On Walt Whitman and Shakespeare

The few surviving excerpts of Sappho’s poetry, Walt Whitman’s “When I heard at the Close of

the Day,” our provided excerpts of his “Children of Adam,” and Shakespeare’s “Fair Youth”

sonnets are all shining examples of the intensity of queer love, which aids in the opening of the

mind to other subversions of convention.

Although it’s hard to sum Sappho’s poetry up in one statement, one of the most glaring

aspects of her pieces is how closely she writes her love narratives next to her war narratives. In

one of her poems she says, “Which is best? Some say it’s a host on horseback, / some say: no,

footsoldiers… / others, naval forces. To me, the best thing’s / what your heart longs for” (1-4).

Already, it’s clear she not only compares the gravity of love to the intensity of war, but even

asserts that it surpasses it. However, it’s not until she later says “How I love the way that she

walks” that this love interest is confirmed female (although this fact is heavily implied

throughout) (16). This kind of bare admission of queer love, as contrasted with war, implies a

fervent, almost entranced quality of the speaker, effectively eliciting these same emotions within

the reader.

A plethora of Shakespeare’s love sonnets also reflect this same intensity, but it is

particularly apparent in the line “How like Eve’s apple doth thy beauty grow” in Sonnet “93”

(13). The fact that Shakespeare likens his male love interest’s appearance to original sin is

telling- it evokes the sense that the speaker feels almost trapped by his attraction, an extremely

intense visual in and of itself. However, the double meaning of this biblical allusion is even more

revealing. Given that the act of Eve eating the apple represents the gaining of knowledge,

Shakespeare’s use of the line may be a subtle jab to the ridiculousness of what counts as “sin,” a
jab at the oppressive religious climate of his time. In doing so, he underscores the power of queer

love in aiding people in stepping away from other constricting heteronormative and conventional

views.

Walt Whitman really drives home this natural progression from the intensity of

experiencing of queer love (in a time of queer erasure) to escaping other societal conventions.

This is particularly evident in his poem “I Sing the Body Electric,” in which he initially describes

the men he is attracted to as “quite grown, lusty, good natured,” and as having “masculine

muscle” (43-44, 51). This is a pretty typical description of conventional male attractiveness, but

as Whitman explores the facets of his sexuality, these confines no longer seem to apply. This is

seen later in the poem, when he describes “a common farmer” as “over eighty years old” and his

sons as “massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome” (61, 70-71). Yet, Whitman says of the

elderly farmer, “you would pick him out as the most beautiful… of the gang / You would wish

long and long to be with him” (83-85). It’s clear that through the already (societally perceived)

unconventional nature of his sexual orientation, Whitman feels even more comfortable pushing

the boundaries of sexual attraction and beauty.

The most striking similarity I found between James Baldwin’s short story ​The Outing​ and Oscar

Wilde’s children’s story ​The Happy Prince​ is that both stories center around queer relationships

(both MLM) that juxtapose their corrupted or misunderstanding environments.

This is easily recognized in ​The Outing​, in which the story’s main character, Johnnie,

goes through an emotionally tumultuous day-long journey concerning his love interest, David.

They navigate their relationship, hidden in plain sight, amongst the devout members of their

Church while on a religious “outing.” The intense contrast between Johnnie and David’s

queerness and their highly heteronormative and oppressive outer community is most exemplified

in the relationship between Johnnie and his father, Deacon Grimes. This is illustrated by the

interaction of the two characters after a tense conversation in which the status of Johnnie and

David’s relationship is thinly veiled, where Deacon Grimes says “Johnnie, don’t you get into no

mischief, you hear me?” (35). Johnnie declines to answer, and instead “wanted at once to shout

at his father the most dreadful curses that he knew and wanted to weep. He was aware that they

were all intrigued by the tableau presented by his father and himself, that they were all vaguely

cognizant of an unnamed and deadly tension” (35). The fact that this tension between Deacon

Grimes and Johnnie is such a recognizable display of convention-vs.-abnormality clearly reflects

a wider tension between homosexuality and Johnnie and David’s religious community, one that

they’re aware of but refuse to acknowledge.

However, the problems that plague the universe of ​The Happy Prince​ seem not to be met

with such awareness, much less acknowledgement. All throughout the story are examples of the

struggle of the human condition: from poverty, to creative motivation, to narcissism, and yet,
similarly to ​The Outing​, it is only the story’s main queer pairing that stands in opposition to this

corruption. This is evident when, after seeing a young boy ill with fever in the house of a

seamstress lacking the resources to care for him, tells the swallow to “bring her the ruby out of

[his] sword-hilt” so that the mother can pay for what she needs to make her child well (7). (In

addition, we receive confirmation at the end of the story that the swallow and the statue of the

prince are indeed a queer couple when the swallow “kissed the Happy Prince on the lips” after

the prince asks him to do so (11). ) The corruption/misunderstanding of the gay couple’s

community in ​The Happy Prince​ is notably less tethered to the actual subject of queerness than

the community in The Outing, but the parallel is nonetheless important- both speak to the

isolation of the queer experience in a predominantly non-queer world.

Although the first two chapters of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando are arguably some of the least gay

parts compared to the entirety of the book, they nonetheless reveal some very interesting and

surprising attributes of Orlando’s attitude toward attraction. Speaking more specifically, the

people he’s attracted to are not characterized by typical conventions of beauty- not even by the

conventions of the Elizabethan era- and yet does not deny himself the pleasure of the attraction.

This is seen very early on, in the first chapter, when Orlando first encounters the

Muscovite princess Sasha, and describes her as “a figure, which, whether boy’s or woman’s, for

the… Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him with the highest curiosity” and that

she emanated an “extraordinary seductiveness” (37). He goes on to think “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” (38). The most fascinating part of this is that it is

not the narrator who describes Sasha in this way, like an opinion given as afterthought to

researched facts, but Orlando himself- he unmistakably finds Sasha attractive ​because​ of her

masculine attributes, not in spite of them. It’s also clear that he is ready to accept the possible

reality that Sasha is male, and rather than feel ashamed, in denial, or even fazed by his own

homosexual attractions, is only concerned with the fact that it is not morally allowed within the

confines of his society- not the morality of the attraction itself. In fact, the only clear emotion

besides lust that we see here is frustration- frustration that the possibility of Sasha’s maleness

would deny him the opportunity of being with her, rather than frustration over her actual

masculinity.
 We see this thought pattern of Orlando’s again with his thoughts of the community of

poets he so greatly idolizes, which he labels as a “blessed, indeed sacred, fraternity”: “to

Orlando… there was a glory about a man who had written a book and had it printed… To his

imagination it seemed as if even… those instinct with such divine thoughts must… have aureoles

for hair, incense for breath and roses must grow between their lips” (82-83). Here, instead of

praising the masculine aspects of a woman, Orlando fantasizes about the godly attributes of male

poets… which are decidedly very feminine. Not only this, but the imagery of incense breath,

glowing, halo-like hair, and roses - one of the most well known symbols for romantic love in

history - is not only feminine, but distinctly sexual. Again, it’s astonishing (and kind of

pride-inducing) that Orlando feverishly waxes such uber-gay poetic without a single thought as

to if he should feel bad or shameful about doing so. He strangely even seems to be incapable of

even knowing what internalized homophobia is, because the concept would be so ridiculous to

him. It’s incredibly heartwarming, especially in a piece written in 1928 about the 1500’s, in

which I would expect all of the depictions of queer attraction to absolutely suffocate under layers

and layers of shame, not only from the characters but from the writers as well.

In chapters 3, 4, and 5 of ​Orlando,​ it becomes more and more apparent that Virginia

Woolf defines gender not only more complexly than how it is seen in her own era, but very close

to the modern understanding of gender identity. This is particularly interesting because of the

strict, conservative climate Woolf would have been writing in, making this novel a sort of

testament to the validity of the inherent nature of gender complexity, especially in a world that

likes to claim that any phenomena falling outside the gender binary are “new problems” affecting

only the youth of the 21st century.

chapter 3, after Orlando has undergone the transformation, and the narrator states “Orlando had

become a woman—there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely

as he had been. The change of sex… did nothing whatever to alter their identity” (138). This

assertion that Orlando’s core identity remains the same even in the event of their external self

undergoing a drastic physical transformation is an observation of gender far ahead of the views

of the 1920’s, supporting the idea we have today that these subversions of the rigidity of identity

have been going on for much much longer than previously thought.

Yet in chapter 4, Woolf somewhat contradicts this idea, with the narrator of Orlando

going on to say “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” (188). In

contrast to the earlier certainty of Orlando’s unchanging internal sense of self, Woolf seems to

say here that an external shift in gender expression ​has​ to come from an internal shift in identity.

However, on just the next page the narrator then says “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,” indicating that a deep

internal change in gender identity absolutely does ​not​ correlate to an outward expression of that

gender identity (189). In fact, she even seems to align here with the more modern theory that

gender is experienced simultaneously but paradoxically in two arenas: the outer world and the

inner self, the former through societally defined and recognized gender cues, and the latter

through personal feelings around identity. Then, in chapter 5, Woolf seems to do a complete 360

back to her original stance, seen in Orlando pondering her past and thinking “She had been a
gloomy boy… and then she had been amorous and florid; and then… sprightly and satirical…

Yet through all these changes she had remained… fundamentally the same” (237). Through all

of these back and forths, Woolf seems to paint a picture of gender as messy and confusing—and

isn’t that how it’s supposed to be? Why relegate this one area of the human experience to an

unyielding binary when we deem that same approach unfathomable for the rest of it? It’s these

questions that ​Orlando​ brings up in a time where it’s crucial to be asking these questions.

Though much of what makes up the meat of the last chapter of Virginia Woolf’s ​Orlando

is a confusing, looping web of motifs, imagery, and philosophy, the most omnipresent concept I

kept seeing was the discussion around the nature of time and how it affects us humans.

Distinctively, a reflection on the way we experience time as non-linear. This is an especially

interesting topic in this novel because of Orlando’s experience of being (and being between) both

male and female. As such, it can be deduced that her experience of time is altered from the

traditional by her gender transience, providing an interesting and revealing point of comparison

for me as a reader, who cannot say the same.

One of the first examples we get of Orlando’s preoccupation with the nature of time in

chapter 6 is after a lengthy stint of observation of her current surroundings, after which “Orlando

started, pressed her hand to her heart, and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can

there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible

because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another” (298). While this particular

example has less to do with the effect of Orlando’s gender on her experience of time, and more

of time in general, it is a powerfully relatable revelation. Orlando’s sudden, painful awareness of

her existence in the present is immediately recognizable, even serving as a sort of sneaky meta
moment for the reader to uncomfortably notice the surrealism of their own present

consciousness. Furthermore, the narrator’s implication that the existence of the past and future

are the only things cushioning our horror at this realization also brings up questions: do the past

and future really exist? Can we really exist in the “present” if we measure time in a way that

doesn’t even allow us to speak a full sentence in the timespan of its smallest unit? As I type these

words they become figments of the “past,” yet they cannot exist without my predetermination of

which ones will come next- in the “future.”

But let’s go back to ​Orlando.​ A little while after this epiphany, the narrator states that

Orlando “had a great variety of selves to call upon… Orlando may now have called on the boy…

who sat on the hill; the boy who saw the poet… or she may have wanted the woman to come to

her; the Gipsy; the Fine Lady…” (309). It’s clear here that Orlando not only sees herself as

accumulating a vast amount of experiences in the time that she has been alive, but that she sees

these various periods of her life has having been inhabited by different people- all versions of

herself, yet distinctly not the same as her present self. This, like before, is a thought I found

comfort in, because it reflects my own system of thought around my memories as well- I will

feel paradoxically that my seven-year old self must be synonymous with the present me, and yet

as if it was a different being entirely that inhabited this body at that time. However, I was not

also inhabiting a different gender at that time, and Orlando was. It’s this that makes me question

how that aspect of her human experience has affected her already complex understanding of the

nature of time, and of how it may or may not affect the experience of the passage of time and/or

memories for trans people in the real world.