherit the properties. The biographer insisted ironically that the fact she was dead “amount[ed] to much the same thing” (Woolf, 1993, p.119) as being a woman. In this way, Virginia Woolf showed how little rights women had and the inequities between men and women because as a man Orlando inherited properties, which she lost as a woman and because a woman had the same rights as a dead man. Then, the lawsuits decided that her sex was female and thus her properties were addressed to “the heirs male of [her] body” (Woolf, 1993, p.176), since she was engaged to Shelmerdine and did not have son, she kept her properties at the moment. To return to Orlando’s love stories, before meeting her husband, when Orlando was still a man, he met an unusual woman, the Archduchess Harriet Griselda, who he began to fell in love with, and it was for that reason that he ran away to Constantinople. But when Orlando came back as a woman the Archduchess confessed that she was a man, the Archduke Harry and explained “that he was a man and always had been one; that he had seen a portrait of Orlando and fallen hopelessly in love with him; that to compass his ends, he had dressed as a woman and (…) that he had heard of her change” (Woolf, 1993, p.126). This is interesting because, in a way, the Archduke also changed of sex, but voluntarily in order to seduce Orlando. The Archduke impersonated the Archduchess through his clothes, and shortly after Orlando did the same to look like a man. One night, Orlando decided to dress with his old man’s clothes and “dressed in it she looked the very figure of a noble Lord” (Woolf, 1993, 12 p.149). After that, she liked to change frequently of clothes, sometimes she dressed with woman’s clothes, sometimes with man’s clothes, she played an ambiguity game. She decided, as it were, her own sex, her own gender, through clothes. It also shows how, in the eighteenth century, clothes defined categories, as the social class or even the gender. By changing her clothes Orlando made fun of social codes, her clothes did not define her identity but in the eyes of society she is treated differently and she even changed her sexual orientation, as one will see later. Thus, as a woman, Orlando frequented two social classes completely different, on the one hand the good literary society of London, one the other hand the prostitutes. At her arrival in England she began to be part of London society but she got quickly bored and felt disgusted. However, she kept fascinated by the poets, especially Addison, Swift and Pope, she indeed began to invite Mr. Pope at her home after a reception and continued by living in the company of the three poets, but it did not go on for a long time and after they left, Orlando chose to dress as a young man. It is dressed as a man that she would meet Nell, a prostitute who thought that Orlando was a man and therefore a client. After this misunderstanding the two women became friends and Nell invited Orlando in her own society: “These poor creatures, (…), for Nell brought Prue, and Prue Kitty, and Kitty Rose, had a society of their own of which they now elected her a member.” (Woolf, 1993, p.152). In this society she stayed only with women, who did not belong to her social class. For the first time she made friends with women. Thanks to this experience, she learned a lot about her sex, that allowed her better knowledge of the women and thus of herself. But with the arrival of the nineteenth century Orlando experienced a sort of pressure, the spirit of the century obliged her to find a husband, she began to see wedding rings everywhere she went, she became obsessed with the idea of marriage and to relieve herself she said “I have found my mate (…) I am nature’s bride” (Woolf, 1993, p.170). But she finally met Shelmerdine with whom she engaged. This pressure seemed to be reserved to the women, it is because Orlando is a woman at this moment that she was concerned to find a husband. During his/her life Orlando had two important love stories, one as a man and one as a woman, but he also had several love experiences, one of them was when she began to change clothes and seemed either a woman or a man. This experience is more important than others because she took advantage of her androgynous appearance to try the loves of both sexes. First, Orlando met the Russian Princess Sasha, and it is interesting to mention that when he saw her for the first time, he thought Sasha was a boy: “a boy it must be (…) the person was of his own sex” (Woolf, 1993, p.26). The ambiguity of Sasha’s gender connects with the ambiguity of Orlando’s gender, Orlando could indeed pose as a man only by changing of clothes. Then, Orlando met Shelmerdine, just as she was desperate to find a 13 husband, and fell instantly in love with him, or perhaps because of the social pressure she convinced herself that she was in love. The day after their meeting they simultaneously cry “You’re a woman, Shel!” and “You’re a man, Orlando!” (Woolf, 1993, p.174) and a few days later they had the same conversation (Woolf, 1993, p.178): Are you positive you aren’t a man?’ he would ask anxiously, and she would echo, ‘Can it be possible you’re not a woman?’ and then they must put it to the proof without more ado. For each was so surprised at the quickness of the other’s sympathy, and it was to each such 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, that they had to put the matter to the proof at once. They understood each other so well that they thought they were the same gender. If one takes their line of argument, one could conclude that two persons might be of the same gender to really understand each other, for this reason Orlando considered that Shelmerdine could not be a man but a woman and Shelmerdine considered that Orlando was a man. What is even more interesting is that Orlando was actually a man before meeting Shelmerdine but when she met him she felt herself a woman, since she asked if he was not a woman, so much so that she had a feeling that he was like her, he understood her, so he had to be of the same gender, that is female. To conclude this summary of the gender issues in the novel one has to come back to the ‘present’ time of writing when Orlando succeeded to publish her poem. In fact, since childhood Orlando was fascinated by poetry. at the age of sixteen years, during the Queen’s visit, he “stopped dead” (Woolf, 1993, p.16), staring at a man who, according to him, was writing poetry, he already was attracted to literature and specifically to poetry. Throughout his/her life Orlando wrote a lot and particularly the poem “The Oak Tree”. This was the only text she kept for his/her-self the whole life, most of the time carried it on herself. The change of sex and her immortality helped her to publish this poem, because as a man, and with his rank, Orlando could not be a writer, he had to be in the service of the Court and of his country; as a woman of the twentieth century, she could write without being mocked, the change was consequently positive for her writing. She could become a writer as a woman but not as a man due to the social codes. Virginia Woolf chose to write a ‘biography’, which is in reality a novel, to depart from her serious works, but finally Orlando discusses serious subjects as women’s rights, love, sexuality and gender. The change of sex of Orlando enables the author to mention the gender inequalities and to approach gender and call into question the legitimacy of this notion. The notion of identity is also called into question, as it will be seen in the second section. 14 2. The reconstruction of Orlando’s identity This second part will focus on the notion of identity, particularly on the ‘female’ identity, how the change of sex of Orlando led to a gendered identity and how this identity has been ‘constructed’. This part will show how an identity could be socially constructed but how it could also be reconstructed, since this is an individual feeling. 2.a) The notions of sexual and gendered identities The notion of identity is a noticeably broad concept that this thesis will try to enlighten through the novel and the eponymous film Orlando . First of all, the notion of identity should be constantly called into question, since it defines a human being, always moving, always changing, always evolving. This thesis will focus on the sexual identity and the gendered identity. Firstly, the sexual identity might be the notion more complicated to explain, each person could indeed have one’s own idea of the sexual identity and what it represents. But one could not define the sexual identity without mentioning the body, which is the essence of sex and sexuality, as recalled by the theorist Judith Butler. She explains in her book Gender Trouble (Butler, 2006, p.12) that: “the body” appears as a passive medium on which cultural meanings are inscribed or as the instrument through which an appropriative and interpretive will determines a cultural meaning for itself. In either case, the body is figured as a mere instrument or medium for which a set of cultural meanings are only externally related. But “the body” is itself a construction, as are the myriad “bodies” that constitute the domain of gendered subjects. Bodies cannot be said to have a signifiable existence prior to the mark of their gender. As gender the body is defined by the theorist as a construction. And, the fact that the bodies could not have a signifiable existence prior to the mark of their gender would mean that the gender is marked on the bodies and does not depend upon the sex. It gets particularly interesting with the story of Orlando because, in some ways, Orlando’s body is the only concrete thing that becomes different with the change of sex. After the change it remains the same person, the body is in a way what makes the change, it switches between male attributes and female attributes, the body is thus marked by the gender, as specified by Judith Butler in the quote above. The body is also attached to the sexuality, since it embodies the human being with one’s sexuality, as explained by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (Beauvoir, 2009, p.80): “The existent is a sexed body; in its relations with other existents that are also sexed bodies, sexuality is thus always involved; but as the body and sexuality are concrete 15 expressions of existence”. According to Beauvoir’s theory, the body and the sexuality would be the expression of the identity and the human being would be a sexed body, that is, one would be a subject guided by one’s sexuality and by one’s sexual relationships to others. The sexual identity could also be connected to the sexual orientation, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, etc., and here again Orlando experiences different types of sexuality, his and then her relationships are central in the construction of his/ her identity. As highlighted previously in the first section, Orlando had two important love stories, one with a woman when he was a man, Sasha, and one with a man when she was a woman, Shelmerdine, but she also experienced the love of both sexes when she was a woman, that is, she experienced homosexuality. In fact, even before beginning Orlando , Virginia Woolf already had the idea of writing about women’s homosexuality, she indeed wrote in her diary: “Sapphism is to be suggested.” (Woolf, 1982, p.131) when she was thinking about the writing of her new book. It is interesting that the homosexuality is approached only when Orlando is a woman (even if it was subtly evoked as a man), as if the change of sex allowed her to be freer about her sexuality. Furthermore, Virginia Woolf might experience homosexuality with Vita Sackville-West and since the novel is inspired by her, it seems a way to pay tribute to their special relationship and to show that love and sexuality are not a question of gender. Finally, the homosexuality is more accepted between two women than between two men, even more at the time when Orlando was a man, and the fact that he was a noble reinforced this unacceptance. The author showed that a man of his rank and his time could not choose his sexuality, and even his partners, since he was judged when he fell in love with Sasha, who was not a respectable English woman of the Court. The sexual identity is indeed complex and comprises several aspects as the body, the relationships, the sexuality and the freedom to be oneself. Then, one cannot take an interest in the sexual identity without take an interest in the gender identity, both are complementary. The gendered identity becomes recently a topical issue and is increasingly at the heart of the discussions nowadays. According to the Oxford dictionary5 the gender identity is a person’s understanding of having a particular gender, which may or may not correspond to the assumed gender assigned to them at birth. In this way, the gendered identity could be an identity felt and chosen by each one, each person having one’s own vision of one’s gender. The gender identity could also be a construction, a sort of creation, if one considers Judith Butler’s theory about gender, it would be a 5 https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/gender_identity 16 concept presupposed and not fixed. In that case, the notion of gender is completely reinvented, each one could have one’s own perception of the gender. The theorist calls into question the notions of sex and gender and wonders: “is there “a” gender which persons are said to have, or is it an essential attribute that a person is said to be?” (Butler, 2006, p.10). This distinction between have and be demonstrates that the gender could be seen as a personality trait or as a part of the body. If one has a gender it would mean that one’s gender belongs to one’s body but if a person is a gender it would mean that one’s gender is what makes one oneself, the gender would define a person. Judith Butler develops this idea of being a gender, clarifying that it cannot be exhaustive (Butler, 2006, p.4): If one “is” a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered “person” transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. Here, she highlights the exhaustiveness of being a gender, one is much more than one’s gender and she defines what makes an identity, as the race, the class, the ethnicity, the sexuality, the regionality and the gender, one could add the nationality, the religion, the education but this list could not be exhaustive. In her book Undoing Gender , she came back more specifically to this distinction between have or be a gender and wrote (Butler, 2004, p.42): Gender is not exactly what one “is” nor is it precisely what one “has”. Gender is the apparatus by which the production and normalization of masculine and feminine take place along with the interstitial forms of hormonal, chromosomal, psychic, and performative that gender assumes. Here she explained that gender could not neither ‘be’ nor ‘have’ because it is not concrete, it is a sort of mechanism which could not work on its own. To come back to Orlando and to what makes an identity, in the novel, the reader could understand Orlando’s identity since he knows about his/her race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender etc. but the gender changes during the novel and that involves a change of her class and also of her sexuality. So, her identity is reconsidered and, in some ways, reconstructed. The notion of gender is thus an essential component of the concept of identity, which leads up Judith Butler to wonder (Butler, 2006, p. 23): To what extent do regulatory practices of gender formation and division constitute identity, the internal coherence of the subject, indeed, the self-identical status of the person? To what extent 23 are almost always complementary. In a way, Orlando adapted himself/herself to his/her sexed body. When he changed of sex ‘he’ became a ‘she’ but also a woman. Simone de Beauvoir explains how one becomes woman (Beauvoir, 2009, p.330): One is not born, but rather becomes, woman. No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine. The French philosopher tries to show that it is civilization which defines being a woman. Once again, the social and cultural norms – the civilization – define what a woman is. The notion of woman and more broadly of gender are determined by the codes of the society. But as outlined by the theorist Judith Butler, this concept of norms is not so simple, she takes the example of gender regulations, the fact that gender is normed, standardized, institutionalized and wonders how gender could be regulated (Butler, 2004, p.40-41): If gender were to exist prior to its regulation, we could then take gender as our theme and proceed to enumerate the various kinds of regulations to which it is subjected and the ways in which that subjection takes place. The problem, however, for us is more acute. After all, is there a gender that preexists its regulation, or is it the case that, in being subject to regulation, the gendered subject emerges, produced in and through that particular form of subjection? Is subjection not the process by which regulations produce gender? One indeed does not know if the norm is prior to gender or if gender is prior to its norm. If the notion of gender is only a regulated norm one could wonder how it will evolve since a norm changes with time and society and how some people get rid of the norm. The notions of identity, of gender, of sexuality, of sex, of body are notions of which each individual has his/her own vison, his/her own definition, it is consequently difficult to suggest a common definition but by combining a lot of theorists’, philosophers’, authors’ opinions one is able to understand that the sexual and gendered identities are conditioned by the society. However, these identities are fluid. 24 3. The fluidity of gendered and sexual identities As said above the gendered and sexual identities are fluid, this thesis will demonstrate how and why. 3.a) Gender is a construction As established in the previous sections the notion of gender is a norm which follows some social and cultural codes, in that case this is a construction. But if gender casts the norms off, it would be a personal, individual feeling, in that case gender is fluid. To illustrate how gender could be a construction, the theorist Judith Butler mentions the distinction between sex and gender and the construction of the binarity of gender (Butler, 2006, p.8-9): the distinction between sex and gender serves the argument that whatever biological intractability sex appears to have, gender is culturally constructed: hence, gender is neither the causal result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex. (…) If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of “men” will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that “women” will interpret only female bodies. Further, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution (which will become a question), there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two. The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it. When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a freefloating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one. Firstly, the theorist reminds that gender is not fixed as the sex and that the anatomy/the body does not define the gender. Regarding the body, she explains that a female body could belong to a man as a male body could belong to a woman. The distinction between sex and gender indeed enable the gender to be different of the sexed body and not mirror the sex. Secondly, she reminds that gender is culturally constructed and also culturally presupposed because it does not result of sex, it is binary because of the binarity of the sexes – the sexed bodies – but there is no physical reason – morphology, anatomy – 25 to have only two genders which correspond with the two sexes. As said above, gender does not have to mirror sex, those are the social codes that imposed this restricted vision. Furthermore, gender is a construction since it conforms to social and cultural conventions which encourage thinking the binarity as the normalcy. About normalcy, the sexual orientation also was and still is restricted to heterosexuality, there are indeed a lot of people who do not dare assume their sexuality due to other people’s opinions, even nowadays. This notion of normalcy excludes all of those who are non-binaries and/or who are not heterosexuals. In Undoing Gender , Judith Butler gave the example of intersex children to illustrate the negative aspect of this notion of normalcy (Butler, 2004, p.4): “consider the intersex opposition to the widespread practice of performing coercive surgery on infants and children with sexually indeterminate or hermaphroditic anatomy in the name of normalizing these bodies.”. She explained later in the book the “case of a person who was determined without difficulty to be a boy at the time of birth, then determined again within a few months to be a girl, who decided in his teenage years to become a man” (Butler, 2004, p.58-59), this case highlights two important aspects of this notion of normalcy. Firstly, the sex and also the gender of the child, David Reimer, was determined by the doctors because of this principle of normalcy, David indeed lost a major portion of his penis so it was decided for him that it would be better to remove the rest of the penis and his testicles and to be a girl. Even if (s)he did not have a boy’s body David still felt as a boy so the doctor wanted him to take female hormones. According to the doctor, to be normal meant to feel as a girl since he had a girl’s body and anatomy. Secondly, it is related with the first aspect, the doctors forced the child to have a defined gender since it is abnormal to have a body which does not correspond to the gender. As a matter of fact, the child did not have, strictly speaking, sex because of the loss of a significant part of his male genital but he was not a girl neither because he did not have a vagina. The doctor decided for him that he would be a girl because he thought he would be happier with a concrete sex and thus a gender. If the doctor had this thought it is due to the social and cultural codes, the norms whereby the normalcy is to be a girl or a boy, is to have/be a gender. Then, this notion of normalcy could be almost dangerous for those who do not fit in this normalcy as the transsexuals, the transgenders, the agender persons because they could feel obliged to choose a gender or worse still, they could feel rejected, abnormal. Judith Butler mentioned an “oppressive social world for the otherwise gendered and for sexual minorities of all kinds” (Butler, 2004, p.25). The human-beings indeed need the acceptance of society and of the others, even when they think they do not, it is in the nature of human beings. Judith Butler approached this theory by writing about the ‘longing for recognition’ of the human beings and explained that recognition “is the condition under which the human subject achieves psychic self- 26 understanding and acceptance” (Butler, 2004, p.131). The recognition is the fact that the human being wants to be reflected on the other and wants to be understood by the other. Due to this need of recognition the human being could fake her/his attitude to fit what society expects of one’s gender. In this way, gender is constructed also by the human beings who follow the social norms. This idea is represented in Orlando , when Orlando, dressed as a man, meets Nell the prostitute who will become her friend. At the moment of the meeting, both were acting what it is expected of their gender. Orlando, because he was dressed as a man, acted as a man and “swept her hat off to her in the manner of a gallant paying his addresses to a lady of fashion in a public place” (Woolf, 1993, p.150); and Nell, because she thought that she was in the presence of a man, behaved as a sensitive and feminine woman: “through this silver glaze the young woman looked up at him (for a man he was to her) appealing, hoping, trembling, fearing” (Woolf, 1993, p.150). The narrator specifies that Nell believed that Orlando was a man, and that was for this reason she behaved like this. But just as she discovered that Orlando was actually of the same sex, that she was also a woman, she changed: “it was remarkable how soon, on discovering that they were of the same sex, her manned changed and she dropped her plaintive, appealing ways” (Woolf, 1993, p.151). This scene illustrates the fact that men and women behave differently towards their interlocutor according to their gender, as a man Orlando had to be courteous with a woman and as a woman Nell had to exaggerate her femininity in front of a man. It is the society – the social and cultural codes – that make human beings behave in a certain way so one’s behaviour is socially and culturally influenced. Virginia Woolf, by writing this scene, criticized this ‘influence’ of the society and showed that gender is acting, that it is a performance. Virginia Woolf indeed put forward the idea of the performativity of gender even before Judith Butler’s theory about gender as a performance and that is why it is interesting to analyse this theory. The theorist writes in the preface of Gender Trouble (Butler, 2006, p. xv): the performativity of gender revolves around this metalepsis, the way in which the anticipation of a gendered essence produces that which it posits as outside itself. (…) performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration. She explains that gender is mainly performed out of habit, it is a repetition of what society and culture expect of a particular gender that becomes a performed habit. She reinforces this idea when she writes that “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results” (Butler, 2006, p.34). The gendered identity is performative since gender expressions are performative. This notion of performativity is linked 27 with the notion of habitus explained by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as a mediation between social and cultural practices and the objective structures of the social spheres in which they take place7. The notion of habitus refers to the fact that as human one learns by socializing and observing other human beings, their behaviour, their way of speaking but it brings out the social inequalities, because it separates people depending on their social classes. Each one behaves according to what she/he thinks ‘normal’, that is, what she/he observed during her/his childhood and then during adulthood. The same phenomenon occurs with the performativity of gender, since one learns that gender is binary one would behave in accordance with this binarity, one would perform one’s gender even if it is not what one feels. Everyone is, to a certain extent, influenced by what she sees around, on-screen, online, in magazines, all these images conveyed by the society and which become a norm. In this case, the norm is a social standard, particularly for the women, an image of an ideal woman who would be feminine, attractive, discreet, etc. but this image leads women to feel inferior, ‘not enough’ and reduce the female gender to this ideal. Pierre Bourdieu, however, explains in Language and Symbolic Power that this norm is selfconsciously followed (as cited in Butler, 1997, p. 134-135): All symbolic domination presupposes, on the part of those who submit to it, a form of complicity which is neither passive submission to external constraint nor a free adherence to values. The recognition of the legitimacy of the official language has nothing in common with an explicitly professed, deliberate and revocable belief, or with an intentional act of accepting a 'norm.' Here P. Bourdieu writes about the language, but his theory can apply to any kind of norm. Even if it is not intentional, one accepts the norm, one becomes accomplice of the acceptation of the norm and contributes to normalize it, each one is the subject of the norm before being an object. According to this point of view, the norm is essentially created in the society by the human beings, more than by the society itself. As regards gender norms, the same phenomenon appears. Each one behaves according to what he thinks is the norm, thus does not reflect upon the notion of gender, what it could be if it was not binary. The notion of gender becomes socially and culturally normative, as the notion of sexuality – but which begins to emancipate from its norms. In Gender Trouble , Judith Butler explains that sexuality and gender norms are linked and the fact that the notion of sexuality is less and less normative leads to a profound questioning of the notion of gender. To stress her point, the author draws from Gayle Rubin who seeks to “establish that normative sexuality fortifies normative gender” (Butler, 2006, p. xi). The norms of gender are indeed reinforced by the norms of sexuality, since the sexuality of a human being 7 https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/habitus/2-l-habitus-selon-pierre-bourdieu/ 28 is part of one’s gender identity. The norm whereby ‘normal’ sexuality is heterosexuality – a man with a woman leads one to define gender in accordance with this binarity a male and a female, masculine and feminine and creates a sort of anxiety, as Judith Butler explains: “the fear of losing one’s place in gender or of not knowing who one will be if one sleeps with someone of the ostensibly “same” gender” (Butler, 2006, p. xi). For the reason that sexuality and gender are intrinsically linked, if someone reflects upon his/her sexuality he/she will unconsciously reflect upon his/her gender and could call into question his/her own gender with respect to his/her sexuality. If one is not heterosexual, one could wonder if one’s gender corresponds to oneself, one could also be afraid of being rejected by the society and question society’s norms. But nowadays sexuality norms begin to change: homosexuality, transsexuality begin to be accepted and be included in the norms, with the homosexual marriage for example. In that sense, gender norms are also called into question; if one is recognised as a transsexual, one could be recognised as a transgender or an agender/genderless person. One could be genderless but one could also be both genders and be androgynous. 3.b) The notion of androgyny In Woolf’s novel, Orlando appears as an androgynous being, in the sense that (s)he is never completely a man or a woman but seems to be both of them. The word androgynous means “not clearly male or female” but also “having both male and female features”8, an androgynous person would be neither a male nor a female but a mixture of both. Virginia Woolf was interested in the androgynous mind and tried to explain Coleridge’s theory in her essay A Room of One’s Own (Woolf, 1995, p. 103): If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine According to this quote, the mind to be great is not gendered, it is genderless, even if here the binarity of gender is still generalised masculine and feminine. Virginia Woolf raises the issue of creation in relation to gender and thinks that a ‘mono-gender’ mind cannot create correctly. This point of view is interesting regarding the character of Orlando since (s)he succeeded in writing a masterpiece of poem when she was a woman, but after being a man Orlando indeed began to write as a man; but 8 https://dictionary.cambridge.org/fr/dictionnaire/anglais/androgynous 29 without her feminine perception he was mocked, it was the combination of his masculinity and of her femininity which allowed him/her to write the poem ‘The Oak Tree’. About writing, V. Woolf reiterates the same idea later in her essay and qualifies “fatal” the process of writing being a man or woman ‘pure and simple’ (Woolf, 1995, p.108): it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman (…) to speak consciously as a woman. (…) It ceases to be fertilized. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. If the writer has the consciousness of one’s own sex/gender while one is writing, one cannot create. As said above the mind needs to be androgynous to write and more broadly to create. In the case of Orlando, he has lived as a man and as a woman, therefore his/her mind is androgynous and able to create. The expression ‘man-womanly’ applies to the character of Orlando because as a man he already had a ‘feminine’ temperament; his way of doubting everything, his quietness, his love for loneliness and for writing are viewed as feminine characteristics. His feminine sensibility, if one could say, helped him to begin to write his poem but it was as a woman that she succeeded to finish it. The poem, and its creation, are essential in the evolution of Orlando’s identity and particularly of his/her gender identity. It is, to a certain extent, the only thing that (s)he kept throughout all the novel and therefore all his/her lifetime. The act of writing enables Orlando to know him/herself and to accept the combination of the two sexes which make him/herself. It is this combination, equally physical and mental, that we can call a form of androgyny. In A Room of One’s Own the author addresses this idea of androgynous mind several times, as when she saw a man and a woman getting together into a taxi and started thinking about a possible union of the two sexes/ genders in one mind (Woolf, 1995, p.102): One has a profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the theory that the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness. But the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask 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? And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, 30 one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually cooperating. Here, Virginia Woolf deconstructs the heterosexual cliché of happiness by defining it as ‘irrational’. This idea of happiness is indeed reductive, firstly because it would mean that a man has to unite with a woman, therefore the other sexualities, as homosexuality, could not bring happiness, and secondly because it reduces the notion of gender to its binarity. Furthermore, the essayist wonders if one’s sexual/gendered identity is mental the mind or physical the body and if these two ‘sides’ correspond to one another. These two sexes in the mind that she mentions here would be the two genders, male and female and she imagines the two genders living in one brain, which would define an androgynous brain. Virginia Woolf promotes the androgynous mind in the sense that each human being could be both woman and man, without affecting one’s gender but increasing one’s creativity, even one’s intelligence since one would have more possibilities. Regarding the androgynous ‘point of view’, Elaine Showalter, in a chapter entitled “Virginia Woolf and the Flight into Androgyny” speaks about “a new literary sensibility – not feminine, but androgynous” (Showalter, 2009, p.215), which would mean that Virginia Woolf was not a feminist, at least in her works, but more in favour of androgyny. However, feminism and androgyny are similar, since feminism advocates a gender equality and this notion of equality is also found in androgyny, but androgyny goes further because it advocates the fusion and the disappearance of both sexes for the benefit of a gender which would be ‘neutral’, simultaneously male and female, man and woman. Androgyny, in accordance with Virginia Woolf’s opinion, would not be man or woman but man and woman in one human being and Orlando would be the perfect example of this, since the character of Orlando embodies this manly-woman and this womanly-man whom the author speaks about in her essay A Room of One’s Own . From the very beginning of Orlando , the eponymous character and his body are described as asexual, and even as feminine, with “the red of [his] cheeks was covered with peach down” (Woolf, 1993, p.12) and with the recurring motif of his beautiful legs. When Orlando changed of sex, the author used it to question the notions of male and female (Woolf, 1993, p.132-133): Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. Of the complications and confusions which thus result everyone has had experience 31 Here, Virginia Woolf wants to deconstruct this image of ‘male’ or ‘female’, which is often determined by the clothes a human being wears. She explains that, most of the time, the appearance the clothes does not reflect what the human being is truly. Under the narrator’s mockery, she makes fun of some philosophers’ opinions about how the clothes are gendered and how they influence one’s behaviour (Woolf, 1993, p.132): If we compare the picture of Orlando as a man with that of Orlando as a woman we shall see that though both are undoubtedly one and the same person, there are certain changes. The man has his hand free to seize his sword, the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders. The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same. That is the view of some philosophers and wise ones, but on the whole, we incline to another. The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than usual -openness indeed was the soul of her naturesomething that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed. This passage is essential for several reasons. Firstly, the narrator begins to explain that the difference of sex of Orlando, as a man and then as a woman, is noticeable in the pictures in his and then in her way to stand or to look and that is because of the clothes but the narrator disproves this point of view. The clothes do not impact one’s point of view but could impact others’ points of view about oneself, in this sense it would be a symbol, some clothes would represent a sex but the narrator insists that the difference between the sexes is much more serious than the difference between gendered clothes. The symbolism of clothes is important in Orlando , as in the scene with the Archduchess becoming the Archduke: “she turned to present the Archduchess with the salver, and behold – in her place stood a tall gentleman in black. A heap of clothes lay in the fender. She was alone with a man” (Woolf, 1993, p.126). It was only by removing his clothes that the Archduke became a man in the eyes of Orlando. To come back to the explanation of the previous quote: the change of sex of Orlando is discussed by the narrator and for the first time a ‘rational’ explanation is given, in contrast to the fantastic side of the novel (with the change of sex but also with the time). The change of sex is explained as a choice made by Orlando him/herself, Orlando would decide to be a woman physically , (s)he would decide to change from one sex, man, to another, woman. 32 In the continuation of the quote, the narrator writes that most individuals feel the same as Orlando, that is, a willingness or a need to change of sex, to assume a gender which does not correspond to their birth sex, but in the case of Orlando this was expressed physically. Orlando would have this capacity of becoming what she feels, what (s)he is inside. Under the narrator’s words, Virginia Woolf expressed her theory that gender was a choice and that was the society which made it binary and fixed, she “suggests here that gender roles are not biological givens, but societal constructs” (Ermens, 2016, p.24). Since Orlando lived for centuries (s)he is less affected by social rules and because (s)he is ‘more open’ than most people (s)he would express him/herself more openly. At the age of thirty years, Orlando probably felt that he was not himself as a man and decided to be a woman but it was also a way to “intermix” (Woolf, 1993, p.132) the sexes and become an androgynous person physically, since Orlando already had an androgynous mind. As written by B. Ermens “it does not matter if the body is male or female, her mind is both” (Ermens, 2016, p. 24). Orlando’s physical appearance does not matter; (s)he has an androgynous mind. As discussed above, Orlando, as a man, had both masculine and feminine character traits and as a woman she could pose as a gentleman without no one noticing, only by changing clothes. Orlando’s mind is ‘complete’ when (s)he accepts both genders, it is what Virginia Woolf wanted to be understood when she wrote: “the mind felt as if, after being divided, it had come together again in a natural fusion. The obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to cooperate.” (Woolf, 1995, p.102). In Orlando’s mind the two sexes are ‘working’ together, as if it was a ‘team’, that is what describes the narrator when he writes about Orlando’s mind (Woolf, 1993, p.133): For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue, for example, if Orlando was a woman, how did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man’s love of power. She is excessively tender-hearted. […] Yet again, though bold and active as a man, it was remarked that the sight of another in danger brought on the most womanly palpitations. […] Whether, then, Orlando was most man or woman, it is difficult to say and cannot now be decided. This passage is after her change of sex and before the trial that pronounced Orlando was a woman, which explains that Orlando’s sex ‘cannot now be decided’. But there is a more important reason, Orlando does not have a defined sex. She has both man and woman features, she is bold and active as a man but she has a tender heart as a woman, it seems she keeps the best of each sex; hence, the 39 regardless the sex or the gender of the self. Androgyny is accepting one’s part of male and one’s part of female, which should not be confused with man and woman, as wrote Nancy Bazin (Bazin, 1973, p. 166-167): Virginia Woolf’s male and female “powers” are traditionally designated as the male and female principles, what the Chinese refer to as yang (male) and yin (female). As Linda Thurston points out in an excellent article, “On Male and Female Principle”, “Male and Female, as cosmic principles, should not be confused to mean men or women.” These terms provide us with a useful metaphor based upon the reproductive process; unfortunately, the terms seem confusing to us at first because “what our society has been doing is defining the total person by [his or her] reproductive process when we are, in fact, much more than this function.” Indeed, whereas in biology “neither Male nor Female is productive by itself”, likewise, each human being must embody both the male and the female powers. The androgynous mind utilizes rational (…) as well as intuitive (…) faculties; it strives not only to dissect but to connect. In terms of Virginia Woolf’s aesthetic, the androgynous mind perceives both the multiplicity and the underlying unity. The author compares the male and female to the yang and yin, which could be described as two principles, one positive, bright and masculine (yang) and one negative, dark and feminine (yin), whose interaction influences the destinies of creatures and things10. However, Virginia Woolf did not seem to associate feminine with negativity but rather with positivity. In fact, V. Woolf advocated a union of the female and the male, as the Chinese yin and yang, but without this notion of darkness. Nancy Bazin also reminds that male and female should not be confused with men and women because each man could be able to embody the male and female powers as each woman could be able to embody the male and female powers. The sex, man or woman, is physical, whereas the gender, male or female, is mental, and that is for this reason that one could be male and female, as the androgynous mind. The author specifies Virginia Woolf’s aesthetic, the androgynous mind is a connection between male and female, a union which enables the mind to be complete. To conclude on this point, Orlando had an androgynous mind, (s)he had both male and female powers. The union of all the selves of Orlando’s mind enabled the creation of the poem ‘The Oak Tree’ but also enabled the character to be oneself. The theory of the androgynous mind as well as the theory of the true self show that the gendered identity could not be restricted to the binarity male or female. As for the gendered identity, the sexual identity could not be restricted to heterosexuality. 10 Definition from https://www.dictionary.com/browse/yin-and-yang 40 3.c) Sexuality and gender The sexual identity, as described in the previous section, encompasses the body, how a human being is a sexed body and how it is sexualized, and also the sexual orientation, heterosexuality, homosexuality, etc. In this section, however, the main issue will be the sexuality, as far as sexual orientation is concerned, and how sexuality and gender are linked in general terms and in Orlando . As written by Adam Burgess, gender, sexuality and time are, in some ways, the true characters of the novel Orlando (Burgess, 2017, p. 3): One could argue, though, that the true characters are actually gender (identity), sexuality, and time: these are the ideas explored most intricately and most often throughout the course of the book and they are certainly front-facing; the narrator/biographer views time and Orlando in opposition to how opinions and practices of sex and gender are viewed differently at various points in history. A. Burgess explains that the story of Orlando enables Virginia Woolf to discuss the opinions and practices of sex and gender across the centuries. However, in the novel, sexuality is barely covered and subtly, nevertheless, it is a main point in regard to the construction of Orlando’s identity. In fact, sexuality is mainly suggested more than exposed. It was firstly addressed when Orlando was in Wapping Old Stairs, by the time he was a young boy , and of his discovered sexuality; then, at the Court, but even if sexuality is evoked as in the phrase “their loves had been active” (Woolf, 1993, p. 21) the biographer does not emphasise Orlando’s sexuality. Similarly, when Orlando fell in love with the Russian Princess Sasha, even if their intimacy “became the scandal of the Court” (Woolf, 1993, p. 29) and even if Orlando murmured to her that he knew for the first time “the delights of love” (Woolf, 1993, p. 31), the sexual act is never mentioned as such. Later in the novel, when Orlando is a woman and she begins to frequent prostitutes, it is suggested once again that Orlando had sexual relations but never explicitly. Lastly, when Orlando met the man who will become her husband, Shelmerdine, the narrator is silent on their sexual relations but in the film adaptation the film director chose to name the section of their meeting “Sex”. Even if the narrator chose to not mention Orlando’s sexual relations, his/her sexuality is central in the novel and is closely linked with the construction of his/her gendered identity. Moreover, sexuality and gender build together, sexuality leads to gender and gender leads to sexuality. As regards these two notions, Judith Butler reflects upon the link between gender and sexuality in the preface of Gender Trouble (Butler, 2006, p. xii-xiii): But what is the link between gender and sexuality that I sought to underscore? Certainly, I do not mean to claim that forms of sexual practice produce certain genders, but only that under 41 conditions of normative heterosexuality, policing gender is sometimes used as a way of securing heterosexuality. Catharine MacKinnon offers a formulation of this problem that resonates with my own at the same time that there are, I believe, crucial and important differences between us. She writes: Stopped as an attribute of a person, sex inequality takes the form of gender; moving as a relation between people, it takes the form of sexuality. Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualization of inequality between men and women. In this view, sexual hierarchy produces and consolidates gender. It is not heterosexual normativity that produces and consolidates gender, but the gender hierarchy that is said to underwrite heterosexual relations. If gender hierarchy produces and consolidates gender, and if gender hierarchy presupposes an operative notion of gender, then gender is what causes gender, and the formulation culminates in tautology. Here, the theorist recalls that both sexuality and gender are subject to social norms, which causes a misunderstanding and even an inappropriate perception of these notions. Indeed, the principal norm of sexuality, which is normative heterosexuality, makes gender a sort of extension of sexuality, that means that gender becomes a share of sexuality. Judith Butler quotes the feminist Catharine MacKinnon to explain that ‘sexual hierarchy produces and consolidates gender’, that is, in normative heterosexual relations gender tends to create hierarchies just as sexual hierarchy. In that sense, sexual hierarchy and gender hierarchy follow the same pattern, which, in a way, reinforces the inequality between men and woman. In these hierarchies, the masculinity prevails over the femininity, the heterosexuality prevails over the other sexualities as the homosexuality or the transsexuality, the norm prevails over the differences. However, these hierarchies enable the consolidation of sexuality and gender, as written by J. Butler “gender is what causes gender”. The notion of homosexuality is discussed in the novel, and one should take an interest in Orlando’s heterosexuality. As a woman, but dressed as a man, Orlando met Nell and her friends, described as prostitutes. After admitting she was a woman, Orlando became friend with these women and became herself a prostitute, as indicated by the phrase “receiving a client or two (for she had many scores of suppliants)” (Woolf, 1993, p. 153). During that same period, she would as well “more often than not become a nobleman complete from head to toe and walk the streets in search of adventure” (Woolf, 1993, p. 153), and among her adventures there was a flight with a married woman. Thus, Orlando experienced, for a short time, sexual relations as a prostituted woman, probably as a noble woman in Richmond and as a nobleman, she experienced sexual relations within different social classes and “enjoyed the love of both sexes equally” (Woolf, 1993, p. 153). By 42 changing of sex, Orlando allows herself to explore her sexuality, as if by becoming a woman she had more freedom in her sexuality and could no longer restrict herself to the normative heterosexuality. As a man, homosexuality was not directly addressed, but one could understand that Orlando was attracted to masculine features in his relations, with the Princess Sasha and with the Archduchess Harriett. Furthermore, Sasha represents gender fluidity since Orlando fell in love with her despite the fact that “the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex” (Woolf, 1993, p. 26), he was attracted by “the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person” (Woolf, 1993, p.26). The seductiveness of Sacha did not come from her gender or her femininity but from her whole person. With Sasha and the Archduchess, Orlando is attracted by male features but is also unable to discern, in these potential lovers, male from female. To come back to female homosexuality, Virginia Woolf benefits from Orlando’s sexual experiences to discuss Sapphism, which was still a taboo subject at this time (twentieth century), as written by D. Cohler “in the 1910s, birth control, free love, and male homosexuality appeared frequently as topics alongside women’s suffrage in the pages of the Freewoman. Yet, any significant discussion of female homosexuality is notably absent among these frank discussions.” (Cohler, 2010, p. 73). Female homosexuality was ignored and Virginia Woolf, who fell in love with a woman herself and who fought all forms of inequality and discrimination affecting women, wanted to highlight this sexual orientation and make it standard, ‘normal’. In A Room of One’s Own , she wrote about an unknown writer and what seems to be her first book, in which there is an allusion to female homosexuality (Woolf, 1995, p. 87): I turned the page and read… I am sorry to break off so abruptly. Are there no men present? Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over there the figure of Sir Chartres Biron is not concealed? We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these – ‘Chloe liked Olivia…’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women. ‘Chloe liked Olivia’, I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Before declaring what she read, Virginia Woolf wanted to make sure that there were no men present and she seemed shocked. Indeed, she needed to make a break to tell what she read; the subject was so unusual. But the questions about the men are ironical, by doing this she wanted to expose social norms and men who acted as if female homosexuality did not exist. Since she was only with women, she could admit that lesbianism exists, that women could love women and have sexual relations with women. She also explained that a woman, Chloe, liked another woman, Olivia, in literature for the first 43 time, it shows and proves that female homosexuality was ignored in society and even in literature. By speaking of Mary Carmichael – the unknown author who wrote about Chloe and Olivia – Virginia Woolf gave visibility to one of the first English women writing about lesbianism. When she wrote Orlando, shortly before A Room of One’s Own , she probably already had this idea of the inexistence of female homosexuality in literature and by deflecting the codes of the biography, she questioned the notions of gender and sexuality. By changing the sex of the main character, she could discuss women’s sexuality and female homosexuality. Homosexuality is also mentioned when Orlando was a man, he was indeed attracted to the Muscovite Princess, thinking she was a man (Woolf, 1993, p. 26): When the boy, for alas, a boy it must be – no woman could skate with such speed and vigour – swept almost on tiptoe past him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question. Here the biographer highlights that male homosexuality, in the seventeenth century, was not accepted, if the Princess was a man an embrace would have been ‘out of the question’. Moreover, Orlando felt attracted to the Archduchess Harriet, who was, in reality, a man. Later, when Orlando was a woman, it was female homosexuality which was not accepted but the author chose to mention it, even briefly, with the aim of bringing in the norm female homosexuality. As mentioned by herself in A Room of One’s Own , Sapphism is not represented in literature, therefore she chose to represent it in her own way. She presented it as something normal, in the telling of Orlando’s adventures, but as for Orlando’s sexual relations, the author does not emphasise homosexuality. However, the presence of homosexuality makes it possible to open the debate, particularly about female homosexuality and how it was seen at this time – in the eighteenth century but also at the time of Virginia Woolf – and raises questions about queer theory. Indeed, one could associate Queer theory to Virginia Woolf’s ideas and to Orlando . To define the term queer, it referred to a homosexual but in an offensive way but it also could refer to anyone who is not fitting traditional ideas about gender or sexuality, especially the idea that everyone is either male or female or that people should only have sexual relationships with the opposite sex11. Both meanings bring to mind Orlando, who had homosexual relations and above all, who not fitted traditional ideas about gender and sexuality. However, the connotation of the term queer changed over the years, to become the contrary of its first meaning and be used in the queer theory. Judith Butler reflects upon the change of meaning of the term (Butler, 2011, p. 169): 11 Definition from online Cambridge dictionary: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/fr/dictionnaire/anglais/queer 44 the temporality of the term is precisely what concerns me here: how is it that a term that signalled degradation has been turned – “refunctioned” in the Brechtian sense – to signify a new and affirmative set of meanings? (…) Is this a reversal that retains and reiterates the abjected history of the term? As noted by J. Butler the term has been subject to a reversal over time, it changed from a negative signification it was synonym to strange, abnormal, it was even used as an insult to describe a homosexual – to a more positive one, which designates the fight of everyone who does not fit traditional ideas of sexuality and gender (Butler, 2011, p. 172): The term “queer” emerges as an interpellation that raises the question of the status of force and opposition, of stability and variability, within performativity. The term “queer” has operated as one linguistic practice whose purpose has been the shaming of the subject it names or, rather, the producing of a subject through that shaming interpellation. “Queer” derives its force precisely through the repeated invocation by which it has become linked to accusation, pathologization, insult. People who have been persecuted through the use of this term make it a strength, in the sense that they transform this term to denounce the standards imposed of gender and sexuality and to undo sexual and gendered categories. Judith Butler explains how this reversal is possible in Bodies That Matter (Butler, 2011, p. 177): Within queer politics, indeed, within the very signification that is “queer”, we read a resignifying practice in which the desanctioning power of the name “queer” is reversed to sanction a contestation of the terms of sexual legitimacy. Paradoxically, but also with great promise, the subject who is “queered” into public discourse through homophobic interpellations of various kinds takes up or cites that very term as the discursive basis for an opposition. This kind of citation will emerge as theatrical to the extent that it mimes and renders hyperbolic the discursive convention that it also reverses. The hyperbolic gesture is crucial to the exposure of the homophobic “law” that can no longer control the terms of its own abjecting strategies. The “queered” use the term queer and thus appropriate it, which leads to the loss of its original homophobic meaning. This is also thanks to this reversal that the Queer theory emerged. As explained by Patricia Waugh, this theory aims to show how sexuality could be fluid (Waugh, 2007, p. 444): sexualities are conceptualized in terms of fluidity, contradiction, and indeterminacy; desire is bodily and embodied, but it is also linguistic and discursive and sex is de-linked from gender such that sexuality is no longer understood within the framework of the heterosexual matrix. 45 In this quote Patricia Waugh describes the Queer theory and explains that the notion of sexuality should get rid of the normative heterosexuality, that sex should be de-linked from gender and that these notions are fluid. The Queer theory tends to remove normative categories, such as heterosexuality, male and female, and to remove the link between the biology (the body, the sex), the gender and the sexual orientation, this link is indeed considered by Judith Butler as a forced performance. Regarding Orlando , it could be read and analysed from the perspective of the Queer theory because it counters gender binarity and also this link between gender, sexual orientation and the body/ the sex. The main character is not locked into a specific gender or a specific sexual orientation, even Orlando’s body is not restrained to one specific sex. As stated by Judith Butler, if the distinction between sex and gender tends to disappear “it would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category.” (Butler, 2006, p. 10). Gender should not be an interpretation of sex, neither sex should be a gendered category. Each notion – sex, sexuality and gender – should exist by itself without depending of other notions, much like in Orlando . However, a sort of connection should be maintained between these notions, as explained by Judith Butler (Butler, 2011, p. 182): It is important to emphasize that although heterosexuality operates in part through the stabilization of gender norms, gender designates a dense site of significations that contain and exceed the heterosexual matrix. Although forms of sexuality do not unilaterally determine gender, a non-causal and non-reductive connection between sexuality and gender is nevertheless crucial to maintain. Precisely because homophobia often operates through the attribution of a damaged, failed, or otherwise abject gender to homosexuals, that is, calling gay men “feminine” or calling lesbians “masculine”, and because the homophobic terror over performing homosexual acts, where it exists, is often also a terror over losing proper gender (“no longer being a real or proper man” or “no longer being a real and proper woman”), it seems crucial to retain a theoretical apparatus that will account for how sexuality is regulated through the policing and the shaming of gender. She demonstrates that even if sexuality does not determine gender, a connection should be maintained between the two notions only to protect homosexuals, transsexuals and every human being who does not fit normative heterosexuality. Moreover, she reminds us that gender exceeds the heterosexual matrix, even if the society still has difficulty to accept it, which causes what she calls the homophobic terror and also the fear of losing one’s specific gender. The connection between sexuality and gender enables a sort of protection of homosexuals, transsexuals etc. but it should be necessary to not confuse the need of this connection and the link imposed by the society between sexuality, sex and gender, even 46 if the connection exists because of the society. Perhaps, this connection would not be needed if social and cultural norms did not ‘shame’ human-beings without specific gender or human-beings who are not heterosexuals. If the fluidity of gender and of sexuality was accepted as normal, the link between these notions would not even exist. To conclude this part, gendered and sexuality identities are fluid because these notions are fixed only by social norms but, in reality, each one could feel one’s gendered identity and one’s sexual identity, one could be agender, androgynous, homosexual and could change through one’s lifetime, there is no limitation to gender or to sexuality, these notions are fluids. As said by Virginia Woolf “when a subject is highly controversial – and any question about sex is that – one cannot hope to tell the truth.” (Woolf, 1995, p. 14), there is indeed no universal truth about sex, about sexuality, about gender, each one could have a different opinion on these notions but the social and cultural norms impel a lot of people to believe in the binarity of gender and in the heterosexual matrix and to behave as if these norms were the truth. But nowadays these norms are increasingly called into question and the idea of fluidity of the notions as gender or sexuality is increasingly accepted, even if the social and cultural norms have not been sufficiently evolved. Virginia Woolf was indeed far ahead of her time, since she wanted these norms to evolve, from the beginning of the twentieth century. With Orlando she succeeded to prove that gender and sexuality are not fixed notions and that it was possible for a human-being to not be confined in only one gender or one sexuality, despite the fictional nature of her book. 47 4. The film adaptation Orlando This part will be dedicated to the film adaptation Orlando and to the gender issues in the film. As in the book, gender norms are challenged by the film director, through Orlando’s story but also through the choice of the actors, as it will be seen later. About the film, it was released in 1992 and lasts ninety-four minutes. It was adapted by Sally Potter (who is both the writer and the director of the film), who stated: “My task with the adaptation of Virginia Woolf's book for the screen was to find a way of remaining true to the spirit of the book and to Virginia Woolf's intentions, whilst being ruthless with changing the book in any way necessary to make it work cinematically” (Levy, 2010). 4.a) Purposes of Sally Potter and her choice of actors The first phrase of the film, pronounced by the voice-over, reflects the same words of the book but without the pronoun “he”, the voice-off says “there can be no doubt about his sex” and adds “despite the feminine appearance that every young man at the time aspires to” (1:06, 1992). From the first sentence of the voice-off the spectator knows that Orlando’s sex and gender will be called into question throughout the film. The film is divided in seven sections, named Death, Love, Poetry, Politics, Society, Sex and Birth, each section has a date except the last one ‘Birth’, as if it was timeless. Each section will be analysed more deeply in this part. Sally Potter was born in 1949. Considering that Virginia Woolf died in 1941, she could not know the author of Orlando when she adapted it; she had to adapt and change the text of her own and create a new text, the screenplay [Figure 4]. Furthermore, she couldn’t know if Virginia Woolf would have agreed with the film adaptation, the author indeed declared her disagreement with film adaptation on the whole, in an essay about the theme of Cinema, in 1926: “Virginia Woolf, commenting on the fledging art of cinema, deplored the simplification of the literary work that inevitably occurred in its transposition to the new visual medium and called film a “parasite” and literature its “prey” and “victim” (Hutcheon, 2006, p. 3). However, since her early teens fourteen years old when she read Orlando for the first time, Sally Potter knew that she wanted to adapt it in a film. She indeed declared: “It had an incredible effect on me as a book, because I remember feeling I wasn’t just reading it, I was watching it… I could see it” (BBC, 2017). Thus, she decided to adapt the story of Orlando because of her personal feeling, she thought it was a story to watch and not only to read. In some ways, Virginia Woolf would agree with Sally Potter on this issue since she stated that “cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for 48 emotions that have so far failed to find expression in words” (as cited in Hutcheon, 2006, p.3), S. Potter indeed succeeded to show characters’ feelings and emotions while keeping the words by using a voice-over. As Virginia Woolf, Sally Potter is feminist but she refuses to describe her films as feminist (Lodge, 2017): Potter may strongly identify herself as a feminist (…) but she has long been leery of ascribing the same term to her work. “This is a complicated one,” she says with a half-smile, raising an index finger as if to warn of an imminent screed. “I am a feminist in life. I would expect you, or Ken Loach, or Martin Scorsese, to be a feminist in life. But I object to having my films called feminist, implying they’re only for a certain audience of like-minded people and that the film itself would preach that line. Feminist is somehow different from saying ‘anti-racist’. I would think of my films, or my life, everything in my life, as anti-racist, but you don’t hear that as a label. But feminist film is seen as specific.” It’s the attachment of the term to a single gender of film-maker, she continues, that really rankles – liberal-minded men can make female-driven stories without ever being so defined. “Why aren’t Ken Loach’s films called feminist? ‘The feminist film-maker Ken Loach’ or ‘the feminist film-maker Mike Leigh’ – why don’t we read that? And if not, why not?” She takes a breath. “I’m completely proud of the word. The feminist movement is one of the most vibrant, extraordinary political movements of the 20th century, and now there’s a younger generation who’s taken it up again with great joy and pleasure, and that’s wonderful to see. But I object to the way it’s used as a prefix to my work, to ghettoise it, often as part of a criticism rather than an appreciation. I just want to occupy a free space without a prefix. Indeed, she does not want to qualify her films as feminist because it would reduce them to a concept and to ‘a certain audience’. She also explains that, because she is a woman her films could be defined as feminist but if she had been a man and she had done the same type of film, the films would not be defined as feminist. She wants her films to be seen without prejudices/ stereotypes, as if it was a man film-maker who did the film. The fact that she is a woman film-maker and that she is feminist should not affect one’s perception of her work. As she said, she does not want feminist to be used as a prefix to her films because it would be more used as a critic than as an appreciation, she wants her work to be appreciated or judged without thinking about her personal ideas. She wants to be neutral when she makes a film. Yet, many films she chose to direct relate to feminism and gender issues. For example, 55 would offer her a house and he tried to frighten her: “With your history quite frankly who else will have you? Do you realize what you're turning down? With your ambiguous sexuality which I am prepared to tolerate. This is your last chance of respectability.” (1:07:56, 1992). The words of the Archduke express the thoughts of men in the nineteenth century, a woman who is not married is not respectable and is lost without a husband. But Orlando still refused the demand and preferred not to conform to these norms which compelled her to marry. Already as a man, Orlando was not following social norms, he preferred literature and poetry to war, as a woman she continues to not accept the standards imposed to her gender. As a female she should be guided by a father or a husband but she refused. The film succeeded to show social norms through the centuries, by the interruption of Orlando’s poem as a boy, by the conversations of the poets about women, by the marriage proposal of the Archduke and also by the loss of the property by Orlando at the end of the film. The film director succeeded to represent each century through its social norms. The sixth section is named Sex and is dated 1850, it tells the meeting and the love story with Shelmerdine. In a conversation with him, Orlando visualizes herself as a man: “If I were a man (…) I might choose not to risk my life for an uncertain cause. I might think that freedom won by death is not worth having.” (1:15:08, 1992), to which Shelmerdine answers “you might choose not to be a real man at all” (1:15:29, 1992). This conversation proves that ‘a real man’ had the obligation to risk his life, to kill etc. to be accepted as such. It seems important to remind that, in the film, Orlando became a woman after being unable to fight and kill a man. The film director continues with this metaphor of the crisis of masculine identity. Orlando could not be a real man, thus she became a woman. She also questions gendered identity, since Shelmerdine affirms that a man has to fight, his point of view is influenced by social norms. Nowadays these norms changed and a man is not obliged to fight or to kill to prove that he is a real man. Moreover, the film gives specific dates, thus helping the spectator to link the dates – the historical context – with the norms. Yet, the last section does not have date. The seventh and last section is named Birth and, as said above, does not have date. There are a lot of possible reasons for this absence of a date: it could be a strategy of the film director to make this section timeless, but it could also be because it happens in the present time, which is different for each spectator watching the film, thus it would allow the spectator to place the end of the film in one’s own present time. Moreover, the end of the film changed in comparison with the book. In the film Orlando, is driving a motorcycle and her daughter is in the sidecar. The film director indeed chose to change the sex of the child from a boy to a girl. Once again, this change is made to give a logical explanation for the fact that Orlando lost her property, she could keep her house only if she had male heirs. Just before the 56 scene on the motorcycle Orlando was with Nicholas Greene, who is in the present a publisher and compliments Orlando for her book. Perhaps this is her poem ‘The Oak Tree’. The film director chose to keep the same actor for the past and the present, but the present Nicholas Greene does not remember Orlando. The film ends with Orlando and her daughter visiting the house that Orlando lost because of her sex; then, they are together under the tree where Orlando was reading his poem at the beginning of the film. This last scene is a reinterpretation of the film director, who brings in the film an angel who is singing “neither a woman, nor a man (…) at last I’m free” (1:29:10, 1992). This ecstatic scene, between heaven and earth, leads to reflect upon gender, since the words of the angel’s song represent Orlando who is crying when she listens to what the angel sings. Orlando feels the words of the angel. Even if her sex is at the present female: “She. For there can be no doubt about her sex. (…) She is tall and slim, with a slightly androgynous appearance that many females at the time aspire to. (…) She is no longer trapped by destiny. And ever since she let go of the past... She found her life was beginning.” (1:26:50, 1992). The voice-off specifies that Orlando has an androgynous appearance, but more importantly, her life is beginning since she is no longer trapped by destiny. Orlando is crying tears of happiness in front of the androgynous angel because she is free of gender, she could be what she wants to be in this ecstatic moment. To conclude this part, the film director tries to be faithful to the book Orlando for the film adaptation, while questioning gender issues. However, even if she wanted to be faithful to Virginia Woolf’s ideas, her own point of view emerges in the film adaptation, since the notion of gender seems to be more important than the notion of sexuality. Homosexuality is barely approached in the film, while in the novel Virginia Woolf tried to deliver a message about the acceptation of the homosexuality. 57 Conclusion Orlando is a unique and new work since this is a fantastic novel that Virginia Woolf passes off as a biography with the aim of mocking biography codes, writing a book lighter than her previous books, but also of discussing gender and sexual issues without being censored. Indeed, Virginia Woolf was way ahead of her time and approached subjects as queerness, androgyny, which were not discussed and not even accepted in the twentieth century. With Orlando she could write about gender and sexuality more freely and she succeeded to make people think about identity, gender and sexuality. The film adaptation of Orlando , by Sally Potter, leads to an increase of the audience knowing the story of Orlando and it encourages more people to reflect upon the notions of gender, identity and sexuality. The film director tried to remain true to the spirit of the book and to the author’s ideas, thus the film also questions gender and sexuality. As discussed in the first part, Orlando is a book made of duality. There is a balance between biography and fantastic, between seriousness and entertainment, between man and woman, between heterosexuality and homosexuality and between male and female. Indeed, the character of Orlando suffered him/herself these dualities but also made a strength of them. As a woman she decided to accept the duality of her sex and dressed sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman, thus she could be what she wanted to be. By changing clothes, Orlando played with social and cultural norms which impose feminine clothes to women and masculine clothes to men. Furthermore, Orlando experienced sexuality with men and also with women. There are indeed some allusions to Orlando’s homosexuality in the book. Moreover, the story of Orlando enables Virginia Woolf to denounce the gender inequalities through the centuries. Orlando could be seen as a committed book defending the rights of women, but also sexual freedom, gender fluidity and androgyny. The book also calls into question social and cultural norms. In the second part, the focus was on the notion of identity and on the gendered identity. The identity of a human being is always evolving, changing, since the human being is permanently changing. As for the gendered identity, it has been seen that it is a construction, since one constructs one’s gender by acting, talking, thinking as one’s gender with an act of repetition and also because gender is guided by social and cultural norms. The female identity would consequently be a repetition of actions and words seen as feminine, of the development of femininity, imposed by the society. However, gendered identity is a personal feeling, which could be different for each human being. In the case of Orlando, he was a man who became a woman but remains the same person, and Orlando finds him/herself, if we may 58 call it that, as an androgynous mind, neither male, neither female, but a mixture of both. This brings us to the third part, about the fluidity of gendered and sexual identity and particularly about androgyny. The story of Orlando enables the deconstruction of the binarity of gender, since Orlando is never a male or a female; the fluidity of gender is present from the beginning of the book. The third part also approached the notion of normalcy and showed that it could lead to a feeling of being outside of the society for the people who do not fit in this normalcy. Moreover, as stated in the second part, gender is performative, this means that nobody is a gender from the start, that this is a phenomenon being produced and reproduced all the time16, but not an innate feature. To come back to gender fluidity, androgyny represents the non-binarity of gender, since this is a mixture between male and female. Orlando has an androgynous mind, as described by Virginia Woolf; (s)he has a man-womanly or a womanly-man gender. The theory of a multitude of selves also reinforces this idea of gender fluidity. In short, there is no universal truth about gender, about sexuality and neither about identity; the binarity of gender and the normalcy of heterosexuality are only created by social and cultural norms, but do not define either gender or sexuality, which are not fixed. In the last part, the gender issues were approached in the film adaptation Orlando , by Sally Potter. The film director chose to focus on gender and neglected to focus on sexuality, particularly, on homosexuality. Indeed, sexuality is present in the film with the love story between Orlando and Shelmerdine but homosexuality is not mentioned, as if the film director wanted to keep Orlando’s innocence and, to a certain extent, conformed to social norms. However, Sally Potter challenged gender and sexuality norms, notably with her choice of the actors, who are not fitting in these norms. The film director also wanted to be faithful to Virginia Woolf’s intentions, which were to call into question gender, sexuality, identity, in an entertaining way. That is why, at first reading of Orlando and at first sight of the film adaptation, one could not understand all gender and sexual allusions, but by focusing on these notions one would reflect upon these notions. Orlando is a distraction but also a questioning. To conclude this dissertation, we should consider that gender is finally a personal appropriation, each one should have the choice of one’s gender. In the case of Orlando, the character is simultaneously androgynous and genderless, one could not appropriate a specific gender to the character Orlando. Orlando is outside the norms, as (s)he is outside time. One could still wonder what would be the story if Orlando was a woman who became a man, if it would have made a difference, and how Orlando would react waking up as a man after being a woman, since when she woke up as a woman she was not surprised, almost relieved. One could also wonder what 16 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo7o2LYATDc 59 would happen if Orlando became again a man or if her/his body and her/his sex conformed to her/his gender and became asexual. Nowadays, as human beings, we are able to change our body to conform to our gender, our own feeling of gender, as we could keep our body and feel a gender which does not conform to our attributed gender. As mentioned in the introduction, the issue of gendered identity is increasingly discussed and called into question, particularly by the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) community who do not recognize themselves in this imposed gender binary. Therefore, the social and cultural norms are progressively accepting the differences about sex, gender, sexuality and, in a way, Virginia Woolf and Orlando contributed to this change of mind. 60 References  Bibliography: Bazin, Nancy Topping (1973). Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision . New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Butler, Judith (1997). Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative . New York & London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2004). Undoing Gender . New York, NY: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2006). Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity . New York, NY: Routledge Classics. Butler, Judith (2011). Bodies That Matter, On the discursive limits of “sex”. England: Routledge Classics. De Beauvoir, Simone. (2009). The Second sex . New-York, NY: Vintage books. Harlan, Virginia (1931). Defoe's Narrative Style . The Journal of English and Germanic Philology , Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 55-73 (19 pages) Hutcheon, Linda (2006). “Beginning to Theorize Adaptation.” A Theory of Adaptation . 1-32. New York: Routledge. Irigaray, Luce (1985). This sex which is not one . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Showalter, Elaine (2009). A Literature of their own . From Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing. London: Virago Press. Thurman, Judith (2010). Introduction of The Second sex , p.8-15. New-York, NY: Vintage books. Waugh, Patricia (2007). Literary Theory and Criticism . Oxford: University Press. Woolf, Virginia. (1982). The diary of Virginia Woolf – Volume 3 1925-30 -. England: Penguin Books. Woolf, Virginia (1993). Orlando, A Biography . Ed. Brenda Lyons. England: Penguin Books. Woolf, Virginia (1995). A Room of One’s Own . New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.  Webliography: BBC. (1 November 2017). Sally Potter describes how to film an ‘unfilmable’ book. Available at: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20171031-sally-potter-describes-how-to-film-an-unfilmable-book Big think. (6 June 2011). Judith Butler: Your behaviour creates your gender. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo7o2LYATDc 61 Burgess, Adam. (12 February 2017). Orlando by Virginia Woolf: Gender and Sexuality Through Time. Literary Ladies Guide. Available at: https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/book-reviews/orlando-byvirginia-woolf-gender-identity-and-sexuality-through-time/ Cohler, D. (2010). “A more splendid citizenship”: prewar feminism, eugenics, and sex radicals. In Citizen, Invert, Queer: Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (pp. 73-110). Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttscw4.6 Darling, Lily. “Actress Tilda Swinton breaks gender barriers with new ‘Orlando’ exhibit”. From the community-driven platform Kulture Hub. Available at: https://kulturehub.com/tilda-swinton-orlandoexhibit/ Definition of Queer. Available at: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/fr/dictionnaire/anglais/queer Ermens, Bregje. (15 June 2016). Gender Subversion in Virginia Woolf’s Works: Comparing A Room of One’s Own , Orlando , and To the Lighthouse . Bachelor Thesis. Available at: https://theses.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/handle/123456789/3646/Ermens%2C_J.P.M._1.pdf?sequence=1 Ford, Tyler. (7 August 2015). My life without gender: 'Strangers are desperate to know what genitalia I have'. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/07/my-life-withoutgender-strangers-are-desperate-to-know-what-genitalia-i-have Gonthier, F. (N/D). Habitus. In Universalis.fr. Available at: https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/habitus/2-l-habitus-selon-pierre-bourdieu/ (accessed: 30/09/2019) Koresky, Michael. “Queer & Now & Then: 1992”. From Film Comment. Available at: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/queer-now-1992/ Kuhn, Annette. “Potter, Sally (1949-)”. From Reference Guide to British and Irish Film Directors. In Screenonline, BFI. Available at: http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/490062/index.html Levy, Emanuel. (2 June 2010). Orlando: Interview with writer/ director Sally Potter. Available at: https://emanuellevy.com/interviews/orlando-interview-with-writerdirector-sally-potter-8/ Lodge, Guy. (8 October 2017). Sally Potter: ‘There’s nothing like hearing a whole place vibrate with laughter’. In the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/oct/08/sally-potterinterview-the-party Oates, Joyce Carol. (15 April 1973). Toward a Recognition Of Androgyny (Page 7). The New York Times Archives. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1973/04/15/archives/toward-a-recognition-ofandrogyny-virginia-woolf-and-the.html?searchResultPosition=1 62 Virginia Woolf Seminar (14 September 2010). University of Alabama in Huntsville. Available at: https://www.uah.edu/woolf/index.html Woolf, Virginia (14 September 2015). The Death of the Moth, and other essays. The University of Adelaide. Available at: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/index.html  Filmography: Orlando , Dir. Sally Potter, France, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, UK, 1992 [94 min.]. Adventure Pictures, Lenfilm Studio (co-production), Sonny Pictures Classic, European Fund UK (co-production), Mikado Film (co-production), Rio Sigma Film Productions (co-production) 63 Appendix Figure 1: A photograph of the agender Tyler Ford, an agender 64 Figure 2: A photograph of the actress of Orlando, Tilda Swinton Figure 3: The scene of the change of sex in the film 71 Come, your handsome leg. For you and for your heirs Orlando. The house. Your Majesty. I'm forever I... But on one condition. Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old. Very interesting person. First the queen and now his father. It is too sad. Mourning so becomes him. One can quite see why he was the favourite. My dear friends how can you? In his time of grief. That way. Sasha. Who's that? I believe she is the daughter of the muscovite ambassador. How the delightful. If that's to your taste. What ever can you mean? 72 Oh, smearing themselves with candle wax to keep warm. Wearing beards as they get older, that kind of thing. Perhaps in this you're mistaken, Moray. Told me on good authority by Lord Francis Vere. Does he travel to muscovite. He knows someone who did. Aah. This is the Lady Euphrosyne. The Lord Winchelsea. The Lord Orlando.17 Figure 5: A photography of Tilda Swinton, which shows her androgynous appearance 17 Retrieved from https://www.scripts.com/script/orlando_15370