Re-Dressing Feminist Identities: Tensions between Essential and Constructed Selves in Virginia

Woolf's Orlando
Author(s): Christy L. Burns
Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 342-364
Published by: Hofstra University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441560
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 Re-Dressing Feminist Identities:
Tensions Between Essential and
Constructed Selves in

Virginia Woolf's Orlando

CHRISTY L. BURNS

Discussing the source of the self is never an easy task.

Autobiographical desires get displaced into biographical sketches,
which are then readily transformed into broad historical portraits.
Ultimately, the task of re-narrating all these simultaneous strands slips
into the genre of fiction, as in Virginia Woolf's parodic biography,
Orlando. If Orlando can be characterized as Woolf's exploration of her
own theory of sexuality (Holtby), it is also a fictionalized biography of
Woolf's friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and still again it functions
as a broadly sketched history of English literature and politics. One can
imagine how to write a biography of one's lover would be to undergo
the process of a powerfully mute identification and realization, one that
calls up denials and displacements as well.'
As desire for identification draws Woolf toward the genre of
biographical fiction, the need for differentiation following upon such a
mimetic project propels her back into parody.2 If the text is "true to"
Sackville-West's personal history, the novel is still quite unfaithful to the
genre of biography. How can one be both faithful to facts and
unfaithful and tell more of the truth without exactly telling it the same?
While the book's incompetent narrator may issue misleading imperatives
to find "the single thread" that ties together personal identity, the
effects of Orlando's transformation through the ages-marked espe-

342
 VIRGINIA WOOLF'S ORLANDO

cially by his/her changes in clothing-execute a parodic deconstruction

of essentialist claims tentatively offered in the text. The tension of these
issues centers on the breakdown of inner and outer spaces in Woolf's
writing. Woolf plays on a twentieth-century conception of truth,
derived from the Greek notion of alethea, unveiling. In her novel truth
is destabilized and turns into parody through an emphasis on period
fashions, cross-dressing, and undressing of "essential" bodies.
Because of the nature of parody-to implement the very concept
that is being distorted and undone-confusion prevails in the current
criticism as to Woolf's position on subjectivity and essentialism in
Orlando.Critics tend toward one of two extreme positions with regard to
Woolf's theory of subjectivity in Orlando, with Fredric Jameson, on the
one hand, using Orlando as an example of a novel that portrays an
unchanging, constant personality passing through the centuries,
bearing the marks of only external re-shapings;3 Makiko Minow-
Pinkney, on the other hand, argues that "social and historical factors are
. . . fully admitted as constitutive for the human subject in the novel"
(135). This question of whether some innate human essence can
surmount historical effects or whether the only "essence" we know as
personality is fully shaped by the world around one-this problem is
comically re-figured by Woolf as the question of whether the clothes
"make the (wo)man." At one point Orlando's narrator suggests that "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"
(189). While one must remain persistently wary of the narrator's
authority in this text, this claim at least points to the importance of such
a possibility.4 Moreover, advocates of gender studies will recognize an
early formulation of contemporary questions about the extent to which
society-and not biology-delineates distinction between "men" and
"women."5
As Bette London has pointed out, Woolf has become the American
feminist's favorite cultural icon, the mother to whom we turn in hope of
finding a mirror of ourselves.6 It begins to look, on London's review of
often contrary receptions, as if Woolf's figure admits of so many
identities that Woolf is merely a mirror to her reader-another bad
cliche of the woman who can mutate to become whatever society
demands of her. My point here is that Woolf is hardly so obliging, and
that contemporary feminist debates do violence to Woolf's texts
whenever they try to create her as icon of their cause, as they struggle to
fix her identity as one identity alone. Woolf's style is a persistent if subtle

343
TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

playing out of tensions, a negotiation of Victorian mores and modernist

experimentation that results in a double mirror, a parodic displacement
of any essential and "true" position. I am returning to Orlando (1928) as
a preferred site of analysis, for that text carries within it the initial map
of concerns that extend into A Room of One's Own (1929), the "literary
feminist bible," as Jane Marcus has called it (5).7 I do not aim to treat
Orlando as a mirror to any single vision of contemporary feminism, so
much as to mark it as a historically significant text that informatively
examines the tensions between notions of essential personal identity and
contextually re-defined subjectivity, tensions that are replicated in
contemporary debates between essentialist and post-structuralist femi-
nists.

In the process of writing her novel, Woolf weaves together two

competing approaches to biography: the attempt to define an essential
self and the modern project of retracing the construction of a changing
subjectivity, which stems most recognizably from Freud's influence. One
need always remember that Orlando is a parodic biography,8 and several
strands of biographical beliefs prevalent in the Victorian era are being
parodied throughout the novel. Influential to Woolf's re-thinking of
the factual exploration of a fixed identity was the work of her close
friend Lytton Strachey, who emphasized psychology in his own work on
biography. Strachey met with great success in the 1920s, inspiring
others to introduce Freudian notions of constructed subjectivity into
biography. In "Women and Fiction" Woolf refers to "our psycho-
analytic age" in which thinkers are increasingly aware,of the "immense
effect of environment and suggestion upon the mind" (45). If Strachey's
work began to move Woolf toward a more contextual understanding of
identity, she was still turning half toward that and half away from the
earlier influence of her father's essentialist notions.
Leslie Stephen was both an author and editor of biographies. His
work was influenced by the Positivists9 and also by English philosophical
discussions of personal identity that grew out of the works of David
Hume and John Locke. For the Victorians, biography had been
institutionalized in part through the "Men of Letters" series begun in
1877 by John Morley. Woolf's father contributed five volumes to this
series and established, in 1882, his own biographical project, the
Dictionary of National Biography (Nadel 41).10 Morley and Stephen saw
biography as a door to history, a way for the reader to "know" a single,
exemplary figure from a period, and hence to understand that period
better. Conceptualized explicitly as a mode of establishing a national

344
 VIRGINIA WOOLF'SORLANDO

identity, Stephen's biographical approach neither portrayed the

individual as created by his age nor gave him an over-determining
influence on it. Rather, the singular individual mirrored the age and
exercised potentially powerful influence on future ages. Following
Plutarch's advice to find, in biographies, "the signs of the soul in man,"
the new humanists chose a biographical subject whose life could be
treated as exemplary, as a spiritual guide and historical locus for the
reader (Nadel 38). This individualistic notion was, however, combined
with a reading of Auguste Comte, who urged biographers to "see the
subject in and of his times, related to history and conscious of the effect
of social and economic forces" (Nadel 39). These "great men" were, in a
sense, contextual creations, but with a firmer essentialist thread running
through their characters.
Woolf would continue to experiment with biography throughout
her career, treating it both as a "serious" form that could provoke
reflection on the lives of women, as in The Second CommonReader, 1 and
as a genre admitting of great comic potential. In 1933 she also
published Flush, the fictitious biography of Elizabeth Barrett Brown-
ing's dog, and in the year of her death she completed a somewhat
unwieldy, serious biography of her friend Roger Fry. Woolf unravels
the tensions in this theory of biography as she pits questions of essential
selfhood against their social constructedness. She not only spoofs the
presupposed centrality of great "men" by treating a man-turned-
woman, in Orlando, but also presses upon the ambiguous relations
between social determinism and individual influence implicit in
Victorian combinations of biographical theories. If Woolf was highly
conscious of living in a "psycho-analytic age," at the same time she
seems to have been drawn toward a more essentialist notion of identity,
perhaps absorbed through early impressions derived from her father's
notions. Orlando was the novel that allowed her to chart the tension
between these two contradictory beliefs.
On the second page of Orlando's holograph, Woolf records a note
from the novel's initial conception:
This is to tell a person's life from the year 1500 to 1928.
Changing its sex.
Taking different aspects of character in different centuries: the
theory being that character goes on underground before we are
born; and leaves something afterword [sic] also.'2
Woolf here remarks the three most important elements of Orlando: the
way in which Orlando's biography doubles as a map of four hundred
years of English history; the shocking scene of Orlando's change from

345
TWENTIETHCENTURYLITERATURE

male to female sex; and the tension between two notions of subject
constitution. She postulates that one's character takes on "different
aspects" in "different centuries," but then translates this into a theory of
a continuous spirit, one that "goes on underground" before birth and
which also "leaves something" after death. These two theories get sorted
out as the novel progresses-the notion of an essential self being
comically reduced to a belief that Woolf's less than competent narrator
struggles to defend, while the parody of that narrator's attempt results
in the realization of the modern, constructive figuration of subjectivity.
This model is not, however, a model of simple determinism wherein
Orlando becomes whatever society requires; Woolf's conception of
Orlando's identity holds within it the possibility for participation in
social and self construction. The crucial question of Woolf's novel
becomes that of subjectivity, but subjectivity as it is embroiled in the
problematics of historical change and sexuality.
The questioning of identity in Orlando raises issues that are of
returning importance to feminism. How much of the self, Woolf asks, is
unchangeably and essentially our own? How solid a space does one have
for resistance to social demands for conformity? Does the "spirit of an
age" weigh upon the sexes differently? And how does one's adaptation
or resistance to society affect one's writing? If such questions are
implicitly structuring the narrative drama of Orlando, they are explicitly
posed in Woolf's feminist essays, most notably in A Room of One's Own.

In 1928, the year in which she published Orlando, Woolf delivered

a series of talks, published under the title A Room of One's Own. Urging
women to write, to give themselves a voice, Woolf is still caught up in
consideration of how one can constitute an identity (of one's "own") in a
world determined by economic constraints and often degrading
representations of women. Woolf must implicitly inquire as to how
women who have been excluded from the male literary tradition might
both participate in and resist that tradition and the expectations of their
unworthiness.
To demonstrate the importance of social pressures, Woolf sketches
a hypothetical "Judith" Shakespeare, sister of William, who is as brilliant
and promising as he, but who fails as a result of the "twisted and
deformed" state of mind that emerges after she encounters society's
restraints on women's genius (50). As Woolf writes, "All the conditions
of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which
is needed to set free whatever is in the brain" (51). The state of mind is
crucial to creation, Woolf argues, and it can only be found in a quiet

346
 VIRGINIA WOOLF'SORLANDO

(socially permitted) moment. This essay has drawn fire recently from
feminist revisionists. London, for example, criticizes feminists for
creating an image of the female writer that "desires to be young, gifted,
and male" (19); Judith Newton also has objected that this demonstrates
how Woolf's writing is not, as Jane Marcus has claimed, revolutionary,
for Woolf holds woman to a polite code of behavior. On other counts,
Elaine Showalter (17) has accused Woolf of being the "bad mother" for
betraying feminism by her "flight into androgyny" in A Room of One's
Own.'3 While I am in sympathy with some of these reactions, I think it is
important to recognize that Woolf's style consistently weaves together
contrary strands. At every moment that she issues an imperative, she
immediately turns with a qualification or even-subtly-a contrary
possibility. She is not, as London suggests, simply a mirror of our own
desires, especially not if one can learn to read the ambivalences in
Woolf's writing as productive of multiple feminist positions.'4
One cannot simply say that Woolf is inconsistent; in the late 1920s
she is playing out the tensions of dual and seemingly opposing
pressures upon identity, tensions which create a web of possibilities. In
Orlando the "male" and "female" strands of character combine in
various ways, leaving Orlando more androgynous than essentially one
sex or the other. Likewise, one might argue that the "revolutionary"
feminist does not (cannot) step completely outside of the existing
(patriarchal) world-a problem explicitly addressed in Judith Butler's
recent work on "gender trouble." In A Room of One's Own these tensions
between utopian desires to escape the system and an insistent drive to
change that system revolve around the metaphor of being locked in and
locked out of institutions. Woman must have "a room of her own" where
she can lock herself in and concentrate, where she can purge herself of
the "male" society that seeks to constrain her voice and control her
writing. But earlier in the essay Woolf describes her anger at being
locked out of "men's" world-out of the library-and driven off the
Beadle's lawn by the river (6-8). Over the course of this essay Woolf is
asking herself whether it is worse to be locked out or to be locked in
(36). The element she implicitly calls on is a kind of reversibility, a tactic
of being at once both inside and outside the tradition. Thus, "A woman
writing thinks back through her mothers. Again if one is a woman one
is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in
walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of the
civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and
critical" (97). The second half of this quotation has been too often
overlooked; Woolf is aware of a heterogeneous heritage and calls on her

347
TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

readers to give up the habit of suppressing the half of their inheritance

that comes from women. It is Woolf's "splitting off" of consciousness
that might interest contemporary feminism and that is developed
elaborately in Orlando. If identity can be formed out of parodically
identifying with a range of models (male, female, dominant culture,
non-dominant, and so forth), perhaps Woolf's own problems with
essentialism can be more precisely addressed.
Ironically, the one philosopher parodied the most in Orlando (if
only with subtle implicitness) bears the name of Woolf's dilemma-John
Locke's opposition between the inside and the outside is taken up by
Woolf through her discussion of clothing and nature. It is coincidence
perhaps that Orlando travels to Turkey under the reign of Charles the
First (1625-1649), undergoes the sex change, and returns with the
commencement of the rule of William and Mary, in 1689, the same year
of Locke's publication of the Essay. Locke and Hume were not
necessarily direct influences on Woolf-although I would like to claim
here an explicit use of one passage in Essay. As to their intersection with
theories of biography, Richard Congreve, an English positivist and
friend of Morley's, had written on Locke. Furthermore, since both were
given biographical representations of their period in the "Men of
Letters" series, their general philosophy of fixed personal identity
pervaded Victorian notions of biography.

In a struggle to form and reform his/herself throughout the novel,

Orlando writes, revises, and eventually publishes a long autobiographi-
cal poem, "The Oak Tree." The poem's title, along with other odd plot
devices integrated into Orlando, suggests an allusion on Woolf's part to
Locke's philosophy of personal identity in his Essay Concerning Human
Understanding.Deriving his notions of personal identity from essentialist
arguments about objects, Locke articulates the belief that "The variation
of great parcels of Matter alters not the identity; an Oak, growing from
a Plant to a Tree, and then lopp'd, is still the same Oak" (330).15 He
resists the notion that any change of the body might have an effect on
one's personal identity. Taking the "oak" as his operable example, he
translates his scientific, essentialist paradigm into one suited for a
human's identity. In both cases, the exterior's alteration (being "lopp'd,"
amputated, or-as figuratively in Orlando-castrated) does not effect
any change in the person's interior self. Not only does Woolf link
Locke's example of an oak tree to the project of autobiographical
writing; she also parodically adapts another example from the
Essay-his explicit dismissal of the relevance of clothing to personal

348
 VIRGINIA WOOLF'SORLANDO

identity. In a key passage of the Essay Locke argues that the self "will be
the same self as far as the same consciousness can extend to Actions past
or to come; and would be by distance of Time, or change of Substance,
no more two Persons than a Man be two Men, by wearing other Cloaths
to Day than he did Yesterday, with a long or short sleep between" (336).
Indeed, Orlando's greatest alterations of personality always occur after
a long trance in which s/he lies as if dead, in a seven-day sleep. Those
sleeps do, in fact, leave Orlando greatly altered, and so, for that matter,
does the clothing s/he wears.
When Orlando'snarrator despairs that the self is "a perfect rag-bag
of odds and ends within us-a piece of a policeman's trousers lying
cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra's wedding veil," s/he comically
postulates that this dissonant collection of various fabrics can be "lightly
stitched together by a single thread" (78). Speculating that this thread
might be memory, or at least "memory is the seamstress," the narrator
comments on how "capricious" a seamstress memory is. "Fabrication"
can be unraveled as well as constructed. Orlando himself, as
autobiographical author of "The Oak Tree," loses the thread of his
memory while trying to add a passage on the betrayal by his first love,
Sasha. Memory is, in fact, as fickle a seamstress as Sasha was a mistress
and both are tied metaphorically to "fabrication" by Woolf: memory
being a "thread" and sash-the root of Sasha's name-meaning in
Arabic the turban of cloth one wraps around the head. In Orlando
fabric, fabrication, writing, sexuality, and clothing are all interwoven.
Through these metaphors Locke's essentialist opposition between
outside and inside is broken down; this opposition decays most
humorously and explicitly in the scene of Orlando's sex change.

As a much-loved ambassador to Turkey during the reign of King

Charles, Orlando falls into his second seven-day trance. The narrator
insists that s/he would dearly love to "spare the reader" the outcome of
this particular crisis, but spurred on by the trumpeted demands of
"Truth, Candour, and Honesty," the narrator observes the way in
which, on a plot parallel, the figures of Purity, Chastity, and Modesty
struggle to veil the "truth" of Orlando's sex. But just as the
mock-Victorian narrator must forge ahead and detail the seemingly
seamy oddities of Orlando's sex change, so these veiling figures are
banished from the scene by trumpets that blast "Truth! Truth! Truth!"
Orlando awakes wholly naked and unclothedon his/her bed: "[Orlando]
stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness
before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! we have no

349
TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

choice left but confess-he was a woman" (137).16 Orlando's sex change
parodies the philosophical search for bare, naked, essential truths. And
it is no coincidence that a parodic text will unravel any fantasy of pure
and perfect mimetic reference. Parody must always simultaneously
point toward its "source"-here Victorian notions of biography-and
humorously distort, debilitating the very act of pointing. A regress of
possible origins inevitably unfolds, as the parody points to no single
biographical text and as the biographer can fix no single identifiable
self for Orlando. Parody thus teases out the impossibility of locating an
immediate referent, a naked source of truth, a fact separable from
fiction. The regressive play of locating a single source or origin
necessarily also complicates notions of historical causality. How might
biography or history determine the cause of a single event?17 In this
scene such classic motifs as unveiling and nakedness are re-organized
around questions of sexuality, and what is "revealed" or "unveiled," the
"truth" of Orlando's sex-that he is a she-points only to the essential
instability of essence, the reversibility inscribed within the "truth." What
is essential here is to be without an essence. What is revealed is the
reversibility of sex. This is no mere playful fancy on Woolf's part,
however; it leads her to reconsider the nature of sexuality and the
constructedness of gender.
For here is the mystery of this crisis: although Orlando's naked
body is markedly changed, we eventually learn that no change in his/her
identity has actually occurred: "Orlando," we are told, "remained
precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their
future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces
remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory ...
went back through all the events of her past life." (138). If one might
assume that sex is one of the single most essential attributes of identity,
the self here is a collection of many possible sexualities. Note that the
pronouns-their, his, her-are comfortably accommodated in a single
"identity" determined by memory chains, a further mark of the
disidentification present in identity. That is, there is a certain plurality
and mark of difference always present in this identification. Notice too
how initially the change in external, physical being has no impact on the
self's internal identification.
Woolf continues to have great fun with pronouns throughout the
novel. When Orlando arrives home a woman, the housekeeper who last
saw her as a man is overwhelmed and keeps gasping "Milord! Milady!
Milady! Milord!" (169). Her social discomfort with sexual ambiguity
elicits the humor of her hysteria.

350
 VIRGINIA WOOLF'SORLANDO

If Orlando's sex is at first ambiguous, when s/he is eventually

transformed, this is not effected through a genital change. It occurs
instead as a gender transformation that emerges after a change of
clothing.

After the sex change, Orlando goes into hiding with the gypsies
in order to escape an insurrection in Turkey. Several months later,
she finally sheds the androgynous Turkish pants she tossed on before
escaping and begins to wear the traditional garb of an English
woman. She thus finds herself abruptly faced with the task of coming
to terms with her new sex. We are told that "up to this moment she
had scarcely given her sex a thought," but, buying and donning "such
clothes as women then wore," she finds herself helpless and at the
mercy of chivalrous condescension. "It was not until she felt the coil
of skirts about her legs and the Captain offered, with the greatest
politeness, to have an awning spread for her on deck that she
realized, with a start the penalties and privileges of her position"
(153). Orlando has to foreswear foul language, realizes she can no
longer swim or stride with ease, and experiences the pang of anxious
control over the Captain's tender ego. So Orlando's body may be
altered by the sex change, but her gender change cannot be effected
until clothing-that external social trapping-pressures her to con-
form with social expectations of gendered behavior. These expecta-
tions work like an outside that seeps in, and clothing attracts and
activates these expectations. It is as if she, Orlando, might have
continued to be a he, if only by virtue of dressing as a man. And so,
we are told, Orlando is herself convinced that it is "often only the
clothes that keep the male or female likeness" (189).
Although the clothes control Orlando as she adjusts to woman-
hood, she is well aware that she is the one who chooses the clothes.18
Throughout the novel Orlando engages in cross-dressing.19 As a
woman Orlando occasionally pulls on a man's breeches and cloak so that
she might go roving about the countryside with the same freedom a
man experiences in his nightly wanderings (215). In this manner she
meets Nell, a friendly streetwalker who gives her the odd sensation of
first being mistaken for a (male) lover and then, when discovered a
woman, being made into a friend and confidant (215ff). Orlando thus
experiences herself as different in response to gender expectations
inspired by means of cross-dressing. The impact of clothing extends
also to categories of class. As a man Orlando uses clothing to disguise
himself as lower class (123 and passim), in order to spend time away

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

from the constraints of the upper classes, mingling with the men and
woman of local pubs and byways.
Clothing, however, is not always just clothing in Orlando. The
parallel between the biographer's duty to relay "Truth, Candour, and
Honesty" and the necessity of revealing sexual "truths" in the scene of
Orlando's awakening suggest another figuration: that of language and,
specifically, of writing. The biographer struggles to write the "naked
truth" about Orlando, but the revelation of his sex change tells us little.
Likewise, Orlando later gets embroiled in the struggle to "say what one
means and leave it." What she finds in trying to abandon metaphor,
however, is that simple statements get no closer to the truth. Sentences
like "The sky is blue," are no more or less true than "The sky is like the
veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair"
(101-02). As with Sasha, so with language; Orlando must conclude that
both "are utterly false" (102).
In light of this suggestive parallel to language we might notice how
cross-dressing happens somewhat unintentionally as well, in Orlando.
That is, sometimes the "fashion of the time" obscures a person's sex and
gender, and confusion results. The first thing we learn about Orlando is
that "There could be no doubt of his sex," although the narrator admits
that "The fashion of the time did something to disguise it" (13). Such
ambiguity becomes important when Orlando comes of age. His first
"true" love, Sasha, is remarked as "a figure, [either] boy's or woman's,
for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to
disguise the sex" (37-38). Orlando is ready to "tear his hair with
vexation," so certain is he that the figure is a young man's and "thus all
embraces were out of the question" (38). The figure, however, turns out
to be that of a woman and an affair ensues. Sexual determination is thus
not secured prior to affection in Woolf's novel, but fixing gender
becomes an important part of courtship, at least prior to the twentieth
century. As Woolf approaches the modern era, she ironizes gender
stabilization and comes very close to valuing homosexual love explicitly.
At one point, cross-dressing is used to introduce homosexual
possibilities when Orlando, as a man, is wooed by the Archduchess
Harriet. Harriet later reveals himself to have been Harry all along (178).
He confesses that he had been so swept away by Orlando's beauty that
he had disguised his sex to press his suit (115ff). Orlando's rejection of
Harriet-Harry allows the story to elide homosexual relations; we later
hear, however, that Orlando's elaborate cross-dressing allowed her to
"enjoy ... the love of both sexes equally" (221). So Woolf writes in some
ambivalence around this issue.

352
 VIRGINIA WOOLF'SORLANDO

While Orlando can participate in the changing re-constitutions and

articulations of her gender through her dress, clothes can also
sometimes contrarily coerce her behavior. Woolf tests the question of
whether "it is clothes that wear us and not we them" when she turns to
what was, for Woolf, the most socially coercive of eras, that of the
Victorians (188).20

As the Victorian age descends, Orlando faces her third crisis as she
attempts to resist the "Spirit of the Age," which dictates marriage. Not
in the least inclined to matrimony, Orlando's "natural temperament,"
we are told, is to cry "Life! A Lover!" not "Life! A Husband!" (244). The
narrator goes on to explain that "Orlando had inclined herself naturally
to the Elizabethan spirit, to the Restoration spirit, to the spirit of the
eighteenth century. . . . But the spirit of the nineteenth century was
antipathetic to her in the extreme" (244). Here, Woolf takes on the
question that troubles contemporary debates about feminism and
psychoanalysis. Is there ever room for rebellion or resistance on the
model of social construction?21 Woolf seems to judge that there is not
room for resistance, but this is only when extremes are postulated in
advance. If the external world and inner self are polarized with respect
to questions of influence, then on Woolf's model here the individual
loses control over his/her self. One result of this conflict, in Orlando's
experience of the Victorian era, is that she can no longer write.
While trying to work on "The Oak Tree," Orlando finds that words
suddenly abandon her. Once she admits that it is "impossible" for her to
write, however, she suddenly sees her own hand and pen possessed by
"the spirit of the age." Spilling out "the most insipid verse she had ever
read in her life," her pen creates a parody of Victorian poetry. While
still ill from this "involuntary inspiration," Orlando becomes aware of a
strange tingling in her left ring finger, the first sign of coercion toward
marriage (238-40). Eventually, she will utter words like "Whom ... can
I lean upon?" at which point the narrator observes, "Her words formed
themselves, her hands clasped themselves, involuntarily, just as her pen
had written of its own accord. It was not Orlando who spoke, but the
spirit of the age" (246). Language can thus function independent of the
author's will-what, to the reader, might resemble something of a
parodic extreme of anxieties about deconstructive and psychoanalytic
theories of language. In order to regain control of her writing, Orlando
must give up her preferred social position of the single, sexually
ambivalent subject. To save her writing, Orlando contemplates
conformity.

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

Rational capitulation, however, does not bring about Orlando's fall

into conformity. It is rather the fabric of the age, literally, that drags
Orlando down and overwhelms her avowed passion for independence:
She stood mournfully at the drawing-room window . . .
dragged down by the weight of the crinoline which she had
submissively adopted. It was heavier and more drab than any
dress she had yet worn. None had ever so impeded her
movements. No longer could she stride through the garden
with her dogs, or run lightly to the high mound and fling
herself beneath the oak tree. Her skirts collected damp leaves
and straw. The plumed hat tossed on the breeze. The thin
shoes were quickly soaked and mud-caked. Her muscles lost
their pliancy. She had become nervous lest there should be
robbers behind the wainscot and afraid, for the first time in her
life, of ghosts in the corridors. All these things inclined her,
step by step, to submit to the new discovery, whether Queen
Victoria's or another's, that each man and each woman has
another allotted to it for life, whom it supports, by whom it is
supported, till death them do part. (244-45)
Woolf thus again takes a form of mental pressure and turns it into a
palpable, physical effect; the heavy crinoline of the Victorian age
imprisons Orlando's person and weakens her resolve for independence.
In her final attempt to avoid social transformation, Orlando rushes out
onto the heath (a favorite sport in English literature), she trips (for
Orlando is rather ill-coordinated), she breaks her ankle, and gives
herself up for dead in the fields. Just at this moment, in parody of Jane
Austen, Jane Eyre, and the novel that closes in marriage, a young man
rides up. Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine jumps off his horse and
exclaims, "Madam . . . you're hurt!" to which she stunningly replies,
"I'm dead, Sir!" (250). Resurrection immediately occurs, and "A few
minutes later, they became engaged." The snap effect of this
capitulation to the Victorian spirit is played up as parodically extreme
here, and is tinged with a certain horror. After Orlando's long
resistance, her instant and gleeful reversal marks a feminist shock.22 As
it turns out, however, Orlando's conformity is not absolute, nor was her
capitulation ever complete.
Eventually Orlando achieves a comfortable gender ambiguity in the
modern era. This ambiguity, or androgyny, is remarked by Orlando's
spouse, Shelmerdine, shortly after their engagement: "You're a woman,
Shel!" Orlando cries. "You're a man, Orlando!" he cries. And, after "a
scene of protestation and demonstration," they settle back into their
assumed sex roles and sexes (252). But not precisely. Soon after,

354
 VIRGINIA WOOLF'SORLANDO

Orlando reflects on the way her marriage-which turns out to be

strikingly nontraditional-has given her an odd freedom:
She was married, true; but if one's husband was always sailing
round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it
marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And
finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole
world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her
doubts. (264)
Although she conforms by virtue of marrying Shelmerdine, Orlando
resists the particular demands of Victorian marriage and womanly
roles. She finds that she has conformed just enough to slip by unnoticed
in the age, while she may also maintain a resistance to further
constraint.
After her marriage, Orlando asks herself if she has satisfied the
demands of the age and if she might again write in her own hand. She
reflects that "the transaction between a writer and the spirit of an age is
one of infinite delicacy" and finds to her great relief that "she need
neither fight her age, nor submit to it; she was of it, yet remained
herself" (266). It is the degree of conformity (and nonconformity),
unmeasurable as it is, that determines the space left for resistance to an
undesirable paradigm. That is, Orlando takes the category that is forced
upon her (marriage), but she subverts it by negating many of its more
traditional constraints.

Our inability to mark what is world and what the individual has lent
great anxiety to contemporary debates about the constructedness of
subjectivity. Paul Smith, for example, has voiced concern that Julia
Kristeva's more recent philosophy of the subject leans away from a
dialogically constituted subject-one that identifies with a range of
possibilities and responds to the world-and tends toward a description
of a subject who would "understand and accept that its own crisis is not
out of phase with the social but is more nearly the truth of the social."
Smith argues that the imperative to "stop worrying and love your crisis"
would "make the analysand conform to a pregiven social world." What
Smith and others like him are concerned about is conformism or forced
collaboration, the collapse of heterogeneous drives. Judith Butler
attempts to answer such concerns, as well as to take issue with a view
that post-structuralist theories of the subject threaten to undermine the
possibility of political action. She sharply identifies a problem for
movements of social change, emphasized in Michel Foucalt's recogni-
tion that institutions and juridical systems of power produce the subjects

355
TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

they eventually come to represent. "Feminist critique," Butler argues,

"ought ... to understand how the category of 'woman,' the subject of
feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures of power
through which emancipation is sought" (2). What Butler offers as a
possible avenue away from such a cyclical dilemma is an awareness that
one does not necessarily just imitate the model, and hence is not
deterministically bound to repeat the conventional model of "woman."
Rather, one can "locate strategies of subversive repetition" and
parodically repeat, yes, repeat-but with a difference (147-78). "The
task," as Butler notes, "is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or,
indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to
displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself" (148).
Butler labels this form of subversive repetition "parody." While I would
not go so far as to say that all parody is subversive23 (it is not clear
whether Butler believes this or not), I do believe that the form of
parody that Butler describes-one that presses toward heterogeneous
mixtures of the norm and the contra-normal-carries with it the politics
she describes.24 Her model offers parody and cross-dressing, in
particular, as acts that cross boundaries and allow one to perform
subjectivity in a dialogue with social expectations for conformity-to
resist without fully breaking with, to remain politically active within the
system without conforming to it. Butler addresses the same early
philosophical debates over humanist individualism and determinism to
which Woolf responds; moreover, Butler's concerns about subjectivity,
as they inform contemporary feminism, are interconnected with
Woolf's own ambivalences, embedded as they are in American
feminism's current identity crisis.

Woolf's hope, as she first confided it to Sackville-West, was to

"revolutionise biography in a night" while also working to "untwine
and twist again" the various strands of Sackville-West's character
(Letters 3:429). The two actions are inextricably related; to "revolu-
tionise" biography-the science of the self-one much be weaving
together disparate strands. Woolf goes further and weaves strands of
herself together with references to Sackville-West, thus inscribing the
paradoxical representation of one self constructed from two (or
more), and thereby only loosely tied. And all this through the practice
of writing.
Writing has a psychologically constructive function for Woolf, one
that helps the author re-determine herself. In "A Sketch of the Past"
(1939), Woolf reflects on the difficulties of biographical writing:

356
 VIRGINIA WOOLF'SORLANDO

Consider what immense forces society brings to play upon each

of us, how that society changes from decade to decade; and also
from class to class; well, if we cannot analyse these invisible
presences, we know very little of the subject of the memoir; and
again how futile life-writing becomes. I see myself as a fish in a
stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the
stream. (80)
The tension between self-control and historical influence here signals
Woolf's changing sense of the historical process, her interest in causality.
This interest is also necessarily directed toward concerns about how one
writes about the self, a process that Woolf seems to believe will give her
back to herself. In A Room of One's Own she urges young women to find
their voice (and, I suggest, their selves) through the act of writing. Woolf
believes that she can free herself from undue social influence only by
describing the stream that surrounds her, and, while she is here "caught"
in the stream, at other moments her writing suggests a more active
engagement with the influences that surround her.
In the act of writing the (auto)biographical narrative of Orlando,
Woolf can address questions about her own (and women's) sexuality
and subjectivity-how these things are determined by context or
predisposition-through strong identification with the biography of a
woman whose name, Vita, holds in it the Latin meaning of life, life
force, and-biography. I point toward this close relation between "the
self" and biography that constructs the self through language in order
to emphasize the ways in which Orlando's surviving question-that of
who Orlando is-and Woolf's genre, parodic biography, are integrally
related. I would like to suggest through a reading of Orlando that
notions of the self are intricately linked to writing for Woolf, and that
the essence of a word functions just like the essence of a person, clothed
in social conventions and full of indeterminacy. Locke's essentialist
doctrine of personal identity in fact trembles when he begins to reflect
on language in the Essay (476-77). Referring to the "double use" of
words, Locke divides the use of language into two projects: that of
recording autobiographical notes to the self, and also that for conveying
ideas to others (to express truths). He articulates an uneasy concern
about the "doubtfulness and uncertainty of [words'] signification" on
account of there being no relationship between words and ideas but that
which man artificially imposes. It is as if words might be the fabric that
veils the truth, but Locke is nervous about the project of unveiling. He
worries that "no one has Authority to determine the signification of the
Word Gold" (486).

357
TWENTIETHCENTURYLITERATURE

Mastery, authority, and control over the self (and one's word)-
these are issues as well for Woolf. Of the novel that precedes Orlando,
Woolf admits she has inscribed an ambivalence about her own power as
author. When her friend Roger Fry writes a long letter in praise of To
the Lighthouse, he confesses that the "symbolic meaning" of the
Lighthouse escapes him. Woolf writes in response that "I meant nothing
by The Lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the middle of
the book to hold the design together. I saw that all sorts of feelings
would accrue to this, but I refused to think them out, and trusted that
other people would make it the deposit for their own emotions-which
they have done. ... I can't manage Symbolism except in this vague,
generalised way" (Letters3:385). Woolf's habit of writing in ambivalent
symbols that admit of a variety of definitions is a way of giving some
partial authority to her readers, which creates more conspicuously this
double/multiple-mirror effect.
Likewise, readers of Orlando, as noted, identify with Orlando's
formation of "identity" variously. This is perhaps because subjectivity
itself in Orlando is increasingly depicted as a mesh of various optional
identities. The present moment of the novel-its closing day in October
1928-finds Orlando constantly invoking her own history, recharging
her memory, and re-narrating her past (298ff). She calls to herself,
"Orlando?" upon which we are treated to a long reflection on personal
identity, which concludes with the exasperated query: "How many
different people are there not-Heaven help us-all having lodgment
at one time or another in the human spirit?" These alternative selves
(some two thousand and fifty-two, the narrator speculates) are "built
up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter's hand" (308)
and all are attached to certain weather, locales, circumstances, and
people, and so can be triggered on appropriate occasions. The
conscious self then struggles to form a dominant identity of them all;
Orlando undergoes this exercise shortly before the novel's close.

One is left to ask, much like an echo of Orlando herself, what if

anything constitutes Orlando's identity. Has anything remained
essential or even consistent throughout the history? Various strands,
such as memory and her ownership of the estate, might be suggested.
But memory lapses and Orlando travels about. The one truly persistent
aspect that remains with Orlando throughout her life may seem more
arbitrary than essential; only her name, "Orlando," truly remains the
same. Moreover this name (Orlando) is also the name of Woolf's
fictional text (Orlando), which points up something significant about

358
 VIRGINIA WOOLF'SORLANDO

biography. That is, once the corporeal body is gone, only the textual
body remains. Orlando ends abruptly with the appearance of an odd,
elusive goose that flies beyond Orlando's nets. Earlier, Orlando recalls
how she has always been "Haunted! Even since I was a child. There flies
the wild goose. It flies past the window out to sea. Up I jumped (she
gripped the steering wheel tighter) and stretched after it. But the goose
flies too fast.... Always I fling after it words like nets (here she flung
her hand out) which shrivel as I've seen nets shrivel drawn on deck with
only sea-weed in them. And sometimes there's an inch of silver-six
words-in the bottom of the net. But never the great fish who lives in
the coral groves" (313). Whether this is all merely a wild goose chase, as
J. J. Wilson has suggested, or some moment of serious personal strife,
Woolf admits that the fish (or goose), the self, or the "essential truths"
about one's life, will never be caught, nor in a sense will they ever be
lost, for there will always be silver dregs at the bottom of the subject's
net, interestingly figured as the curious residue of language. It is in a
sense only this residue that both invites and resists our insistent
refigurations, our attempts to make Woolf conform to our societal
demands. Thus in Orlando Woolf has already, in the process of playing
out her own anxieties about conformity and identity, anticipated our
attempts to clothe her writings in our own desires. She offers, as always,
both a sympathy (a partial identification with our desires and
requirements) and a parody that resists such reductive (or "fishy")
attempts to fix a single subject position within our nets.

NOTES
Critics all concede that Vita Sackville-Westis Orlando's primary model.
Woolf solicits her response to the novel's premise early on: "Suppose,"she
writes,"Orlandoturns out to be Vita; and it's all about you and the lusts of your
flesh and the lure of your mind" (Letters3:429). With Sackville-West's
permission,Woolf goes on to model Orlando'svariouslovers on Sackville-West's
own. Lord Lascelles, who unsuccessfully wooed Sackville-Westfrom 1912 to
1913, appears as the Archduchess/ArchdukeHarry (Letters3:433n). Violet
Trefusis, one of Sackville-West'searly lovers, gets transformed into Sasha
(Letters3:430 and Diary3:162). Vita'sown family history,Knoleand theSackvilles,
supplies Orlando's distinguished ancestry and the description of Orlando's
estate. Orlando further shares Sackville-West'sliterary aspirations; his/her
poem, "The Oak Tree," takes large pieces out of Sackville-West's"The Land."
Like Sackville-West, Orlando exhibits a penchant for transient sexual
attachmentsas well.
2 In her
diary (3:163) Woolf reflects that she is writing Orlando"half in a
mock style,"but trying to strike a balance between truth and fantasy. Woolf's

359
TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

brand of humor is parodic, modeled, I believe, on Jane Austen's lightly satiric

tone. Orlando's parodic twist is suggested immediately in the preface, in which
Woolf thanks the "many friends" who helped her along with her project. "Some
are dead," she notes, "and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no
one can read or write without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir
Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott . . ." and the list continues. Woolf's
preface simultaneously performs the gesture of thanking those who assisted her
project while also parodying the genre's constant hat-tipping, source-naming,
and allusion to key literary figures.
3 See Marxism 375 and Political 136.
James Naremore also argues that
Orlando and Between the Acts "present history as a kind of a pageant, where the
costumes change but the actors remains the same" (195). Gillian Beer argues as
well that history changes only the outer lights, while humans remain essentially
the same.
4 Critics have in
part begun to pick up on this motif in Orlando. Sandra
Gilbert, for example, argues that each change of clothing constitutes an identity
for Orlando.
5 For several articles
giving serious thought as to how we might reconsider
Woolf's impact on contemporary American feminist thought, see the special
issue called "feminist miscellany" of Diacritics, 21.2 (Summer-Fall 1991). See
especially Rachel Bowlby and Bette London.
6 London here is concerned that "in
remaking Woolf-or any other
figure-as mother of feminist literary criticism ... we risk creating a mirror to
magnify our own achievements" (20).
7 London also
points to Judith Newton's emphasis on A Room of One's Own
as a call for a canon of women's writing, and she notes as well that Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar extend this project in their work.
8 Woolf parodies the Victorian insistence on bare facts, the resistance to

imaginative construction. In "The New Biography" Woolf suggests that, though

fiction and biography are conceptually incompatible, they are necessarily always
interwoven arts. She there recommends the use of what she calls "creative facts"
to reconstruct the personality as well as the historical life.
9 Fredrick Harrison, G. H. Lewes, Richard
Congreve.
10For eleven
years, starting in the year of Woolf's birth, Stephen worked
on sixty-three volumes of the Dictionary, contributing over 370 entries and
editing a mass of others. See Leslie Stephen Men, Books, and Mountains 13. The
biographer's task, for Stephen, was to bring order to the chaos of available
material, to provide the framework that would allow the subject to speak for
itself. Although Stephen, like Woolf, argued that biography should be classified
as an art, he favored a much more condensed and less imaginative approach
than the one Woolf chose.
11 She uses this in contradistinction to Morley's and Stephen's emphasis on
the lives of great men. In "Women and Fiction" Woolf remarks that "the history
of England is the history of the male line, not of the female" (44). Her "Lives of
the Obscure" gives a female line to women writers, and a history of struggle
against social constraint and disappointment.
12Cited in J. Wilson 179.
J.
13 Woolf
opts for Coleridge's model of the "androgynous" artist. She

360
 VIRGINIA WOOLF'S ORLANDO

imagines a mind that might be a mixture of male and female gender traits, a
mind such as she has just sketched in Orlando (98). She complains that men of
her time write with too much of the male side of the brain. She complains, in
general, that "it is fatal for any one 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" (104). By merging the two, she argues, the anger that can
damage a woman's writing will be disassembled.
14See London 20. London makes an important case for turning toward
figures besides Woolf in our struggle to revise notions of feminism. While I
would not argue to erase Woolf, who seems to operate as a strong map of
American feminism's unconscious and conscious struggles, I would say that by
turning to a broader range of figures we might ease up on the more competitive
and critical urges that make Woolf a figure who does seem, in a sense, to have
grown disproportionately large.
15 Locke promotes the notion of a solid essence, composed of unchanging
attributes of the object. This notion of an object's essence was applied to
theories of personal identity into this century. See Book II, chapter 27, where
he argues that consciousness (or memory) is alone constitutive of consistent
character. David Hume expands on and contradicts Locke's theories in A
Treatise on Human Nature (1739-1740) and An Equiry Concerning Human
Understanding.In Book I, part IV, section VI of Treatise,he argues that the self
is only a fiction that we construct through memory. Hume, however, is invested
in refuting religious notions of the soul which Locke's work supports.
Consequently, Hume links the body to the self, whereas Locke insistently
separates the two.
16 This moment is not
only a coming-out narrative; it is also a feminist
gesture. Woolf is placing woman into a national history that largely excluded
her, a point she remarks with great energy in Three 33. One might also note, as
does Carolyn Heilbrun, that this tribute to Sackville-West goes one step further
and returns to her the home and estate she would have inherited had she been
male.
17Within the construct of the story, the cause of Orlando's sex change is
puzzling. It may have been necessary, as Orlando's only possible escape from
the marriage contract found near his body during this trance. Orlando was
apparently secretly married to Rosina Pepita, a dancer of uncertain origin, who
had borne him several illegitimate children during his stay in Turkey (132). On
a broader scale, general social upheaval (the Glorious Revolution of 1689)
might suggest the need for transformation. One might even speculate that
cross-dressing in Turkish pants, which was not only a favorite trick of
Sackville-West's but a popular practice among English women in the 1920s,
linked gender ambiguity and Constantinople in the minds of Woolf's
contemporaries. Karen Lawrence, for example, reads Orlando's sexual
transformation as intricately linked to her trip to Turkey. Marjorie Garber
argues that wearing Turkish pants brings about the sex change. Orlando is,
however, naked here. Moreover, he seems to have worn English dress at least
occasionally. The narrative leaves ambiguous the question of whether or not
Orlando wore Turkish dress except before his bath. However it occurs, the sex
change stands out as shocking and a-contextual, both in its narrative expression
and by virtue of the humor Woolf wrings from such a shock.

361
TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

18 Sandra Gilbert has

argued that "Woolf's view of clothing implied that
costume is inseparable from identity-indeed, that costume creates identity"
(394). Gilbert, however, fails to acknowledge the trauma of the transformations
in Orlando, and so all tensions between historical, social, and individual
determination drop out.
19I believe that the novel's title refers to Ludovico Ariosto's OrlandoFurioso,
which also deals with questions of cross-dressing. A romantic epic from the
Italian Renaissance, Ariosto's poem was written over the course of his life,
starting in 1502 and finishing only some thirty years later at the time of
Ariosto's death. Orlando likewise writes "The Oak Tree" from the novel's
inception, in 1500, until 1928. In Ariosto's long series of cantos, sensual love is
the prevailing passion, as is its analysis in Woolf's novel. Most significant,
however, is the use of cross-dressing in Ariosto's poem. Marphisa, a fearless and
respected woman warrior, dresses as a man, jousts in the wars, and is famous for
her ability to fight like a man. Moreover, the women of her city are said to keep
the men home, "to ply the distaff, broider, card and sow,/ In female gown
descending to the feet,/ which renders them effeminate and slow" (lxxii in
Canto XIX). Gender categories are thus scrambled between cultures as they
relate to the performance of cross-dressing.
20 The narrator comically dissents from the view that, if man and woman
had "both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have
been the same too" (188). We are given instead the suggestion that "the
difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity. Clothes are
but a symbol of something hid deep beneath." But this opposition breaks down
almost immediately in the narrator's rather haphazard ramblings: "Different
though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from
one sex to the other takes place" (189). Clothes, we are told, merely anchor
temporarily one side of the androgynous nature to which the parodic
oscillations in the narrator's perspective have given rise.
21 The model to which I refer here is a Freudian notion of
developmental,
Freudian subjectivity, where personality is formed by early crises. This model is
established for Woolf, as I have argued, through Strachey's work. This fits into
a much more precise sketch of social constructiveness in contemporarywritings by
Michel Foucault, whose work takes up the same concerns that seem to be
motivating Woolf. Judith Butler's work, discussed below, is clearly indebted to
Foucault's own struggle with these questions.
22 At the 1990 International Symposium on James Joyce, Sandra Gilbert
read this moment of Woolf's acceptance of "the new" in contradistinction to
Joyce's repetition of "the old" in Finnegans Wake. (Gilbert's argument is
developed in what I understand to be an early draft of her introduction of her
and Susan Gubar's No Man's Land, Volume 3, forthcoming from Yale University
Press.) In fact, the "new," as it is invoked here, is accompanied by a return to the
old tradition of marriage. Marrying herself to Shelmerdine, Orlando opens
herself to new experiences, but she also conforms to tradition. This scene can be
misconstrued if not read closely. Sue Roe, for example, argues that "The Oak
Tree" "can only be written when Orlando recognizes that she wants to be
married, just like everybody else" (97). Roe's book proves to be one of the best
on questions of writing and gender, but here she makes a disturbing slip.
23 In
fact, depending on the aggression and application of its gesture,

362
 VIRGINIA WOOLF'S ORLANDO

parody is seen as either bitingly satirical or benignly ironic. It can be

light-hearted and playful or, per Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" model,
willfully aggressive toward its target. Both Margaret Rose and Linda Hutcheon
are concerned with this ambivalence. Butler builds her notion of parody off of
a more deconstructive model, one that emphasizes the play in parodic gestures.
See Richard Kearney's and also Jacques Derrida's formulations of parody in
Spurs. Derrida most powerfully develops a notion of parody implicitly in
"Double."
24 Butler points out that "the deconstruction of identity is not the
deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms
through which identity is articulated" (147, 148, passim).

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