OTHELLO'S SISTER: RACIAL HERMAPHRODITISM AND APPROPRIATION IN VIRGINIA

WOOLF'S "ORLANDO"
Author(s): CELIA R. CAPUTI DAILEADER
Source: Studies in the Novel , spring 2013, Vol. 45, No. 1 (spring 2013), pp. 56-79
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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OTHELLO'S SISTER:
RACIAL HERMAPHRODITISM AND
APPROPRIATION IN VIRGINIA WOOLF'S
ORLANDO

CELIA R. CAPUTI DAILEADER

Like any writer worth her salt, Virginia Woolf had a gift for first sentenc
Her most fanciful novel, Orlando (1927), begins: "He—for there could be
doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise
was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafte
(13). As an opening, this is on par with that of her most famous work, A Room
One's Own (1929), for its sly wit and rhetorical innovation: "But, you may s
we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do w
a room of one's own?"(3). In each case, Woolf breaks with the convention
English composition to very different—although theoretically linked—effe
crafting on the one hand an overtly self-deprecating, yet covertly sarcas
feminine persona, and, on the other, a bombastic and ultimately specious m
biographer-narrator. "He," Woolf writes, then adds a dash—putting the ter
"under erasure" syntactically, if not in the strictly Sausserian sense. It is a b
move—as is her beginning her book-length essay on "women and fiction" w
a conjunction.
Orlando's first sentence, though, does much more than catch our attention.
The gendered pronoun immediately undercut by the typographic violence of
the dash both introduces the hero/ine and ironically foreshadows his magical
transformation into a woman not quite halfway through the novel's three-and
a-half century romp. In other words, Woolf's dash enacts on her protagonist's
gender the veiy sort of violence she describes (as I'm similarly doing when I
call him a "hero/ine"). But the genius of the sentence does not stop there. For
crystallized in these mere thirty-eight words we not only find Woolf's critique

Studies in the Novel, volume 45, number 1 (Spring 2013). Copyright © 2013 by the
University of North Texas. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

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 WOOLF / 57

of gender norms and imperialism, but also her indictment of the relationsh
between them. There "could be no doubt"—the narrator confidently declares
of Orlando's biological gender because...well, look at what he's doing, h
playing with something "the color of an old football," and everyone knows
only boys play with footballs. That the "football" was once a man's head is
not, in the biographer's deadpan description of this puerile mock-violence, an
more remarkable than "the fashion of the time"—because "Orlando's fathers...
had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders...," as we quickly
learn, and "[s]o too would Orlando, he vowed" (13). As I am not the first critic
to point out, Orlando's pointless brutality with the unfeeling skull parodies
the brutality that placed it there in the rafters of his ancestral manor—and that
brutality is deeply gendered, and deeply British (see, for instance, Phillips 186
and Hovey 398).
For a novel Woolf herself dismissed in her diaries as a "joke," as
"frivolous," and as "mere childs |sic] play," this opening reference to racist
violence is disturbing (Diary 177, 264). Sally Potter's filmic interpretation
omits it entirely, choosing instead to begin with Orlando's composing poetry.
I myself did not know at first what to do with it—or indeed with any of the
other seemingly offhand references to people of color in Woolf's oeuvre. Is
the decapitated Moor in Orlando yet another instance of the Anglophone
obsession for which I coined the term "Othellophilia"?1 Indeed, Shakespeare's
tragedy of interracial love and murder seems to be everywhere and nowhere
in the novel. The hero's name alludes to As You Like It (one of Shakespeare's
most gender-bending comedies) as well as Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (from
whence Woolf derived her hero's love-madness), but it also closely resembles
another seven-letter name beginning and ending in the round vowel: Othello. If
the resemblance is accidental, Woolf's shorthand for the novel in her letters—
"O—o"—hints further at an unconscious association (Vol. 4 23,27). Only after
viewing a performance of the play does Orlando determine to elope with his
Russian princess, and that plan's failure sets up the ensuing events of the novel
as a kind of anti-Othello. It is almost as if Woolf sat down to write the story
of an Othello whose Desdemona betrays him before their marriage, and then
eludes (ingeniously and to feminine applause) his jealous rage.2
Virginia Woolf, no bardophile herself, was the rebellious daughter of a
deeply bardolatrous, imperialist, and sexually conservative Victorian England.
Her ambivalence toward Shakespeare's literary and cultural dominance
saturates her work. ",..[H|is fame intimidates and bores," she irreverently
notes in her essay "On Being 111": "a paternal government might well forbid
writing about him, as they put his monument in Stratford beyond the reach of
scribbling fingers" (200). According to the great Shakespearean Julia Briggs,
Woolf imagined Shakespeare not as a literary father-figure, but as her literary
big brother: her relationship with her own older brother—whose tragic death
greatly affected her—was largely carried out in and through their discussions

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58 / DAILEADER

of the famous poet. In comparing Shakespeare's influence on Woolf to his

influence on James Joyce, Briggs places the relationship between the two ma
authors on a vertical axis and contrasts this hierarchical, paternal relationshi
to the horizontal, fraternal relationship between Shakespeare and Wool
"While Joyce's relationship with Shakespeare is problematized by race and
nationality," Briggs writes, "Woolf's is complicated by gender" (128). As muc
as I appreciate, on feminist grounds, the way this diagram empowers Wool
relative to her male contemporary, I wish to quarrel with the race/gender binar
Briggs builds into the equation, thereby occluding the importance of race an
nationality in Woolf's literary self-fashioning. Indeed, the text that takes up
the most space in Briggs's article is Orlando—a novel that, as I've alread
touched on, concerns itself with issues of race, nation, and empire from its firs
sentence onward. As Karen R. I .awrence observes, the novel "is a narrative
of boundary-crossings—of time, space, gender, sex" (327). Its immortal hero/
ine traverses not only centuries and gender roles, but also ethnic and racia
categories as well: it is in Constantinople that s/he becomes female—a change
that precipitates her joining a band of Gipsies—and it is the shared fantasy o
"kissing a negress in the dark" that crystallizes the sexual empathy between th
protagonist and her equally androgynous lover, Shelmerdine (ibid 258).
My reading of the above-quoted passage builds on that of Jaime Hovey,
who considers "the 'negress'...a racially and nationally colonized figur
appropriated to mark the closeting" of Orlando and Shelmerdine's "queerness
But the invocation of the "negress"—metonymizing the hero/ine's "sexual
perversity and ambivalent gender identification" (401)—also points up the
way in which the text consistently racializes her/his sex-change. In the contex
of what I will call Orlando's "racial hermaphroditism" and in the meta-contex
of Woolf's own affair with Vita Sackville-West (the dedicatee of the book and
source of all the images of Lady Orlando), the fantasy of kissing a "negress
signals her resistance to the conservative sexual and racial ideologies th
Shakespeare—accurately or not—had come to represent (see Taylor 16
230). That this undermines her praise in A Room of One's Own of the Bard
"incandescent, unimpeded" and "androgynous" mind should not surprise us
{Room 57, 103). "Lies will flow from my lips" (4)—she warned her readers.
And how could she help it, as a feminist, a critic of empire, and a bisexual in
1929?

What Color Is an Oyster?

Toni Morrison writes that "in a wholly racialized society, there is no
escape from racially inflected language, and the work writers do to unhobble
the imagination from the demands of that language is complicated, interesting,
and definitive" (13). Although Morrison speaks here of "both black and white
American writers" (13), her critical paradigm offers a starting point for an
analysis of Orlando's racial subtext. For Woolf indisputably had Othello on

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 WOOLF / 59

her mind when she crafted Orlando's first chapter, yet she seems to have tak
pains to "unhobble" her art from the racialized color binaries that pervade
Shakespeare's play.3 Thus, the love affair of Orlando and the Russian princes
that occupies the Elizabethan section of the novel both is and is not legible a
interracial to a culture as steeped in dichotomies of skin color as Woolf's (an
our own).
From first sight, the Russian princess is associated with the snow of her
homeland and something else that the poet-protagonist struggles to express in
metaphor. Not surprisingly in this novel, he is at first unable to distinguish her
gender: when they meet, skating on the frozen Thames, she is "dressed entirely
in oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish-coloured
fur" (Orlando 37). The oyster introduces a pattern of nautical imagery that
pervades the novel; it also suggests inwardness, layering, and the female
sexual organs. Modifying a color, the term becomes richly ambiguous. The
exterior of an oyster can be solid white or gray, but is often marbled with
purplish or bluish tints; it can also be green, or even black. An oyster shell's
interior is often pearly or even iridescent, while the flesh—and the rare pearl
inside—can be white or gray. In her letter to Vita the day after beginning the
novel, we see Woolf playing with the image: "But listen: suppose Orlando
turns out to be Vita...suppose there's the kind of shimmer of reality which
sometimes attaches to my people, as the lustre on an oyster-shell...?" (Vol. 3
429). This fascination with the effects of light on surfaces is part and parcel
of Woolf's modernity and anti-essentialism, and marks her departure from the
early modern binary of appearance ("seeming") versus essence that undergirds
Shakespearean tragedy.
But back to the Russian princess. Woolf reinforces the ambiguity of the
woman's velvet attire by trimming it with fur the color of no earthly animal.
The text then doubles back to comment on itself:

Images, metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted
in his mind. He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and
a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether
he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together. (For though we
may pause not a moment in the narrative we may here hastily note that all
his images...were mostly taken from things he had liked the taste of as a
boy...)....A melon, an emerald, a fox in the snow—so he raved, so he called
her. (37)

Shape-shifting exoticism moves through this sequence as furtively as through

the protagonist's perceptions, and it is typical of the bumbling narrator
to comment so ineptly on them. Indeed, the tropes are objects of literal or
figurative consumption—fruit, a fruit-bearing tree, an animal that may be
hunted and skinned, a gemstone. But the list is far more suggestive than that.
For one thing, none of these is native to England. We later learn more about

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60 / DAILEADER

the fox: "Hence Orlando and Sasha, as he called her for short, and because
it was the name of a white Russian fox he had had as a boy—a creature soft
as snow, but with teeth of steel, which bit him so savagely that his father had
it killed—hence they had the river to themselves" (44). Returning, thus, to
the exotic objects that represent Sasha—"a melon, a pineapple, an emerald,
a [Russian] fox in the snow"—we find suggested the range of capitalist
imperialist exploitation of foreign resources, from mining to trapping and
skinning of animals. The excerpt—particularly when the origin and fate of
the fox are considered—also subtly echoes the opening of the chapter, where
a man's head is being "sliced at" and compared to a "cocoanut" in a seeming
paean to what Lawrence calls "the phallic narrative of lunging and plunging"
(327). Notably, it is Orlando's/aï/îer, a figure otherwise absent from the book,
who kills the animal for biting his son "savagely"—just as "Orlando's fathers"
plural are responsible for decapitating "many heads of many colours...to hang
from the rafters" like mere meat to be cured.
And speaking of "heads of many colours." This lineup of produce
coconuts, melons, pineapples, and olives—can also be used to trope skin color,
and hence race. Melons can be green or flesh-toned, olives green, brown, or
black, and so on. These images stand interestingly in tension with the narrator's
blazoning of Orlando himself:

The red of the cheeks was covered with peach down....The lips themselves
were short and slightly drawn back over teeth of an exquisite and almond
whiteness....|H|e had eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water
seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like the
swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which
were his temples. (15)

Peaches, almonds, violets, marble, and gold (presumably, the material of the
"blank medallions")...the conventionality of these tropes—and their racial
significations—need not be belabored. Hovey argues that the details of this
blazon "racial ize and eroticize the contrast between Orlando's Caucasian
youthful vitality and the defeated head" of the Moor that "grin[ s] at him through
shrunk, black lips triumphantly"(309). But they also set up a subtler contrast
with Orlando's own blazon of Sasha—or rather his failure to blazon her at all.
For Orlando struggles with—as did, presumably, his creator—the limitations
of poetic language. Less satisfied with cliché than the narrator of his own life,
Orlando tosses about the usual "stale" (as he calls them) Petrarchan tropes
only to dismiss them, one by one: "he...would try to tell her what she was
like. Snow, cream, marble, cherries, alabaster, golden wire? None of these"
(iOrlando 47). Woolf may have had in mind, here, the anti-Petrarchan parody
of Shakespeare's "Sonnet 130":

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 WOOLF / 61

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

This is the most popular of the so-called "dark lady sonnets" ambivalently
praising the dark-skinned, exoticized woman who interrupts the poet-persona's
relationship to an idealized, androgynous fair youth very like our own Orlando.
We will later look more deeply into the evidence for Woolf 's interest in this
famous literary love triangle. For now, I note only the way in which these
sonnets prefigure the themes of androgyny, bisexuality, and interracialism of
Orlando. For, though a host of Shakespeareans pre-dating Woolf minimized
and whitewashed the sonnets' misogyny and racism, Woolf clearly associated
the eroticism of "snow, cream, marble," etc. with British chauvinism and
imperialism. For, rejecting the above tropes, Orlando immediately asserts:

She was like a fox, or an olive tree; like the waves of the sea when you look
down upon them from a height; like an emerald; like the sun on a green
hill which is yet clouded—like nothing he had seen or known in England.
Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another
landscape, and another tongue. (47)

If Sasha is Desdemona-like in her association with whiteness (the "oyster

coloured fur" she wears; the white fox of her namesake; the repeated references
to the snows of Russia; her "pearls" [48]), she is a kind of anti-Desdemona in
her frank sexuality. The hero goes on to muse, "For in all she said, however
open she seemed and voluptuous, there was something hidden. So the green
flame is hidden in the emerald, or the sun prisoned in a hill" (47).
Since Othello's first performance, commentary on Shakespeare's famous
tragedy of uxoricide has lingered uncomfortably on the degree to which
Desdemona is or is not sexually innocent, the degree to which, coarsely put,
she somehow "had it coming to her"—whether in terms of matrimonial or
filial and racial disloyalty—when her jealous, black husband smothers her.4 I
find it a moot point, and, given her liberal sexual views, I suspect Woolf would
have agreed. For Orlando does glimpse Sasha in the arms of another man. In
Othello-like fashion, he then swoons, and allows himself to be convinced the
vision was a trick of the light. Shortly after this mishap, the couple views a
performance of Othello. Now the aggression displayed on the first page of
this chapter is redirected from a Moor's skull to a live woman. Orlando and
Sasha witness "[s]omething like our Punch and Judy show" involving "a black
man...waving his arms and vociferating" and "a woman in white laid upon

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62 / DAILEADER

a bed" (56). That he is a "black man" and not a white man in blackface—as
would have been the case in early performances—seems more than a casual
anachronism, given Woolf 's own viewing of black actor Paul Robeson in the
role two years later (Diary 304). Note, however, that Desdemona is not a white
woman but a "woman in white." Interestingly, this novel peopled with (to use
Woolf's pejorative terms) "Blackamoors," "Turks," "Gipsies," "Muscovites,"
"Pygmies"—even, embarrassingly, a "nigger" (so Orlando refers to the moor's
head twice in later chapters)—contains not a single white woman (see note 13).
Here is Orlando's reaction to the performance:

The frenzy of the Moor seemed to him his own frenzy, and when the Moor
suffocated the woman in her bed it was Sasha he killed with his own hands.
At last the play was ended. All had grown dark. The tears streamed down
his face. Looking up into the sky there was nothing but blackness there too.
Ruin and death, he thought, cover all. The life of man ends in the grave.
Worms devour us.
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe
Should yawn—

The quote from Othello then segues into an echo of The Merchant of Venice:
"Even as he said this a star of some pallor rose in his memory. The night was
dark, pitch dark; but it was such a night as this that they had waited for; it
was on such a night as this that they had planned to fly" (Orlando 57, my
emphasis). Woolf here revises the Shakespearean duet of the Jew's daughter
and the Christian with whom she elopes:

Lorenzo.
The moon shines bright. In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees
And they did make no noise—in such a night
Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls
And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents
Where Cressid lay that night.
Jessica. In such a night,
Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew
And saw the lion's shadow ere himself
And ran dismayed away. (The Merchant of Venice 5.1.1 -9, my emphasis)

The passage continues in this melancholy vein, ending with Lorenzo's calling
his bride a "little shrew."

Thus, in this densely allusive conclusion to Orlando's first chapter, two

Shakespearean, fugiti ve, interracial couples get superimposed upon Orlando and
the Russian princess on the eve of their planned flight. Like Desdemona, Sasha
is suspected of having betrayed the hero: like Jessica, she will come disguised
"in her cloak and trousers, booted like a man" (Orlando 59). That Merchant

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 WOOLF / 63

contains Shakespeare's only female moor—offstage and impregnated by the

clown (see 3.5.35-40)—may also have been on Woolf's mind. The appointe
meeting place for Orlando and Sasha at "an inn near |the] Blackfriars" Theatr
further connects their romance with Shakespearean drama. I would also point
out that critics frequently apply the term "stagey" to Woolf's novel itself (fo
example, see Hovey 399 and Lawrence 332). That "staginess" seems a by
product of Woolf's Shakespearean appropriations (Woolf added the Othello
reference in revision: the earliest manuscript, the Hologaph, only mentions a
masque by "Jonson, Shakespeare, or another" at this point in the story [38]).
The difference, of course, is what comes of the hero's poetic raptures.
In the downpour that ensues, the Thames thaws, the ice breaks apart, and th
Russian ship departs—with Sasha (presumably) on board. Woolf concludes th
chapter with a deflating image of male jealousy:

Standing knee-deep in the water he hurled at the faithless woman all the
insults that have ever been the lot of her sex. Faithless, mutable, fickle, he
called her; devil, adulteress, deceiver; and the swirling waters took his words,
and tossed at his feet a broken pot and a little straw. (64)

If this is Woolf's answer to the final scene of Othello, I imagine Shakespear

spinning in his grave.

"Unsex Me Here"
After his betrayal, Orlando's first Othello-like move is to go into a trance
(see Othello 4.1.42sd). But Orlando's trance—the first of two—lasts seven
days. Is Woolf commenting on Shakespeare's strange knack of "killing" and
reanimating his characters—particularly his women? Desdemona, Hermione,
Juliet, Hero—the list is sizable. Then there is the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth,
whom I've quoted above. In any case, chapter 2 may well be the most
"Shakespearean" of the novel, for here Orlando meets—not the Bard himself,
but a character, Nick Greene, clearly based on his rival Robert Greene. And
yes, this is the same Nick Greene who gets Judith Shakespeare pregnant in
A Room of One's Own—but I will be talking more about Room below. This
greasy and unkempt figure represents the antithesis of Bardolatry, allowing
Woolf to poke fun at not only Shakespeare but also her poet-protagonist. For
Orlando gives Greene a manuscript to read only to have his efforts lampooned.
This is the second of the three humiliations (the first, of course, being Sasha's
abandonment) that eventually send the hero to Turkey. The third is an encounter
with an amorous duchess (in fact, a duke, we later learn) that leads Orlando
to decide that "[l]ove has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies,
one smooth, the other hairy" (117). In order to flee this "harpy," he requests
an appointment as ambassador to Constantinople, a place where, ironically, all
such comforting dichotomies explode. As if to punish her protagonist for such

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64 / DA I LEA DER

zero-sum thinking, Woolf first marries him to an illegitimate, gipsy half-breed

(Rosita Pepita, named after Vita's own grandmother, a Spanish dancer), puts
him to sleep for another seven days, and then turns him into a woman.
Woolf's description of Orlando's "unsexing" is worth quoting for the
delightfully anti-Freudian implications noted by critics such as Lawrence
and, before her, Elizabeth Abel: "Orlando looked himself up and down in a
long looking-glass, without showing any signs of discomposure, and went,
presumably, to his bath" (Orlando 138).5This is a far cry from the appalling
and traumatic "discovery" of female genital deficiency absurdly postulated by
Freud. But Orlando's transformation manifests more than Woolf's feminist
critique of Freud specifically, or her anti-essentialism generally. As Kathy
Phillips argues, the Constantinople sequence also foregrounds Woolf's critique
of British imperialism and its masculinist justifications, the latter satirized
in the figure of one Lieutenant John Fenner Brigge and his hysteria about
protecting "English ladies" (in what turns out to be only a fireworks display)
and demonstrating the "superiority of the British" (when he realizes his own
countrymen set off the rockets |127|). Shortly after this episode, the Turks
favor their anxious visitors with some real action, and it is during this mayhem
that Orlando's magical sex-change occurs:

The Turks rose against the Sultan, set fire to the town, and put every foreigner
they could find, either to the sword or the bastinado. A few English managed
to escape; but, as might have been expected, the gentlemen of the British
Embassy preferred to die in defense of their red boxes, or, in extreme cases,
to swallow bunches of keys rather than let them fall into the hands of the
Infidel. The rioters broke into Orlando's room, but seeing him stretched to all
appearance dead they left him untouched. (Orlando 133)

As it turns out, our hero is not dead but female (which, as Woolf's narrator later
drily notes, "amounts to much the same thing" 1168|).
Why did Woolf find an Orientalist setting necessary to her uncannily
prescient vision of transsexuality?6 Lawrence points out that "the first sketch
for the novel that ultimately became Orlando was conceived by Virginia as
she waited impatiently for Vita's letters from her second trip to Teheran"
(330). In a letter to Vita that anticipates Sasha's projected disguise for the
aborted elopement, Woolf writes, "I see you, somehow, in long coat and
trousers, like an Abyssinian Empress, stalking over those barren hills" (qtd.
in Lawrence 331). But there are further political implications. According to
Phillips, "Orlando becomes a woman for the imperial age because the British
Empire" requires the pretense of protecting its women. This is particularly the
case in Constantinople, where the decline of the Ottoman Empire created a
power vacuum impossible to resist. Phillips goes on to connect Orlando's anti
imperialist satire to the critique of the Crimean War in To the Lighthouse, and to
Leonard Woolf's 1917 monograph, The Future of Constantinople. Apparently,

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 WOOLF / 65

the Woolfs shared the view "that imperial rivalry for this city was one of th
factors contributing to World War I" (189).
If the British Empire, however, has plans for I .ady Orlando, she prove
a typical woman in immediately thwarting them. The first thing she does
as a woman is to flee with a band of gipsies, who, interestingly, adopt her
without hesitation on the basis of her dark hair and complexion (so much fo
that "marble dome" of her boyhood brow). This episode seals the association
between Orlando's racial and sexual chameleonism. Moreover, the Gipsies—
whom Orlando first considers "little better than savages"—puncture her cultural
chauvinism. On boasting of her house in England with its "365 rooms," and th
nobility of her forebears, her hosts shame her into the following reflections:

To the gipsy whose ancestors had built the Pyramids centuries before Christ
was born, the genealogy of Howards and Plantagenets was no better and no
worse than that of the Smiths and the Joneses; both were negligible....And
then, though he was too courteous to speak openly, it was clear that the gipsy
thought that there was no more vulgar ambition than to possess bedrooms
by the hundred (they were on top of a hill as they spoke; it was night; the
mountains rose around them) when the whole earth is ours. Looked at from
the gipsy point of view, a Duke...was nothing but a profiteer or robber who
snatched land and money from people who rated these things of little worth,
and could think of nothing better to do than to build three hundred and sixty
five bedrooms when one was enough, and none even better than one. (147-48)

The Eurocentric association of Gipsies with Egypt (erroneous, as we now know

sets the stage for Orlando's later eroticization of "Egyptian girls" (Orlando
265) and signals a secondary thread of Shakespearean appropriation/allusion
here and, as we'll see shortly, in A Room of One's Own, involving Antony
and Cleopatra. For the moment, however, I wish to linger on the Gipsi
nomadism—their "room-lessness"—in its relation to Woolf's feminism.
Orlando's ancestral home, by contrast, seems to grow and shrink, adding and
losing rooms as a tree branches. The usual count is 365—with the obvious
symbolism—but elsewhere the house has 467 and 400 rooms. For the purposes
of my argument we need only note the feminization of these gipsies in their
marginalization from patriarchal structures of land-ownership and inheritance.
As Woolf asks in Three Guineas, "What does 'our country' mean to me as an
outsider?" (107).
Orlando—as a woman—can never go home.

"Kissing a Negress"
In the penultimate chapter, the Lady Orlando falls in love with and
hurriedly marries the adventuring Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, whom
she nicknames Shel in a manner consistent with the book's nautical imagery
and his own profession as a sailor. They meet at the climax of a hilarious
satirization of Victorian sexual conservatism, when the heroine—having

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66 / DAILEADER

enjoyed affairs with both men and women of all classes and types—i
suddenly seized by "the spirit of the age" in the form of a tingling ring-fing
(iOrlando 243). She then runs off in an existential panic onto the moor, wher
she falls and breaks her ankle. Just as she tells herself, resignedly, "I have
found my mate. It is the moor," a Brontean "dark" figure on horseback gallop
up to her (248). The pun on "moor" as both a black person and an expanse o
uncultivated land deserves attention, not because Shel is explicitly racialized
but because his status as an "extravagant, wheeling stranger" who enchants th
heroine with his "traveler's histories" (Shakespeare, Othello 1.1.138, 1.3.138)
draws comparisons not only to Rochester and Heathcliff, but also to their
Shakespearean prototype, Othello.7 And it is in Shel's stories of his adventur
that we arrive at the apotheosis of Orlando's interracialist subtext.

She would listen to every word...so as to see...without his having to tell her,
the phosphorescence on the waves, the icicles clanking in the shrouds; how
he went to the top of the mast in a gale; there reflected on the destiny of man;
came down again; had a whiskey and soda; went on shore; was trapped by
a black woman; repented; reasoned it out; read Paschal; determined to write
philosophy; bought a monkey; debated the true end of life; decided in favour
of Cape Horn, and so on. All this and a thousand other things she understood
him to say and so when she replied, Yes negresses are seductive, aren't they?
he having told her that the supply of biscuits now gave out, he was surprised
and delighted to find out how well she had taken his meaning.
"Are you positive you aren't a man?" he would ask anxiously, and she
would echo,
"Can it be possible that you are not a woman?" and then they must put it
to the proof without more ado. (257-58)

Thus, a shared interracial erotic fantasy crystallizes the sexual empath

between two characters who clearly stand for Woolf herself and her lesbia
lover. Could the "negress," then, be Woolf's answer to Shakespeare's "dark
lady"? As the dark-skinned vehicle of white-on-white homoerotic passion, th
figure allows one taboo—miscegenation—to stand in for another, in much th
same way that, in the verbal foreplay of Orlando and Shel, '"the biscuits ra
out' has to stand for kissing a negress in the dark when one has just read Bish
Berkeley's philosophy for the tenth time" (257-59). Notably, the kissing goes
on in the dark, where, to paraphrase a crude saying, all women are black. Th
reference to Berkeley's anti-materialist philosophy adds further confusion, bu
seems to suggest a parallel between dry, white bread and an even less satisfyin
food for the brain (why must it be read ten times?).
But that doesn't make the moment any less racist, and it is a racism that
oddly, Woolf intensified in revision (elsewhere, her revisions are anti-racis
as in her cutting the term "nigger" from the first page).8 In the Holograp
Manuscript, the negress does not trap Shel, and a cancelled sentence attribut
him a motive. Woolf also added the monkey—another allusion to Merchant of

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 WOOLF / 67

Venice, where Jessica suggestively pawns her father's "stones" (Elizabethan

slang for testicles) for such a pet, making it perfectly clear that her elopeme
and conversion symbolically castrate Shylock. All together, then, it is temptin
to consider these elements Shakespearean appropriations of a piece wi
"Othellophile" narratives like Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights or Bra
Stoker's Dracula. Yet, once again, the expected binaries do not hold: Shel is
at once Othello (telling bewitching traveler's stories), Desdemona (findi
black skin "seductive"), and Jessica (buying a monkey); he is at once white
and black, male and female, seduced and seducer, Christian and Jew. Thoug
calling the tryst entrapment fuels one set of stereotypes about women of colo
it does also render Shel sexually passive, feminized, at the same moment tha
his lover's voyeuristic (even better, telepathicl) enjoyment of the episo
and her locker-room style remarks render her masculine. As Hovey notes,
Orlando here is "simultaneously English and foreign, white and multiracial
heterosexually respectable and polymorphously perverse" (402). Ultimately,
the episode leaves it up to the reader to renegotiate "the sexual and racial term
of English national identity" (403).

A Pearl Richer Than All Her TVibe?

When 1 taught Orlando in a course called 'The History of Illustrated
Text," I noticed the prominence of pearls in the faux portraits of the Russian
princess (in fact, Woolf's niece) and Lady Orlando (Vita). This seems not
accidental, given the symbolism that pearls play in the book, from Sasha's
"oyster-coloured velvet" to her eyes like something "fished from the bottom
of the sea" (38; compare Shakespeare's "those are pearls that were his eyes..."
I The Tempest, 1.2.4011), to the pearls with which Orlando buys her passage
back to England (one of which, the Gipsies calculate, is worth an entire flock
of goats), to the pearls whose luminescence guides Shel's airplane to landing in
the whimsical final scene. I wonder whether, in crafting this pattern of imagery,
Woolf had in mind Othello's self-eulogy before his suicide, comparing him to
the "base Indian, |who| threw a pearl away/ Richer than all his tribe" (Othello
5.2.356-57).9 Shakespeare employs here the familiar Elizabethan trope for a
woman's sexual and racial purity, while also reinforcing the racialist-imperialist
notion that non-Christian, "savage" Others are not the best guardians of their
own riches (and let's remember that the term pearl was frequently modified
"orient"). The quote also points up the hierarchy of value wherein white
women (chaste ones, anyway) stand in for whole populations ("tribes") of
dark-skinned, colonized men and women, and the way in which these highly
prized European females propel colonial endeavor in their desire for (and, one
hopes, moral worthiness of) the pearls they wear.
We have seen Woolf play with the equation of women and precious stones,
as when the (male) Orlando compares Sasha to an emerald. That figuration,
however, lacks the racial valence of Othello's trope for Desdemona. Nor does it

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68 / DAILEADER

imply chastity—rather the opposite, in stressing the "flame" trapped within the
jewel's surface. And as for the value of Orlando's pearls, one unit is measured
not against a "tribe" of people, but a flock of goats. Moreover, when Woolf
writes "chastity is [women's] jewel...which they run mad to protect, and di
when ravished of' (Orlando 154), she invokes the Elizabethan/Shakespearean
trope only to satirize it. Indeed, her critique of the cult of chastity runs paralle
to her critique of imperialism in Orlando: her marriage to Shel is in many
ways a sham, and even acts as a cover enabling her to craft those homoerotic
lyrics to "Egyptian girls." As for the sexualized imagery surrounding jewel
and their exchange, the fact that Orlando weds Shel using her own ring (th
sapphire s/he as a male had given in an aborted betrothal) underscores the
way in which Woolf's transsexual hero/ine essentially marries herself
Gayle Rubin's groundbreaking feminist critique of Claude Levi-Strauss
theorization of kinship structures seems oddly prefigured here. Arguably, n
female character in English literature so thoroughly undermines the "traffic
women." Returning, however, to Othello's final speech, a very powerful poin
of contrast between Woolf's notion of the self and Shakespeare's becom
visible. For Othello's self-eulogy is the apotheosis of his self-division in the
murder scene: he speaks of himself in the third person as he prepares for
and carries out his suicide ("That's he that was Othello. Here I am"; "I took
by th' throat the circumcised dog / And smote him thus" | Othello 5.2.290,
364-65]). For Shakespeare, thus, self-division is tragic. Contrastingly, in th
final chapter of Woolf's novel, when the hero/ine talks to herself and call
herself by name, this self-division is not tragic—if anything Woolf celebrat
the multiplicity of the human psyche, for "...how many different people are
there not—Heaven help us—all having lodgment at one time or another in th
human spirit?" (308). Ultimately, then, it is the novel's anti-essentialism with
regard to all aspects of identity that inspires me to collapse Orlando's (and
Shel's) sexual androgyny and racial malleability under the coinage of "racial
hermaphroditism." In describing Orlando's selves the narrator includes "the
Gipsy, the Fine Lady, the Hermit...the Patroness of Letters" (309). There is
also a "barbaric necklace of heavy beads" (312) seemingly chosen to offs
those pearls, along with some geographical confusion, "England, Persia, Italy"
(313) all mentioned in the same breath. Significantly, though, Woolf tropes
the moment in which Orlando's selves (temporarily) unite as darkness: "The
whole of her darkened and settled...and all is contained as water is contained
by the sides of a well. So now she was darkened, stilled, and become...what is
called, rightly or wrongly, a single self, a real self' (314).
This internal darkness becomes richly symbolic in the curious dream
vision that fills the novel's final pages, which I now take the liberty of quoting
at length. A Morrisonian reading of figurative darkness and light here may very
well unlock the author's racial unconscious. Woolf writes:

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 WOOLF / 69

Her own face, that had been dark and somber as she gazed, was lit as by
an explosion of gunpowder. In this same light everything near her showed
with extreme distinctness....She saw with disgusting vividness that the thumb
on [the carpenter's] right hand was without a finger nail and there was a
raised saucer of pink flesh where the nail should have been. The sight was
so repulsive that she felt faint for a moment, but in that moment's darkness,
when her eyelids flickered, she was relieved of the pressure of the present.
(320-22)

The passage continues meditating on "the shadow that the flicker of her eyes
cast"—the term "shadow" appearing five times in four pages—and reiterating
the strange linkage between the sight that had caused this mental darkness, that
"saucer of pink flesh":

For the shadow of the faintness which the thumb without a nail had cast had
deepened now, at the back of her brain...into a pool where things dwell in
darkness so deep that what they are we scarcely know. She now looked down
into this pool or sea in which everything is reflected—and indeed, some say
that all our most violent passions...are the reflections which we see in the dark
hollow at the back of the head.... (322-23)

Woolf's canvas then mutates from darkness to chiaroscuro, unfolding a vision

of "the bare mountains of Turkey...|at| blazing noon" and the voice of the
gipsy, demanding, "What is your antiquity and your race, and your possessions
compared with this?" (326). The vision dissipates when the chiming of a "church
clock" brings Orlando back to the obscurity of her English surroundings at
dusk, "misty fields, lamps in cottage windows...and a fan-shaped light pushing
the darkness before it along some lane....Night had come—night that she loved
of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine
more clearly than by day." Orlando now "look|s| deep into the darkness where
things shape themselves" and sees "Shakespeare...a girl in Russian trousers...
then the Atlantic itself, where it storms in great waves past Cape Horn." She
sees her husband's ship struggling up a colossal wave: "Up, it went, and up and
up. The white arch of a thousand deaths rose before it." Seeing the ship arrive
safely, the waters calm, she cries, "Ecstasy!" (327).
The sexual connotations of the sequence are hard to miss: the phallic
thumb with its "pink flesh"; the imagery of liquids; the orgasmic "white arch"
and cry of "Ecstasy!" But the imagery is racial as well: the "white arch of a
thousand deaths" occurring off the coast of South America recalls the Middle
Passage, while the "pink flesh" of the carpenter—and the disgust it inspires —
can be read as commenting on his racial whiteness. The gipsy's challenge to
Orlando's cultural and class pride is never answered: in fact, his association
with light, as opposed to the murk and mist of the English countryside at
nightfall, reinforces the veiled anti-racism (or even reverse-racism, if there is
such a thing) of Orlando's disgust at the English carpenter's "pink flesh" and

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70 / DAILRADER

the lack or deficiency it represents. The dreadful "white arch" rising out of th
reiterated shadows and darkness of Orlando's reveries, moreover, resonates
with Morrison's commentary on images of whiteness in American fiction:
"|I|mages of blackness can be evil and protective, rebellious and forgiving,
fearful and desirable—all of the self-contradictory features of the self.
Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen
veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable" (59).
But there is more. In her "ecstasy" over Shel's surviving the Atlantic
storm, she magically summons him:

"Here! Shel, here!" she cried, baring her breast to the moon...so that
her pearls glowed like the eggs of some vast moon-spider. The aeroplane
rushed out of the clouds....It hovered above her. Her pearls burnt like a
phosphorescent flare in the darkness.
And as Shelmerdine, now grown a fine sea captain, hale, fresh-coloured,
and alert, leapt to the ground, there sprang up over his head a single wild bird.
"It is the goose!" Orlando cried. "The wild goose...." (329)

Phillips argues that this final scene "parodies both the imperial mission
of bringing light and its female mascot full of sweetness. Ludicrously,
Shelmerdine's militaristic, phallic airplane is guided to land by th
'phospherescant flare' of Orlando's bared breasts and rich pearls" (199). But
if the scene does ridicule empire, it does so while refusing to disambiguate the
racial status of its representatives. To risk splitting hairs, I would point out that
the source of this guiding light is not Orlando's breasts themselves ("...why
then her breasts are dun"?) but her pearls, and Shel, first introduced in the nove
as a "dark figure," is described here as "fresh-coloured"—meaning (as it would
have to mean of a sailor) ruddy, tanned. And if the sequence "breast...moon
pearls...eggs...moon-spider" emphatically genders Orlando, it does so in a
way radically discordant with the angel-in-the-house rhetoric one associates
with the pro-imperialist, British, feminine ideal. On the contrary, there is
something Circean and siren-like about Orlando's luring her sea-captain down
by the luminescence of her pearls. And why a goose? Why not end the novel
with another avian image—for instance, a swan, that symbol of Shakespeare
("the swan of Avon") and British cultural and racial supremacy? A goose is
female—and this one is not domesticated, like a kite, a haggard, or a hen. Also,
given the palette with which Woolf is working in these final pages, the bird's
color (presumably "steel blue" [327] like the metaphorical feather that appears
two pages prior to her arrival) seems not randomly chosen. With the possible
exception of the pearls, then (and I think of phosphorescence as tending toward
the greenish side, like the algae on an oyster or the "greenish-coloured fur" of
Sasha's "oyster-coloured" skating outfit), the only white in this concluding
series of dream-like images is aligned with "a thousand deaths." This "white
arch" rises out of the darkness very much like Poe's spectral figure at the en

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 WOOLF / 71

of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym or the white mountaintop at the end of
Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Unlike those "Africanist"
moments so compellingly analyzed by Morrison, though, Woolf's final pages
resist, ultimately, a color-binary, leaving us instead with a grayish-blue goose.
I have made much of Orlando's first sentence. The very last sentence
reads: "And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded...Thursday, the eleventh o
October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight." Beginning with the pronoun
"he," the book ends with a number—the year in which the book was written,
of course, but also, accidentally (or not), the year that English women were
granted universal suffrage. Might the wild bird, then, be read as a figure for
feminine freedom, taking off just as that "phallic, militaristic" (in Phillips's
words) airplane lands? The overlapping composition of A Room of One's Own
and Orlando's strange finale would suggest that to be the case. And, to close
this critical chiasmus, a glance at Room's ending seems appropriate. Woolf
writes of "the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister" putting back on "the
body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the
unknown who were her forerunners...she will be born" (Room 114). Woolf
here imagines a feminist second coming.
So the wild goose becomes the Phoenix.

"Chloe liked Olivia"

Woolf's diaries show her to have been "woolgathering" about A Room
of One's Own while completing Orlando's final chapter (Diary 175). And if
readers think her famous essay on "women and fiction" does not touch on
issues of race, they may have passed too quickly over the following passage:

...|P|ublicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The

desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned
about the health of their fame as men are, and...will pass a tombstone or a
signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it, as...
[men] must do...murmur[ing as]...a fine woman go[es] by, or even a dog, Ce
chien est a moi. And, of course, it may not be a dog...; it may be a piece of
land or a man with curly black hair. It is one of the great advantages of being
a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make
an Englishwoman of her. (Room 50)

As a trained Shakespearean teaching this text solely in courses on feminism

and canon-revision, for many years I dismissed the reference to the "fine
negress" as an irrelevant racist hiccup; now, viewing the reference to veiling
in light of Orlando's seeming Orientalism, a subtly anti-racist—and clearly
anti-imperialist—point becomes legible in the "negress" and her male
counterpart (metonymized cleverly and elliptically by his hair). It is (white)
men, according to Woolf, who make human beings—white women and black
men, implicitly—property, on par with dogs and real estate. Further exoticism
arises in the subsequent turn to Antony and Cleopatra:

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72 / DAILEADER

What was Shakespeare's state of mind...when he wrote Lear and Antony and
Cleopatra? It was certainly the state of mind most favourable to poetry that
there has ever existed. But Shakespeare himself said nothing about it. We
only know casually and by chance that he "never blotted a line." (Room 51 )

In fact, we "know" nothing of the sort—we know the opposite to be true—an

I suspect Woolf suspected as much. Shakespeare blotted plenty of lines, as
authors do. Lear itself exists in two markedly different authorial versions, a
fact obscured by editorial practice so fully by Woolf's time that we can hard
blame her for mentioning it in the same breath as a play for which no equivalen
textual controversy exists (see Taylor and Warren).
It is to Antony and Cleopatra, however, that Woolf returns in Room, in
way that seems consistent with Orlando's interracial subtext. For Antony an
Cleopatra takes pride of place for Shakespearean citations in A Room of One'
Own just as does Othello in Orlando. Moreover, this other Shakespearea
interracial tragedy is also—not accidentally—the source of Woolf's on
explicit complaint about Shakespeare's female characters in her semin
work of feminist criticism.10 Narrating her perusal of (the fictitious) Mar
Carmichael's (fictitious) first novel, Woolf's persona pauses on the statemen
"Chloe liked Olivia." The names, it turns out, are selected to segue alliterative
into the following remarks:

Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like
Octavia. And how completely Antony and Cleopatra would have been altered
had she done so!...Cleopatra's only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy.
Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair?...All these relationships
between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious
women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. (Room 82)

It is worth pointing out that Woolf's persona, here, identifies with the exoticize
and sexualized Cleopatra—a figure the author also impersonated in one
her biographical episodes of racial drag (a subject to which I will return).11
Moreover, the Cleopatra reference works in a manner similar to the "fine
negress" passage in underscoring the relationship between Woolf's feminism
and her interracialist imagination. Although Woolf does not belabor—in fact
she effaces—the racial divide between the Roman Octavia and her dark rival
(in Shakespeare's text, Cleopatra asks about the color of Octavia's hair), her
suggestion that the two women might bond despite or through their shared
erotic interest in Antony is counter-Shakespeare on the grounds not only of
gender but of race. In Shakespeare's works, where female sexual rivalry plays
out in racial language even between "white" characters (think of Helena and
Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream),12 Woolf's re-imagining cross-racial
hetero female rivalry as a kind of interracial bi sisterhood is subversive indeed.
Interestingly, these reflections lead back to Othello. Woolf invites us to
"|s|uppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as

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 WOOLF / 73

the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers,
dreamers;...how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most o
Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamle
no Lear, no Jaques..." (Room 83). Othello, as the most effeminized of
Shakespeare's heroes, stands alongside Antony—effeminized in his love for
a dark-skinned "Gypsy"—on the same side of a gendered and racial binary
opposite some of Shakespeare's most admired, hyper-masculine, and (with
the possible exception of Jacques) Anglicized (that is, "white") character
This brief thought experiment concluded, Woolf returns to "Chloe and Olivia
(that is to say, Cleopatra and Octavia) and spins out the following color-coded
conceit:

If Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will
light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been. It is all half
lights and profound shadows like those serpentine caves where one goes with
a candle peering up and down....I wanted to see how Mary Carmichael set to
work to catch those unrecorded gestures...which form themselves, no more
palpably than the shadows of moths on the ceiling, when women are alone,
unlit by the capricious and coloured light of the other sex. (Room 84, my
emphasis)

The color binary here is noteworthy and it is of a piece with the slippage from
"fine woman" to "fine negress" quoted earlier in this digression on A Room of
One's Own. Whatever Woolf's own attitudes toward real women of color, in
the theoretical cave or "dark continent" of female relationships, we are all in
the dark, and equally "dark."13

"Sapphism Is To Be Suggested"
In shedding light on Shakespeare's blindness to female friendship, Woolf
anticipates twentieth-century feminist criticism on his fractured female
bonds generally (see, for instance, Rose, Adelman, and Jardine). But Woolf's
biography also highlights—in "meta" fashion—the way in which an investment
in Shakespeare's cultural capital can work to estrange women from one another.
Julia Briggs highlights how Woolf's discussions of Shakespeare with her
brother "created a bond between them that excluded Vanessa, Virginia's sister
and beloved rival, from their discussion. Thus Shakespeare, for Virginia, was,
from the beginning, bound up with sibling love and rivalry within the family"
(128). In the discourse of sisterhood that permeates Woolf's meditations on the
male canon, we may glimpse not only the author's ambivalent identification
with her older brother, but also her sororophobic guilt vis-à-vis Vanessa.14 And
this guilt extended to the women in her audience, who do not share Woolf's
privileged status as author, publicist, and Shakespearean.
Until this point, I have resisted contextualizing Woolf's comments on
female relationships in terms of her bisexuality, in part because a significant

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74 / DAILEADER

branch of feminist thought from Adrienne Rich onwards has posited

"lesbian continuum" that renders it irrelevant, in part because Woolf's essa
on women and fiction is so determinedly "hetero." But reading the latter a
sister-text to Orlando—as theorizing the creative impulse behind the novel —
compels consideration of the biographical meta-text. Thus, for instance, Lady
Orlando's poeticizing about "Egyptian girls"—then hesitating, pen in hand,
over public opinion—prefigures Room's interest in Cleopatra. The episo
is also self-referential on Woolf's part: from her earliest conception of the
novel she planned that "Sapphism...be suggested" (Diary 131), and in ligh
of the sensational obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel The Well o
Loneliness that erupted less than one week after Orlando's publication, Woolf
may very well have dodged a bullet.15
Yet there is evidence of self-censorship in Orlando. Woolf's first draft
of the novel contains a scene she later omitted, in which Nick Greene give
Orlando a letter containing "Shakespeares own account of his relations with
that Mr. W. H. & the dark Lady written by him with great fulness & spiri
[sic]." The typically prudish narrator/biographer then burns the letter, rathe
than resolving the biographical riddle posed by Shakespeare's sonnets an
their personae, for "when Truth and modesty conflict...who can doubt which
should prevail?...No one of British blood will censure us for the course we
took...." {Holograph 72). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, brilliantly analyzing th
paradigmatic homosociality of the sonnets, takes pains to avoid anachronism i
describing "Will" Shakespeare's infatuation with the fair youth as homosexua
a classification alien to Early Modern English culture. But reading Shakespear
through Woolf (hence, post Freud) de-necessitates the usual scare-quoting.
To Woolf, Shakespeare's poet-persona—in his taste for both fair-skinne
androgynous boys and "dun"-skinned, sexualized women—must have
embodied the sexual/racial wanderlust played out in her correspondence with
Vita and on the pages of Orlando.
What is the difference, then, between Woolf's artistic vision in Orland
and Shakespeare's in the sonnets? The difference is encapsulated in a single
letter: "...a shadow seemed to lie across the page |of the novel by "Mr. A"].
It was a straight, dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter 'I.' One
began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it
(.Room 99). As touched on in regard to Othello's final speech, the two author
have radically different approaches to the self, and that contrast is visible bot
in terms of characterization and authorial self-fashioning. To elaborate, no
only does that overweening, masculinist "I" pepper Shakespeare's sonnets, bu
his punning on his own name ("will" was a euphemism for sexual desire and
or the genitals) allowed for special heights of phallic boasting and misogyn
in "Sonnet 135." Explicating the transition from the lighthearted and playful
homoerotic "procreation sonnets"—wherein men beget men upon absent an

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 WOOLF / 75

anonymous women—to the troubled sexual nausea of the "dark lady sonnets,"
Sedgwick writes:

...|T]o be self-divided in loving the fair youth feels like being stoical,
while to be self-divided in loving the dark lady feels like becoming ruined.
Differently put, for a man to undergo even a humiliating change in the course
of a relationship with a man still feels like preserving and participating in the
sum of male power, while for a man to undergo any change in the course of
a relationship with a woman feels like a radical degeneration of substance...
This difference also helps describe the impression of sexlessness that
persists in the relation of the speaker to the fair youth, even in the face of any
amount of naughtiness, genital allusion...and just plain love. Sexuality itself
seems to be defined in the Sonnets not primarily in terms of any of those
things, but as a principle of irreversible change.... (45)

Sedgwick sums up the contrast by quoting two representative sonnets from

each grouping: "A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe / Before, a joy
proposed, behind, a dream" ("Sonnet 129"); versus love, the "ever-fixed mark"
("Sonnet 116").
Woolf herself was no "dark lady," at least judging from the portraits
I've seen. But she enjoyed blacking up, most famously in 1910, when she,
her brother, and some friends employed racial disguise in a practical joke
against the British navy and in particular the crew of the HMS Dreadnought.
The pranksters presented themselves as the emperor of Abyssinia and his
entourage and were entertained unrecognized aboard ship. Woolf—the only
woman in the group—cross-dressed not just racially, but sexually, donning
turban, robes, facial hair, and prosthetic lips. At the revelation of the hoax,
Woolf's chastity was maligned—yet this did not prevent the author from an
even more shocking cross-racial performance, when she appeared a year later
at the Post-Impressionist Ball dressed as one of Gauguin's Tahitian models, in
brown makeup, flowers, beads, and scandalously little else. And I have already
mentioned her impersonating Cleopatra at a fancy-dress party. As Urmila
Seshagiri observes, these performances reveal Woolf's "interest in reordering
the boundaries of Englishness through tropes of racial difference" (65).
What do these biographical anecdotes tell us about Woolf's racial politics
in Orlandol Racial drag—as we know from minstrel shows—can be deeply
racist. But the point of the Dreadnought hoax was to expose the cultural
ignorance of the British, as Jean E. Kennard points out, linking the hoax and its
fallout to The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, and Orlando.16 And though Woolf's
exotic party costumes may be dismissed by Seshagiri as mere participation in
"London's Orientalist fashion craze" (53), we do know from A Room of One's
Own that Cleopatra figured into her feminism. Moreover, these three episodes
of racial disguise also constituted moments of sexual border-crossing, and it is
this aspect that brings us back to Woolf's appropriation of Othello.

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76 / DAILEADER

Conclusion
In her diary entry for April 8, 1925, Woolf describes a trip with Leonard
to Marseilles and Cassis on the French Riviera, and quotes Othello: "But L. &
I were too too happy, as they say; if it were to die now &c" (Diary 8-9). The
passage echoes a moment in Mrs. Dalloway, which she had just completed:

...She could remember going cold with excitement, and doing her hair in
a kind of ecstasy...and dressing, and going downstairs, and feeling as she
crossed the hall, "if it were now to die 'twere to be most happy." That was
her feeling—Othello's feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly
as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to
dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton! (51)

Tellingly, both here and in Orlando, interracialism stands in for same-sex love.
But what do we do with the hetero, "white" interval in her diaries? Stressing
Leonard Woolf's Jewishness might seem to be overstating the case. Another
clue arises in her biographical musings over Vita: "Am I in love with her? But
what is love?...I should have been reading her poem tonight...instead finished
Sharon Turner—a prosy, simple, old man; the very spit & image of Saxon, a
boundless bore..." (Diary 87). The contrast of Vita and the boring "Saxon" poet
speaks, I believe, for itself. If Turner represents all Vita is not, and if Turner
represents the essence of Anglo-Saxon racial purity, then it follows that Vita is
not Anglo-Saxon. Vita is not white.
It gets better. In a letter to Vita herself, Virginia tells of a fan-letter by a
woman who "has to stop and kiss the page when she reads Ofrlando|:—your
race I imagine. The percentage of Lesbians is rising in the States, all because
of you" (Letters Vol. 4 14). It is a deeply significant move—not only calling
lesbianism a "race," but suggesting that one can adopt this racial status, just
as Orlando became a gipsy ("she would return to Turkey and become a gipsy
again" |Orlando 159J). Racial hermaphroditism? Bi-racial transsexualism?
For such radical anti-essentialism, our critical lexicons seem inadequate. But if
there is any lesson to be learned from the Orlando/Room chronology, it's that
art precedes theory. Oedipus, remember, was originally a character in a play.
And so was Othello, a figure from which my reading of Orlando has
strayed quite a bit in these pages. In summing up, though, I hope I can say
that my initial, tentative diagnosis of Woolf's "Othellophilia" has spurred—
in its very inaccuracy—a fruitful exercise. For the genius of Orlando as an
appropriation of Shakesepeare's tragedy is its very ability to cite the play while
deconstructing its essentialisms. And contextualizing Woolf's explicit praise
of Shakespeare's "incandescent, unimpeded" mind in A Room of One's Own
with the critique implied by her revisions of his plots and themes allows us a
fascinating look at one great artist working within and against the legacy of
another. I concur with Vanessa Redgrave, who calls Woolf and Shakespeare
"the two great writers of the last four centuries to be born in the UK" (qtd.

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 WOOLF / 77

in Eyre 68).17 And I would not be the first to suggest that Woolf's imaginar
Judith Shakespeare was her own self-projection, her own bold attempt to
wrest some of Shakespeare's fame for herself. In her letters Woolf was not to
humble to mention her own books in the same breath as Shakespeare's,18 and
her heroine's poetry—at the end of Orlando— earns her comparisons "with
Milton (save for his blindness)." Nor does Orlando, after all, choose to "bur
[her] book" (324)—imagining herself, it seems, a kind of female Prospero (
rather, a female Shakespeare, speaking through the character of Prospero),
cuing "heavenly music" and promising "to break [his] staff, / Bury it certai
fathoms in the earth, / And deeper than did ever plummet sound" to "drow
[his I book" (The Tempest 5.1.52-57).
That Orlando doesn't—that Shakespeare doesn't—that Virginia doesn
"drown" any books is something we can all applaud.

FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

1 I define the syndrome as "the critical and cultural fixation on Shakespeare's tragedy of inter
racial marriage to the exclusion of broader definitions, and more positive visions, of inter-racial
eroticism." See Daileader, Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth 6.
2 Woolf first conceived of the novel as "a Defoe narrative," but her subsequent writings about
the book and (I believe) the book itself do not bear out the force of this influence (Diary 131). For
instance, Defoe is not one of the many authors mentioned in Orlando.
3 I list the more obvious instances: "Even now...an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe"
(Othello 1.187-88); "the sooty bosom of such a thing as thou" (1.2.71-72); "My name, that was as
fresh / As Diane's visage, is now begrimed and black as mine own face" (3.3.391-93); "Was this
fair paper, this most goodly book / Made to write 'whore' upon?" (4.2.73-74); "Yet I'll not shed
her blood, / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, / And smooth as monumental alabaster"
(5.2.3-5). This and all subsequent quotes of Shakespeare's works will be culled from the Oxford
William Shakespeare: The Complete Works.
4 This vein of criticism demonstrates the inextricability of the play's problematic racial
and sexual politics. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, opines: "[I]t would be something
monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable Negro. It would
argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance" (Vol. I, 47). John Quincy Adams raises even
stronger objections: "Upon the stage, her fondling with Othello is disgusting. Who, in real life,
would have her for a sister, daughter, or wife?" (qtd in Hackett 225-26).
5 Lawrence 328. See also Abel xvi and passim.
6 Lawrence astutely notes Woolf's préfiguration of the real-life, twentieth-century transsexual
Jan Morris, who underwent his sex reassignment surgery in Casablanca (329).
7 On the Othello/Heathcliff linkage, see Daileader, Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth
143-69.
8 In the earliest draft of the novel, Orlando would "sometimes take a slice off the niggers
[sic] nose...he was tormented with a desire to hurt; Even inanimate things; like the Moor's skull..."
(Holograph Draft 1). Woolf softened this description in later drafts, removing Orlando's explicit
sadism and reserving use of the racial epithet to two later recollections of this boyhood exercise.
9 The Quarto text here reads "Judean," highlighting a telling conflation of Others. Othello is
simultaneously black, Jewish, a Judas, and an Indian.

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78 / DAILEADER

10 Cleopatra is called "tawny" and "black" in 1.1.6 and 1.5.28 of Antony and Cleopatra. This,
however, has not prevented Caucasian performers from monopolizing the role, most (in)famou
Elizabeth Taylor. See Daileader, "The Cleopatra Complex" 203-20.
11 On Woolf's attending a fancy-dress party "as" Cleopatra, see Seshagiri 63.
12 Hermia is called "Ethiope" and "tawny Tartar" in A Midsummer Night's Dream (3.2.258
264).
13 It seems appropriate to point out here that my reading should not by any means be taken
as exonerating the author for the occasional personal racism of her letters and diaries. Elsewhere,
for textual consistency with Orlando, I preserve Woolf's usage of the following antiquated racist
terms: Blackamoors, Turks, Gipsies, Muscovites, and Pygmies, but do not condone or otherwise
sanction their pejorative use.
14 In using the term "sororophobia" I am adapting the concept put forward by Michie.
15 On the scandal caused by Radclyffe's novel and the more general public preoccupation with
lesbianism and lesbian art in the 1920s, see Weeks, and Whitlock.
16 Kennard's and Seshagiri's readings dovetail neatly with my own: my approach differs in
focusing on the implications of Woolf 's (inter)racialist aesthetic for her relationship to Shakespeare.
17 Redgrave answers a question about learning as an actress how to speak Shakespeare's
language, first quoting Virginia Woolf: "Everything starts with an event, an emotion which
produces a sort of wave and out of the wave words come tumbling" (68).
18 I came across this one by accident: "Is there any book or books of mine, or Shakespeare's
Hardy's Scotts, that I can give you, in token of gratitude?" (Woolf, Letters 350).

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