UNIVERZITA SV. CYRILA A METODA V TRNAVE
FILOZOFICKÁ FAKULTA
Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky
DIPLOMOVÁ PRÁCA
2006
ZUZANA HUSÁROVÁ
UNIVERZITA SV. CYRILA A METODA V TRNAVE
FILOZOFICKÁ FAKULTA
Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky
POST/MODERN FACETS OF FEMINISMCROSSING THE BORDERS
DIPLOMOVÁ PRÁCA
2006
ZUZANA HUSÁROVÁ
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UNIVERZITA SV. CYRILA A METODA V TRNAVE
FILOZOFICKÁ FAKULTA
Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky
POST/MODERNÉ PODOBY FEMINIZMUPREKROČENIE HRANÍC
DIPLOMOVÁ PRÁCA
2006
ZUZANA HUSÁROVÁ
-2-
UNIVERZITA SV. CYRILA A METODA
V TRNAVE FILOZOFICKÁ FAKULTA
Katedra:
anglistiky a amerikanistiky
Akademický rok:
2005/2006
ZADANIE DIPLOMOVEJ PRÁCE
Meno a priezvisko:
Zuzana Husárová
Študijný odbor:
Anglický jazyk a literatúra
Názov témy:
Post/Modern Facets of Feminism – Crossing the Borders
Post/Moderné podoby feminizmu – Prekročenie hraníc
Zásady spracovania diplomovej práce – podrobná špecifikácia úlohy:
1.Bibliografický a informačný prieskum
2. Spracovanie nadobudnutých informácií
3. Tvorba práce
Vedúci diplomovej práce: doc. PhDr. Daniela Petríková, PhD.
Miesto konania diplomovej práce:
Trnava
Termín začatia diplomovej práce:
19.10. 2005
Podpis:
Termín odovzdania diplomovej práce: 30.3. 2006
V Trnave, ..........
PhDr. Gabriela Ručková
dekanka FF UCM
.............................................................
vedúci Katedry
-3-
UNIVERZITA SV. CYRILA A METODA
V TRNAVE FILOZOFICKÁ FAKULTA
Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky
Študijný odbor:
Anglický jazyk a literatúra
ABSTRAKT
Názov diplomovej práce: Post/Moderné podoby feminizmu – Prekročenie hraníc
Meno a priezvisko:
Zuzana Husárová
Akademický rok:
2005/2006
Vedúci diplomovej práce: doc. PhDr. Daniela Petríková, PhD.
Cieľom našej diplomovej práce je uviesť čitateľa nielen do oblasti modernej
a postmodernej feministickej literatúry, ale aj predstaviť pojmy ako pohlavie, rod
a androgynita. Ako uvádza druhá časť nadpisu, veľká pozornosť je zameraná na
prekročenie hraníc. Pod abstraktnými pásmami, cez ktoré prechádzame, máme na mysli
popri modernizme – postmodernizme aj mužskosť –
ženskosť a
pohlavie– rod.
Skúmame názory, vďaka ktorým sú vyššie uvedené hranice prekračované a zisťujeme
zloženie, hustotu, pevnosť, pružnosť a trvácnosť imaginárnej nitky, ktorá ich delí.
Kľúčové slová: modernizmus, postmodernizmus, androgynita, pohlavie, rod, mužskosť,
ženskosť, stereotyp, hranica.
-4-
UNIVERZITA SV. CYRILA A METODA
V TRNAVE FILOZOFICKÁ FAKULTA
Department of English and American
Studies
Branch of study:
English Language and Literature
ABSTRACT
Name of the diploma work: Post/Modern Facets of Feminism – Crossing the
Borders
Student:
Zuzana Husárová
Academic year: 2005/2006
Supervisor:
doc. PhDr. Daniela Petríková, PhD.
The goal of our diploma work is to lead the reader not solely to the field of modern and
postmodern feministic literature but also to introduce the phenomena sex, gender and
androgyny. As stated in the second part of the title, a great attention is paid to crossing of
the borders. The abstract zones, which we are crossing, present along with modernism postmodernism also masculinity – femininity and sex – gender. We are further
investigating the opinions that make the above mentioned borders be crossed and are
discovering the content, the density, the firmness, the elasticity and the durability of
a string that separates them.
Key words: modernism, postmodernism, androgyny, sex, gender, masculinity, femininity,
stereotype, border.
-5-
Čestne prehlasujem, že diplomovú prácu som vypracovala samostatne
s použitím
literárnych
prameňov.
Použitá
literatúra
je
uvedená
v zozname literatúry.
TRNAVA
...................................
19. 3. 2006
Podpis
-6-
Za pomoc pri písaní diplomovej práce by som chcela poďakovať
doc. PhDr. Daniele Petríkovej, PhD., ktorá svojimi radami, inšpirujúcimi
nápadmi, ochotou a zanietením vo veľkej miere prispela ku konečnému
výsledku. Bolo mojím potešením konzultovať túto prácu s odborníčkou,
s ktorou bol strávený čas obohacujúci nielen z hľadiska cenného
množstva informácií, či v teoretickej alebo praktickej rovine, ale i kvôli
udaniu správneho smeru, motivácie a povzbudenia, tvoriacich súčasť
každého nášho stretnutia.
Ďakujem tiež tým, čo ma počas doby písania motivovali a poskytli
mi širokú škálu podnetov.
-7-
CONTENT
INTRODUCTION
3
1.
VIRGINIA WOOLF AS A MODERNIST
6
2.
JEANETTE WINTERSON AS A POSTMODERNIST
8
3.
GENDER
10
3.1.
Gender and Sex
10
3.2.
Gender Roles
11
3.3.
Gender Identity
13
3.4.
Androgyny
13
3.4.1. C.G. Jung and Androgyny
15
4.
16
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
4.1.
Woolf on Men and Women
17
4.2.
Woolf on Women as Subjects of Literature
19
4.3.
Woolf on Women as Objects of Literature
22
4.4.
Woolf on Androgyny
23
5.
WHAT IS WRITTEN ON THE BODY?
24
5.1.
Masculinity in Lothario
29
5.2.
Femininity in Lothario
34
6.
6.1.
WHO IS ORLANDO?
37
Crossing of Orlando’s Sex and Gender
41
CONCLUSION
53
RESUMÉ
56
LITERATURE
59
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-9-
INTRODUCTION
What are the primary criteria, the paradigm, according to which we consider, treat and
think about the other people, our family, friends, partners, the outer world as well as
ourselves? Do we have the world divided into two parts, two poles, the halves? Where is
then the meeting point, the touching line, the border? Is it firm and stable or is it
gradually allowing the penetration, the entrance from behind the other field? What effect
has an epoch, era and time-related progress on winding, overlapping and crossing a path
between two realms?
Realm of masculinity and realm of femininity… Do they exist or are they just our
imagination?
Do they have a lot in common or are they so different? Does our sex predestine us to
how we were brought up, how we approach the life, who we are or is it just a factor of
biology? What is nowadays considered to be masculine and what feminine?
These are the questions that we bear in mind while starting to write our work. Of course
we will not be able to answer them all, since there is no generally approved standpoint to
quench our thirst for solving the puzzle. In the following pages we will be dealing with
the borders. The imaginary borders between genders and sexes, modernism and
postmodernism, fiction and reality as well as their likeness and difference, which we will
prove on the works of two representatives of the feminist movement in English literature,
Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson.
In the first chapter we will introduce Virginia Woolf and the second chapter will be
devoted to the presentation of life and work of Jeanette Winterson.
Afterwards, we would like to provide the readers of our diploma work with some
general terms in the field of sex and gender. We will have a closer look on the paradigm
of androgyny, ancient stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, which can still be
3
present nowadays, but which we do not consider relevant, real or valid. Mentioned will
be some ideas on sex and gender, gender roles and identity of American psychologists J.
Lipman-Blumen and J.T. Wood. Implemented will also be the theory of Swiss
psychologist C.G. Jung of archetypes and androgynism.
Woolf’s polemic, in which it is focused on the feministic thoughts and on the deep
insight into the question of the position of women throughout the history, will be the
milestone of chapter four.
The following two chapters, namely: What is written on the Body? and Who is
Orlando? will represent the practical part of our work. Written on the Body, a novel by J.
Winterson, will offer through the main character and simultaneously personal narrator
Lothario the samples of stereotyped masculinity and femininity, which Winterson listed
to unveil the mockery between the lines for more attentive readers. The chapter will be
divided in two subchapters, first one dealing with the schemes of masculine behaviour,
the second one with femininity. We will try to deconstruct the faulty stereotypes also via
Woolf’s fictive biography Orlando, in which crossing of Orlando’s sex and gender will
stand in the spotlight of our attention.
We decided to set on the voyage of borders of sexes, genders and eras. We entered our
boat and are ready to explore beauties but also barriers, obstacles and perplexities of both
banks.
“ARE YOU READY TO JOIN US ?”
4
As we will be sailing on, the river will be narrowing, the banks will be converging, it
will be getting darker, we will occur in the middle of the storm, we will get damp, we
will get wet, we will soak … splASH
… SPLash
-----We will wake up on the land--- No strict borders------------------------------------
--------------with the idea of Androgyny in our minds-----------------------------
...
5
1. VIRGINIA WOOLF AS MODERNIST
Adeline Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 into the late Victorian intellectual
aristocracy in London as the third of four children. As a child, she was very nervous and
delicate, and, with her sister Vanessa (Bell), was educated at home, mainly by her father,
Sir Leslie Stephens.
Virginia Woolf is considered to be a major figure of the Modernist movement,
making significant contributions not only to the development of the novel but also to
literary criticism. She was a distinguished feminist essayist, critic in The Times Literary
Supplement, central figure of the Bloomsbury group and together with her husband,
Leonard Woolf, founded the Hogarth Press.
During the inter-war period, Woolf was a central character of the Modernist élitist
artistic scene, which formed the Bloomsbury group. Its members included among others
E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry,
Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, John Maynard Keynes and Leonard Woolf . Their ideal
was in the douceur de vivre and witty iconoclasm of the France of Enlightenment,
discussions combined tolerant agnosticism with cultural dogmatism, progressive
rationality with social snobbery, practical jokes with refined self- advertisement 1.
Woolf started her career as a literary critic publishing in the Times Literary
Supplement. Her writing often explores the concept of time, memory and people’s inner
consciousness, psychological effects are achieved through the use of imagery, symbol
and metaphor. She is known as an experimenter and innovator in novel writing,
particularly due to the use of the techniques of interior monologue and stream of
consciousness, the emphasis is shifted from the plot or action to the psychological life of
the characters.
1
Sanders, A.: The Short Oxford History of English Language, p.514
6
Woolf insists that every moment “the mind receives a myriad of impressions trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel”2.
The task of the writer is to attempt to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in
the order in which they fall”3.
She is the founder of ‘the lyrical novel’ - this avant-garde style is famous for the
discontinuities, fragmentations, disintegrations and representations of the nature of
transient sensation, which are, as a work continues, related outwards to a more universal
awareness of pattern and rhythm. The momentary and impermanent reactions and
emotions, random suggestions, ephemeral stimuli and dissociated thoughts are woven
into coherence and structure.
Among her most famous novels belong The Voyage out (1915), Mrs Dalloway
(1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931), The Years (1937), Between the Acts
(1941), fictional biography Orlando and the critical work includes The Common Reader
(1925), Three Guineas (1938), Collected Essays Volume 1-4, where belong the wellknown essays like Modern Fiction (1925), Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown (1924), Narrow
Bridge of Art (1927) and very influential is her feministic study A Room of one’ s own.
Virginia Woolf with her innovative, imaginative, psychological aspect of writing
marked a new direction, which has been permanently inspiring many writers, critics,
feminists but also ordinary readers, who are searching for something deviating from
Victorian ideals and find a pleasure in questioning the literature and reflecting their lives
in between the lines.
2
3
Woolf, V.: Modern Fiction (1925) p. 106 in V.Woolf: Collected Essays, Volume 2
Woolf, V.: The Common Reader.1.series (1968) p.190
7
2. JEANETTE WINTERSON AS POSTMODERNIST
Jeanette Winterson was born in 1959 in Manchester and adopted and raised by a
typical northern, working-class and strictly religious Pentecostal Evangelists in the small
English town of Accrington, Lancashire. During her maturation she permanently had to
struggle between conflicting conceptions of identity, sexuality, morality, divinity, and
literature. At the age of 16 she fell in love with a girl she had converted to the church,
which led to the outrage of the church and the denouncement by her mother. Winterson
mentioned: “It was an extraordinary self-awakening, specially if you have a romantic
temperament, as I do.”4
She had to learn how to support herself as soon as 16 years old, after having left both
home and church. Having failed to impress an interview panel at St Catherine’s College
in Oxford, she camped outside until they reconsidered and she was finally accepted to
read English in 1978.
Her experiences as a child and a teenager, family relationships, stern religious
upbringing and a final scorn by her adoptive mother were a fuel for the fire of the first
novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), which won the Whitbread Award for Best
First Novel 1985 and much praise and admiration. The comic book Boating for Beginners
(1985) was followed by a novel of historiographic metafiction - The Passion (1987),
winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 1987 and Sexing the Cherry (1989), winner of
the E.M. Forster Award 1989.
A significant change in Winterson’ s career brought the seemingly highly personal
Written on the Body (1992), which Julie Burchill branded “the Great Bad novel of the
90s”
5
, became an international bestseller and made her name. Other novels are Art &
Lies (1994), Gut Symmetries (1997), The Powerbook (2000), The Lightkeeping (2005),
her writing includes the children’ s story The King of Capri (2005), the book of essays on
4
5
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story.html [cit. 18.10.2005]
http://jeanettewinterson.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=272 [cit. 17.10.2005]
8
art named Art Objects (1995) as well as the collection of short stories The World and
Other Places (1998). She has also written two screenplays, a television adaptation of
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Great Moments in Aviation (1993).
Winterson’s private ancestors were high Modernists Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein,
T.S. Eliot but has also been excited by European literature, by the playful intertextuality
and sensibility of Italo Calvino, Borges, Perec and Rabelais.
The language of her novels is embroidered with poetry, main themes are usually love,
problems caused by love, love triangles, dilemmas, boundaries vs. desire, present are also
allegorical fairytales, feminist myths and romance. As a writer and controversialist, she
enjoys a considerable public profile and is seldom afraid, when writing in newspapers, to
take a moral view, whether of woman’s rights or global politics. In her fiction she seeks
to challenge conventional thinking, to transgress gender boundaries, all her narrators are
androgynous or sometimes even genderless, the style is playful and aphoristic, the form is
non-linear and fragmented.
“I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations,
when life stops being cozy, when it stops being predictable, when there is a chance
element which unsettles all the rules, which forces people back onto their own sources,
and away from their habits.6
6
http://www.salon.com/april97/winterson970428.html [cit. 14.10.2005]
9
3. GENDER
3.1. GENDER and SEX
Although one may sometimes hear gender and sex used interchangeably, these two
concepts have a very distinct meaning.
The term sex refers to biological characteristics, which are : person’s chromosomes,
gonads, genitalia, hormones and secondary sex characteristics, like hair, breast
development, and physique.
Gender is a much more complex concept than sex, it refers to social characteristics
associated with biological sex and includes complex, encompassing, countless
characteristics of appearance, speech, movement, action and other factors not solely
limited to biological sex.
On one hand, sex is innate, we are born male and female and do nothing to acquire our
own sex. On the other hand, gender is acquired through interaction in social world, we
learn to be masculine and feminine. Gender is a social construction that varies across
cultures, historically within a given culture, and in the relation to the other gender, its
meaning grows out of society’s values, beliefs and preferred ways of organizing
collective life. It is a whole system of social meanings that specify what is associated
with men and women in a given society at a particular time.7
Socially excepted views of masculinity and femininity are taught to individuals
through a variety of cultural means and from infancy on, they are encouraged to conform
to the gender that society prescribes. Gender is a significant issue in our culture, so there
exist many structures and practices that serve to reinforce the prescriptions for women’s
and men’s identities and behaviours.
7
Wood, J.T.: Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender and Culture (1994) p. 33
10
3.2. GENDER ROLES
The related term gender role has two meanings that may be divergent.
The first one: people’s gender roles are the entirety of the ways by which they express
their gender identities. The second one: they may be defined as socially created
expectations about an individual, which are appropriate for him or her as a representative
of the sex.
Gender roles are social constructions; they contain self-concepts, psychological traits,
as well as family, occupational, and political roles assigned dichotomously to members of
each sex.8
From birth on, we have been living in the society, according to its rules and
regulations. Baby-girls are supposed to live in a soft, tender, fragile pink world, babyboys should be born into a strong, powerful, independent blue world. As we get through
teenage age, get matured, become adults, start working and get older, the stereotypes
describing the features of femininity and masculinity accompany us while walking on our
life-path.
Femininity describes a set of supposedly typical female qualities associated with a
certain attitudes to gender roles, masculinity refers to a totality of characteristic qualities
connected to all males.
To femaleness are attributed the adjectives: passive, nurturant, dependent, subversive,
frail, softspoken, supportive, emotional, sympathetic, intuitive, altruistic, fearful… When
talking about maleness, these attributes are expected: active, hard, independent,
dominant, fearless, rational, self-reliant, ambitious… The stereotyping prescribes not
only the features but also body language, gestures, movements, it predicts one’s
appropriate way of behaving in, reacting to and solving life- situations, choosing the type
of job and career.
8
Lipman-Blumen, J.: Gender Roles and Power (1984) p.2
11
According to J. Lipman-Blumen
9
Classical Greek myths, as well as Old and New
Testament stories, transformed the powerful and positive images of women and
goddesses from earlier civilizations into negative, destructive figures. Nowadays, there
exist nine control myths, none of which was scientifically, ethnologically or culturally
proven right, preserving the gender-role images emanating from mythology, religion,
literature and art:
1. Women are weak, passive, dependent, and fearful; men are strong, aggressive,
independent, and fearless.
2. Women think in intuitive, holistic, and contextual terms, men use analytical,
abstract, and field-independent thinking, which makes them smarter than women.
3.
Women are more altruistic, nurturant, and thus more moral than men.
4. Women’s sexuality is inexhaustible, uncontrollable, and even dangerous to men;
male sexuality is more limited and delicate, requiring greater stimulation for arousal and
more protection from injury.
5. Women are contaminated and contaminating.
6. Beauty and sexuality are women’s most valuable assets.
7. Women talk too much.
8. Women are manipulative; men are straightforward.
9. Men have women’s best interests at heart; women can trust men to protect their
welfare.
These control myths, which are the conscious and unconscious beliefs about the
intrinsic nature of the two sexes inspired by ancient images, victimize both women and
men in different but equally destructive ways and we consider them inappropriate, not in
accordance with reality and very far from being valid.
9
Lipman-Blumen, J.: Gender Roles and Power (1984) p.96
12
3.3. GENDER IDENTITY
In sociology, gender identity is characterized by the gender with which a person
identifies, whether one perceives oneself to be a woman or a man but can also be used to
refer to the gender that the society attributes to the individual on the basis of what they
know from gender role indications. Gender identity is the most important identity factor,
followed by race and class.
Psychological theorists Lawrence Kohlberg, Jean Piaget, and Carol Gilligan say, that
central to the development of identity is communication, which is the primary way kids
learn what is considered feminine and masculine, as well as the principal means by which
they practice their own gender behaviours.10 It is estimated that three years is the age, at
which gender identity is being formed. At this age a child develops gender constancy,
which is the understanding that gender is relatively unchanging, inevitable and
unvarying.
3.4. ANDROGYNY
Androgyny is derived from Greek, the morpheme andr- means ‘man’, and the
morpheme –gyn means ‘woman’ , representing the sense of unity that a combination of
the two sexes in one being implies. It refers to two concepts, the first one is the mixing of
masculine and feminine characteristics or the balance of ‘anima’ and ‘animus’ in Jungian
psychoanalytic theory. Secondly it describes something that is neither masculine nor
feminine, for example the Hijras of India who are often described as neither man nor
woman. Androgyny symbolizes a spiritual principle that is three-fold and reflected on
three levels: physical, psychological, spiritual. Most important is that all humans are
androgynous with respect to their souls and there is a psychological component of
androgyny that we all have to develop if we are to grow on a spiritual level. 11
10
11
Wood, J.T.: Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender and Culture (1994) p.44,45
http://www.plim.org/MaleandFemaleAndrogyny.htm [cit. 11.11.2005]
13
In present, many people are addressing psychological androgyny in their quest to
integrate themselves as a whole. This occurs with both sexes, male and female, realizing
that they each have psychological characteristics of the opposite sex that are not fully
developed because society has defined the roles of women and men and the patterns that
each of them must manifest if they want to be integrated in the society.
The androgyny consciously accepts harmony, concord and interaction of the
masculine and feminine aspects of the individual psyche.
If the human beings want to get fully matured in all spheres of their inner psyche, they
have to adopt and develop the attributes of the opposite sex, to become androgynous
psychologically and thus ‘equally high in positive masculine and feminine traits’.12
Within an androgynous person, some of each of the general characteristics, skills,
interests that define the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity are combined and
interplay in concord.
An ideal androgyne would have the ability to be logical, but rely also on his
intuitiveness, would possess capacity to be both, protective and helpful, moral and
independent. This person would be neither too trustworthy and fearful nor distant and
aggressive.
The opportunity to join together the presumably disjoinable has been attracting the
attention of a considerable number of stars. To attract public attention, many musicians,
actors, models have been transforming themselves into the fashionable androgynous look.
Androgyny has been an important figure for the overall art scene since the 1950’s, but it
had to wait until the 1980’s to explode the boom by Glam Rock music.
The outstanding artists publicly embodied the gender-bending trend not only through
the music and performance but also via their moves, dance and look, including style,
clothes, hair and make-up.
12
Gergen, M., Davis, S.N., Ed.: Toward a new Psychology of Gender (1997) p.152
14
3.4.1. C.G. JUNG and ANDROGYNY
C.G. Jung defines ‘archetypes as the concepts of the collective unconsciousness’.13
He distinguishes five major archetypes:
 The Persona,
 The Shadow,
 Anima/ Animus
 The Self.
The Persona is our public image, The Shadow is the dark, amoral side of our
personality, it comes from our animal past, The Self transcends all opposites, so that
every aspect of our personality is expressed equally.
Jung believed, that we are all essentially bisexual in nature. When we begin our lives
as fetuses, our sex organs are undifferentiated. Only gradually, under the influence of
hormones, we become either males or females. The same case happens in our social lives.
When we are born, we are neither masculine nor feminine, but immediately after we get
under the influence of culture, it creates from us men and women. Jung felt, that the
expectations, the society puts on us, mean, that we had developed only half of our
potential.
The Anima is the female aspect present in the collective unconscious of men,
personified as a young girl, as a witch or as the earth mother. The animus is the male
aspect present in the collective unconscious of women, personified as a wise man, a
sorcerer, or often a number of males. Together, they are referred to as syzygy.
“The psyche is part of the inmost mystery of life, and it has its own structure and form
like every other organism.”
C.G. Jung14
13
Jung, C.G.: The concept of the collective unconscious In The archetypes and the collective unconscious,
Collected works Vol.9,Part.1 (1969) p.48
14
http://www.cgjungboston.com [cit. 19.11. 2005]
15
4. A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
“Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name
you please- it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on the banks of a river a week or
two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought. That collar I have spoken of, women
and fiction, the need of coming to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts of
prejudices and passions, bowed my head to the ground.”15
A Room of one’s own is an extended essay, based on Woolf’s lectures at a woman
college at Cambridge University in 1928. Due to her pioneer feministic thoughts and
deep insight into the question of the position of women throughout the history, it is
considered one of the first and most important works on feminism.
A remarkable spotlight is put on women writers and their possibilities, or more correctly
said, impossibilities of creating some works of art, especially fiction. This essay
essentially contributed to the feminist and artistic movement of the 20.th century. The
polemic on female creativity, the roles of writers, whether male or female ones, and the
silent fate of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of woman’s
need for financial independence, intellectual freedom, possibility to study, write and
finally present her work of art to the world. The question of women and fiction is defined
by presenting three inextricable questions, and thus:
 Women and their nature
 Women as Subjects of Literature
 Women as Objects of Literature
15
Woolf,V.: A Room of One’sOwn (1928),p.5, Hereafter referred to in the text as ibid, p.no.
16
4.1. WOOLF ON MEN AND WOMEN
“To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour,
even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in
perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders.” (ibid,p.5)
I think, that the bushes could be the symbols of men, they represent the whole male
population as seen by Woolf, since its beginning until the year 1928 but can be applicable
to our generations as well. The colours stand for the attributes, which the men
incorporate.
On one hand, the bushes are gold, symbolizing something or someone exceptionally
valuable, advantageous, predestined for success, in an extraordinary position. The gold
has always been the colour of people standing in the highest state of importance, like
royal majesties. With golden medals have always been praised the best ones, whether
talking about sport results, significant achievements in historical battles, army, navy or
some heroic acts. Gold is for those, who deserve to be mentioned in the course of history,
those who cannot be forgotten. It was him, who wrote the scenario, was the main actor,
criticized and finally collected the documents of His Story, History. And no space left for
Her Story.
On the other hand, the bushes are crimson. What is the first idea that emerges in
people’s mind, when they imagine deep red colour? It can be love and it can be blood.
In my opinion, the willows could refer to some type of women. They cannot
symbolize the whole woman population, because, according to the biological principle,
the willows are the subgroup of the trees. When we take into consideration a level – the
bush, meaning a man and the tree, meaning a woman - the willows, being a subgroup of
the trees, stand only for a certain type of women in the realm of the human beings, and
thus those, who are bound by their existence to the relationship with men, who are
attached to them and cannot or do not want to loosen the ties, those, who do not speak for
17
themselves but silently listen, do not act but support. Both bushes and willows are on the
bank, which brings my attention to the fact, that the element, which unites them, is the
water.
The water is double-coded, it is the symbol of life as well as of relationship,
providing the source of nutrition. One could wonder, why the symbols of men are shorter
than those of women, since it does not correspond with the reality.
I assume that Woolf did not intend to underline the physical features, I would rather
incline to the explanation, that she meant the psychical capacities, inner wit and
propositions to grow to the height. The willows can be described by sadness, crying and
quiet contemplating in loneliness.
The willows, as it is written in old fables and tales, have always been silent friends of
hermits, travellers, or people, who escaped from civilization to find the answers in the
world of nature. A careful listening of these mythological trees provided them with
solutions, which they found within their minds and souls. Without uttering even one
word, they could help the seekers find what they needed. The falling impression of the
branches embraced their bodies and they could feel like being hugged by a woman’s
warmth. Women tied to men with a rope too tightly and not being able to express
themselves, those having realized, that they posses talent for art but having been denied
the possibility to demonstrate it, have been weeping in perpetual lamentation on the
further bank .
And they will be weeping there until the end of times, unless they do something about
it. They have chance, opportunity and means to cut those ties that do them harm, that
force them to be submissive despite their will, to set themselves free and finally be in the
relationship, in which they will be the equal part and feel comfortable. In the same way,
as the other women who decided to be their own masters, speak when they want to, write
when they want to and live the way they wish to.
18
They are not the willows, bending down under the heaviness of troubles. They are other
kinds of trees – upright, growing and blooming of insignificance.
4.2. WOOLF ON WOMEN AS SUBJECTS OF LITERATURE
“We might have been exploring or writing; mooning about the venerable places of the
earth; sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or going at ten to an office and
coming home comfortably at half past four to write a little poetry. Only, if Mrs. Seton and
her like had gone into business at the age of fifteen, there would have been - that was the
snag in the argument – no Mary” (ibid,p.25)
A Room of One’s Own… What does it actually mean? What does it stand for? Why
was it the main expression of Woolf’s polemic?
“What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?” (ibid,p.29)
When we have a room of our own, we can close the door whenever we want to. The
same principle is valid not only on the material level but also on the psychical one. With
a room of our own, we are the key holders, we decide, whether we want to be dependent
or independent. It is up to us, if we want to provide somebody with a key to our world or
leave it locked for the others. We can hide there and remain there as long as we wish to.
Along with the personal independence, the own room means also the financial
independence. We have either bought it or have been paying a rent, we have furnished
and decorated it according to our taste. To be able to support ourselves financially, we
need to have a job. We can get a fine job if we are sufficiently educated. To present it in a
nutshell, the owners of their rooms have to be intellectually independent as well.
Personal, financial and intellectual freedom are the essentials for having a possibility to
enter the threshold of the own room, threshold of the own mind and leave a message for
humankind, which implies to start to write.
19
These three qualities were denied to women. They were too busy taking care of
children and husbands, had no property of their own, were not admitted to any college,
their jobs were underpaid and they were too contingent on men’s decisions, since their
voices did not count and their rights were restricted.
“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and
delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that
power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars
would be unknown…That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically
upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to
enlarge…How impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is
feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger
than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the
figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished.”(ibid,p.41,42)
By these words, Woolf is providing us with an answer to the inquiry, why women have
always been in a lower position. Someone having a power will never give it away to the
controlled individuals. In the long-lasting periods of history, women gave to men the
feeling of superiority, which made them stay behind the bars of inferiority. Whatever
happened in the civilized societies, the mirrors were essential to all violent, military and
heroic actions. Woolf compares the looking-glass vision and a drug. Both of them charge
the vitality, stimulate nervous system and if taken away, the man will die, like a fiend
deprived of his daily dose.
Maybe, when men insisted upon the women’s inferiority, they were more concerned
with their own superiority than with the inferiority of women. Woolf does not criticize
some particular man, class or sex as a whole, the blame is put on the shoulders of
educational system and culture, dictating the laws, rights and rules and believes in
changes in the future, when women will cease to be the deprived sex.
20
Woolf asks herself, how it is possible, that no woman wrote the lines of the
extraordinary literature. She introduces to us her character, Shakespeare’s wonderfully
gifted sister, Judith and her fate as a writer.
While little William was sent to the grammar school, she remained at home. When she
picked up a book and read some pages, the parents told her, in their best interest, to do
some housework or cooking and not dream away the time with books and papers. Soon,
however, before she was out of her teens, she was betrothed to some neighbour. Not even
father’s beating, scolding, pleasing or finally begging not to hurt him, persuaded her to
marry that hateful man. She packed all her bits and pieces, let herself down by a rope one
summer’s night, and driven by her own force and gift, at the age of seventeen, took the
road to London. Like her brother, she had a taste for theatre, which led her to the stage
door. She was laughed at in the face, after telling, that she wanted to act. No woman, they
said, could possibly be an actress. – Who shall measure the heat and violence of the
poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body? (ibid,p.56)
The story of a talented poetess finishes by killing herself and lying buried somewhere at
cross-roads of bus stops in London.
This is not only a story of Judith, it is the fate of every middle-class woman in
Elizabethan times, who would like to be a poetess. And here we found the answer to the
question: “WHY NOT?”
But there were some women, who could not imagine to keep their gift buried under the
ground of human awareness, which led them to writing the poems using either Anon
instead of the name in the 16th century, which would not suggest the sex, or, like Currier
Bell, George Elliot, George Sand in the 19th century, the name of a man.
Towards the end of the 18th century a change came about - the middle-class women
began to write, for which the writer Aphra Behn should be honoured.
Still the conditions for George Eliot, Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte were
tough: they had to write in the common sitting-rooms, they had never an hour of their
own, were permanently interrupted, which leads to the fact, that they wrote prose and
21
fiction. Poetry and drama requires much more concentration, since the stream of thought
is disrupted extremely easily. Another reason, why they wrote novels is, that old literature
was already hardened and novel was young enough to be soft in their hands.
“The book has somehow to be adapted to the body” (ibid,p.90)
The women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated and framed. Finally, in the
twentieth century, women started to use writing as an art, not as a method of selfexpression.
4.3. WOOLF ON WOMEN AS OBJECTS OF LITERATURE
“Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall
from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the
property of her husband.” (ibid,p.51)
Women as characters in literature represent two extremes- on one side, there is a
beautiful, innocent, moral, loveable, adored angel and goddess, on the other side, horrid,
ugly, dangerous and curse-bringing witch, putting the spell of sexual desire and
destructive temptation on a poor man.
A female character is portrayed only through the relationship with a man, the link
woman-woman was considered from the man’s perspective as not worth mentioning. We
have no reliable documents about the woman’s soul until the 19th century, because it is
very difficult and almost impossible for men to understand women and truly reflect them
in the works of art. And the solution was love and beauty or disaster it implements.
Women were either loved or hated, adored or mourning in tears until the women
writers put it truly and correctly and extended the men’s restricted perception of females,
which they subsequently depicted in the literature.
22
4.4. WOOLF ON ANDROGYNY
“And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers
preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the
woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man.” (ibid,p.113)
Virginia Woolf is persuaded, that it is natural for male and female being to cooperate.
Only at that point can the pair live in harmony, great satisfaction and complete happiness.
The question whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in
the body and the silent YES leads her to the theory, that only then can a person reach a
complete happiness, satisfaction and the highest spiritual flourish, when these two
presumable opposites go hand in hand. In man’s brain, the woman part must have effect
and in the woman’s the man part cannot be neglected.
Coleridge could have meant this when he said, that a great mind is androgynous. With
this fusion, both inner grounds are fertilized, which enables a person to understand both
sexes, and thus create works of art, that will cause the astonishment, wonder and awe
equally by both sexes.
23
5. WHAT IS WRITTEN ON THE BODY?
“Why is the measure of love loss?”16
The very first sentence of Written on the Body is a code to elucidate the cross-word of
the novel. Why do we lose somebody when we want them too much and why do we want
somebody after we have lost them? Why do we emotionally wake up after we have
overslept the night of chance and why the realization, the epiphany comes too late?
Longing, lust, love, leave, loneliness, loss – that are the 6 Ls describing the love story of
a genderless narrator - main character, calling him/herself Lothario and archetypal PreRaphaelite beauty Louise.
The importance of the letter L seems to be here of a high significance. Winterson’s
lifting of L above the rest of the letters of alphabet makes us devote some more attention
to its symbolical meaning and phonetics.
L represents the icon of red heart, which has been associated with love. After the
research of meaning of names starting with L, we came to the conclusion, that most refer
to joy, light, cheerfulness, gentility, whiteness, dedication to God or natural beauties like
meadow or flower of Heaven.
L is a lateral consonant in which “the passage of air through the mouth does not go in
the usual way along the centre of the tongue; instead; there is a complete closure
between the centre of the tongue and the alveolar ridge.”17 The air escapes along the
sides of the tongue. When producing loud whispered L, one can feel the air rushing along
the sides of the tongue. It is the only letter that occurs in two forms and thus: dark l and
clear l.
16
17
Winterson, J.: Written on the Body (1992),p.9 Hereafter referred to in the text as ibid, p.no
Roach, P.: English Phonetics and Phonology (1991), p.58
24
We are persuaded, that Winterson chose the letter L to be her Queen of letters in Written
on the Body due to more reasons – and namely, because it symbolizes human heart and
love, is connected with happiness and higher spirits and by its pronunciation the air gets
out along two sides of the mouth. Two streams of air meet when touching the lips, as it is
by meeting of the lovers.
“Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a
lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel
like Braille.” (ibid,p.89)
Palimpsest comes from Greek roots, meaning – “again-scraped” and it is a technique
used in postmodern literature. Palimpsest is a manuscript (originally written on papyrus
or parchment) on that an earlier text has been effaced and the vellum or parchment reused
for another18.
In postmodern literature earlier texts and author’s text are as joint as in palimpsest.
Different levels of the text are not possible to exactly distinguish and sometimes it cannot
be discovered, which one is authorial and which one is another one’s.
All of us have the palimpsests of our life written on our bodies and wait for someone to
come and discover them, decode them and translate them into their book of life. The
process of the translation is, what we are searching for in the life and a goal to reach it is,
what really matters, which is the reason, why we have insufficient information about
Lothario – we do not know the real name, the sex, the gender, the age, the race – the
institutionalized identity descriptors are missing. Revealed is all the information about the
inner psychical world, wishes, memories and profession- a translator. S/he is not only the
translator of languages, namely Russian and English, but, primarily, the translator of the
code, written on the body of Louise, and at the same time Louise is translating his/her
code.
18
http://sweet-tea.net/corina/definition.html [cit. 19.2.2006]
25
The personal narrator: “You deciphered me and now I am plain to read. The message is
simple one: my love for you. (ibid,p.106)
Winterson mentioned: “All of my books are about boundaries and desire – the
boundaries we should try to cross, like fear and class and skin colour and expectation,
and the boundaries that seem to define us, such as our sense of self, our gender… I
wanted to see how much information I could leave out – especially the kind of character
information that is routine – and still hold the story together.”19
The question about the sex of the narrator is answered by Winterson’s observation that it
does not matter which sex the narrator is, because “the gender of the character is both,
throughout the book, and changes; sometimes it is female, sometimes it is male”
20
and
there is also no need to disclose it.
“If I put in a gender then it weights my story in a way that I don’t want it to be weighted.
So I didn’t.” 21
Written on the Body is an emotional, romantic, lyrical, postmodern novel, embroidered
with deep expressions of longing. Shading of plot, action, public and social life is done in
favour of more extensive insight into characters’ inner consciousness, inner thoughts and
desires, passion, their mutual psychical and sexual attraction, leading almost to reciprocal
worshipping. The whole novel is constructed as a personal story, where the unreliable
narrator Lothario remembers and reports the tale to a second person narratee, who shifts
from Louise to the reader. The narrator’s untrustworthiness is ironical but also underlines
the fact, that his/her subjective perception of the world is for Winterson much more
important than what actually took place, since the scenes are becoming metaphors for
Lothario’s emotions.
As John Fowles said: “One cannot describe reality; only give metaphors that indicate
it.”22
19
http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=13 19.11.2005
Stewart, L.: “No, No, Jeanette.” Harper’s Bazaar (Feb.1993), p.74
21
Bilger,A. :“The Art of Fiction CL: Jeanette Winterson”, The Paris Review, Winter (1997-98), p.106
22
Fowles,J.: “Notes on an Unfinished Novel” in The Novel Today (1977), p. 139
20
26
One of the aims of the book is to deconstruct the clichés about gender, love and societyinstitutionalized masculine or feminine codes of behaviour, which proves the frequently
repeated statement:
“It’s the clichés that cause the trouble.” (ibid,p.10, 71, 155, 189)
An important question to ask is, whether a gender-free narrator can imply to a narration
devoid of any gender-specific categorizations. By refusing to admit Lotario’s gender,
Winterson is playing with and demonstrating the stereotypes which the readers are
supposed to have. The deconstruction of gender specific codes in the minds of the readers
should go hand in hand with the deconstruction of the language of love, which is written
on the body.
The categorizations in the reader’s mind are subject to a chain of uncertainties, as not
only the narrator’ s identity is not answered, but also the coded perception that constitutes
the text in one’s mind. The reader of this postmodern text is forced to actively participate
in creation and image of his own story, since all the milestones of the everyday
perception of the world through the eyes are left out by not describing the character.
Constant contradicting, satirizing and questioning of the sexual stereotypes highlights
the fact, that love should be a more universal phenomenon than we have been taught to
believe. It should not be reserved exclusively for heterosexual relationships, since
Lothario is bisexual. The narrator switches from honest emotional self-analysis to
narrating Lothario, to whom the reader has to be careful to trust.
Winterson mastered in her book both – to compose a very personal confession in a
highly poetic language and to satirically deconstruct the old clichés and codes. When
opening up the questions about the boundaries of love and gender, using the mask of
gender ambiguity, she is directing our gaze to the secret code only visible in certain
lights.
27
Some critics of the feministic literature have dismissed the ungendered narrator as an
eye-catching ploy, considering it as a narrative strategy to assert that gender is
unimportant to lovers. For example Valerie Miner has claimed that although initially “the
concealment of (the narrator’s) sex forecasts interesting theoretical questions about
essentialism,” Winterson fails to “carry these identity questions beyond the gimmick.”23
We on the contrary sustain the opinion, that the ungendered narrator conveys the idea,
that gender is unimportant to the lovers in the text, but simultaneously underlines the fact
that within contemporary dominant discourses, gender is not only important to lovers, it
is what constitutes desire and choice of sexual object. We agree with Christy R.Stevens
and his explanation of the role of Winterson’s narrator:
“The ungendered narrator is not a trivial device, but rather it is a subversive narrative
strategy that challenges traditional gender binarisms and compulsory heterosexuality,
inciting readers to imagine a world in which desire has been dislodged from these
regulatory regimes.” 24
We have decided to have a closer look at the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity
presented on one hand by Winterson in Written on the Body and on the other hand being
valid, existing and operating in our everyday lives.
23
24
Miner, V.: “At Her Wit’s End”. The Women’s Review of Books, (April 1990)
http://www.ags.uci.edu/~clcwegsa/revolutions/Stevens.htm [cit. 1.12.2005]
28
5.1. MASCULINITY IN LOTHARIO
To present some examples of masculinity in the narrator and the main character, we will
start with introducing, thus addressing him/herself.
“One does after years of playing the Lothario and seeing nothing but an empty bank
account and a pile of yellowing love-notes like IOUs.” (Winterson, J.: Written on the
Body, 1993, p.20)
The real name of this self-addressed Lothario remains through the whole book
unknown. It is definitely a man’s name and it is highly improbable, that a female would
under normal circumstances refer to herself with a name of a man, meaning by Roget’s
II: New Thesaurus:
1. a man amorously attentive to women, also amorist, Casanova…
2. a man who seduces women, like debaucher, seducer…25
Lothario adopted this meaning after a character in The Fair Penitent, a 1703 play by
Nicholas Rowe.
The narrator chooses an epitaph:
“Better then to be a contented pig than an unhappy Socrates?” (ibid, p.13).
Here is the reference not that clear as it was in the previous example. On one hand, we
have a male name, which leads to a direct relation to masculinity, as it is not common for
women to call themselves with men’s names, on the other hand, Socrates can stand for a
great philosopher and in this sense Socrates is the term, covering both, men and women,
if they want to mention a person excelling in philosophy, regardless of the sex.
“But you are gazing at me the way God gazed at Adam and I am embarrassed by your
look of love and possession and pride.”(ibid,p.18)
25
http://www.bartleby.com/62/95/L0929500.html [cit. 4.12.2005]
29
Adam was according to Bible the first man, so it hints to masculinity. But at the same
time, he was also the first human being on the Earth, which then represents both genders.
Quite interesting would be to ask Winterson, at what time she intended God’s gazing at
Adam. If it had been before he created Eve, it would mean, that Adam stands for both
genders, because he was the only human. If it happened after having created Eve, it
would directly allude to narrator’s male gender, as God in this text would have chosen to
gaze at Eve, if he wanted to stress narrator’s femininity.
Narrator recollects in his mind the memories of the time spent with a former girlfriend
Inge, who was a romantic and an anarcha-feminist.
“My job was to go into the urinals wearing one of Inge’s stockings over my head. That in
itself might not have attracted much attention, men’s toilets are fairly liberal
places…(ibid,p.22)
It is for sure, that a woman masked with a stocking entering a men’s toilet would attract
a more serious attention. In this excerpt, the person did not cause too much notice by the
men peeing into urinals. Above it all, narrator also mentions, that men’s toilets are ‘fairly
liberal places’, the knowledge that a woman cannot get, unless she is frequently visiting
them, which women do not do.
The stereotypes about sex indicate, that men need to have intercourse more often than
women, their orgasm is reached more easily and in a shorter time and a high percentage
of perfect relationship, in which they feel superb, is achieved by great and regular sex.
Women should according to some old-fashioned stereotypes prefer caressing, tenderness,
feeling of protection and need.
“I was looking for a perfect coupling; the never-sleep non-stop mighty orgasm. Ecstasy
without end.” (ibid,p.21)
Men are considered to treat the breasts as a symbol of womanhood, beauty and sex. By
extreme exaggeration Winterson reaches with intention a ridiculous state of those
stereotypes that do not correspond with reality. In reality it seems to us highly probable,
30
that no man, nor a lesbian woman would stay in a relationship that does not work because
of the woman’s breasts. Also in this example Winterson presents a stereotype of
masculinity to make the readers think about the absurdity of these clichés.
“Why didn’t I dump Inge and head for a Singles Bar? The answer is her breasts.”
(ibid,p.24)
But the previous sentence totally confuses the readers: “I can tell by now that you are
wondering whether I can be trusted as a narrator.” (ibid, p.24).
Winterson combined in one sentence the postmodern techniques:
 second person narratee,
 unreliable narrator
 metafiction.
The reader’s narrative reality is destroyed. From the beginning, the narrator’s
competence to offer an authentic story is shaken. S/he immerses into the minds of the
readers and supposes their wonders. Even if somebody has trusted the narrator until these
lines, they get the cold shower. The readers are since now lost in the personal story, told
by only one character, who they are not sure to believe and thus are forced to be careful
and pay a huge attention to whatever happens. They are standing at the crossroads, one
way means to trust the character, the other one is the way of doubt and a big distance
from every sentence written.
“I’ve always had a sports car…That home girl gonna get you in the end.” (ibid, p.21)
Which of the images occurs to you when you think about a person owning a sports car, a
man or a woman? The statement reminds most of the people of a proud, wild libertine
fooling around in his sports car, carefree, without any worries, who will be sooner or later
captured by a home girl and forced to adapt to society manners and prescriptions.
Of course, there are many women driving a sports car and many home boys planning to
settle down and to have family earlier than their girlfriends.
31
We do not want to suggest, that having a sports car is exclusively restricted to males.
What we have in mind is, that Winterson presented this example of stereotypes for
readers to ponder about their suitability, relevance and ask themselves the question,
whether they are true or are just the prevailing modern myths substituting the old ones
mentioned earlier in our work by J. Lipman-Blumen.
The main character’s ex-girlfriend had a letter-box with a yellow and green serpent
poking out at crotch level, set up for a postman to stop bothering her. To ring the door’s
bell meant to push the private parts into the head of the snake. The narrator hesitated to
reach the bell, because s/he considered it lethal and painful.
The stream of consciousness is set forth in the dialogue of the rational Me and the
irrational, scared I, written like a theatre play. Me says, that it is a joke, the teeth are not
real, while I is afraid.
The male outer genitalia are exposed and therefore more liable to vulnerability. The
snake’s teeth close to the genitalia probably would not cause to females, such a fear as to
the males in the same situation. The dialogue between I and Me is the dialogue between
the reason and the emotion. The rational side of the mind knows, that the metal head of
the snake cannot harm the private parts and it could also lead to the hint, that Me stands
for the female part. The snake’s teeth would not do an enormous damage to the female
genitalia, because they are hidden. The stereotype of the purely female emotiveness and
exclusively male reasoning is being shattered.
The cliché says, that some types of men want to get into bed as many women as they
can, they boast with their numbers and afterwards throw the lovers away as a piece of a
dirty cloth. In our society a myth like this, presenting the women, who would treat men
the same way, is not that common. Louise says to the narrator:
“I don’t want to be another scalp on your pole.” (ibid,p.53).
The citation about the scalp on the pole could bring up the suggestion of the narrator’s
masculinity.
32
The aggression is usually attributed to the male characteristics. Men are stereotypically
said to use the means of violence when they get furiously angry and as a consequence of
bitter arguments. The narrator’s use of the physical power in aggression is depicted in the
novel twice.
o When the ex-girlfriend Jacqueline damaged his/her flat after finding out, that
s/he has been cheating on her.
“I slapped her across the face and tore my keys from her pocket.” (ibid,p.86)
o The second time when s/he visits Louise’s ex-husband Elgin.
“I grabbed him by his tie and jammed him against the door. I’ve never had any boxing
lessons so I had to fight on instinct and cram his windpipe into his larynx.” (ibid,p.170)
We have no doubts, that an exasperated woman could be stronger than a man, causing
her the wrath. Every person’s inner fury can accumulate a surprisingly immense strength.
The reason we are mentioning these examples is, that it is quite rare for a woman to use
violence towards either another woman or man. The females in most of the cases when
being provoked, prefer the psychical pressure towards the object of their indignation.
33
5.2. FEMININITY IN LOTHARIO
The assumption that the personal narrator might be female is achieved by the comparison
to Alice in Wonderland, “I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingoes.”
(ibid,p.10), Lauren Bacall “I stared at it the way Lauren Bacall does in those films with
Humphrey Bogart.” (ibid,p.41) and the similes in “Why do I feel like a convent
virgin?”(ibid,p.94) or “I quivered like a schoolgirl.” (ibid,82)
A male narrator would probably rather compare himself to a monk than a virgin or
would select Humphrey instead of Lauren. A man can quiver like a schoolboy, if he
wants to emphasize the young age, vulnerability, fear and panic. The schoolgirls’ and
schoolboys’ quiver in general is caused by the same stimuli, which are usually terror,
nervousness and anxiety. The reference to a schoolboy would cause no difference in
meaning and therefore these examples are direct hints of I’s womanhood.
These examples of self-identification contrast with those, stressing Lothario’s
masculinity, which we presented in the previous chapter. The male and female pictures,
embodiments and allusions of identity stretch simultaneously in parallel throughout the
whole novel, and are thus a hard nut to crack for a reader, who is trying to peruse
Winterson’s mind and discover the veiled gender.
If the narrator were a woman, it would mean, that her relationship with Louise is a
lesbian one. It would not be surprising, because Winterson is lesbian and her partner
might resemble Louise. When viewed from this perspective, the novel would incorporate
a big amount of autobiographical features.
The point of view and depiction of other characters seem to be a feminine one. Females
are looked at with a greater insight and more developed in the field of psychology. S/he
sympathizes with women rather than with men, as it is felt from their descriptions.
34
“At the Clap Clinic the following day, I looked at my fellow sufferers. Shifty Jack-thelads, fat businessmen in suits cut to hide the bulge. A few women, tarts yet, and other
women too. Women with eyes full of pain and fear.” (ibid,p.46)
All the patients, whom the narrator saw in the waiting room when diagnosed with
contracting syphilis, are commonly labelled as fellow sufferers, which is neutral. Men are
viewed only from the external perspective. All the words describing men in this sentence
have negative and almost hateful connotation: shifty, Jack-the-lads and fat. If one
imagines a man according to this interpretation, their mental picture conveys an idea of a
dishonest, sleazy, obese businessman. All the men seem to be of one type, the
categorization is overly restricted.
On the contrary, women are divided into two groups- the prostitutes and the victims,
although they are the minority in the waiting room. They are classified by the feelings
and not by the appearance. S/he deduces their emotions of pain and fear according to the
expression of the eyes and thus justifies the insight. Their looks – the figures and the
clothes - are not mentioned, the emphasis is laid on the indirect assumption, originating
from their facial expression.
The disdain for men would be comprehended, if the narrator had caught the disease
from a man. But syphilis was transmitted to him/her by Bathseba, who is his/her exgirlfriend. Although a woman is responsible for the narrator’s misery and men play no
role in the burden, they are the ones categorized by depreciation.
“Who gave it to you love?”…“Divorce him,” I wanted to say. “You think this is the first
time?” (ibid, p.46)
The narrator looks at a woman and confidently predicts, that she got the disease from
her unfaithful husband. The black-and-white attitude sees men in the critical light, as the
evil-doers, while women are seen as the injured partners, even though there is no
evidence for this stance. S/he does not know the circumstances of woman’s acquiring of
35
the infection. She could have been the one cheating her partner and thus got infected.
Nothing is mentioned about the woman and so the judgment is exclusively in the hands
of the readers, to decide, whether they agree with the narrator’s standpoint in this
situation, when favouring women and abhorring men.
Our notion varies from the one presented by the narrator. When somebody enters the
clinic, they have no reason for a dissimilar perception of the patients, based only on
patient’s sex. We would not assume, that solely men, and preferably plump businessmen
in the suits, are always cheating their wives and not being cheated. Simultaneously the
blame can be laid on a woman and her husband does not have to be the source of syphilis.
Both sexes are equally competent of deception of their partners.
We regard the narrator’s prejudices about men’s untrustworthiness as misleading and
thus showing his/her negative charge towards males.
36
6. WHO IS ORLANDO ?
Orlando is enabled under the pen of Virginia Woolf to live the dream of the humankind.
He-She can taste sweetness and bitterness, pleasures, worries and physical beauties
thickly embroidered with the psychical ones of both sexes. This literary character gets
what most of us have always desired to undergo – to get to know the feelings, to be able
to read the thoughts and wishes of the opposite sex and to learn how to understand them.
Orlando experiences our yearning – when his man’s identity is succeeded by that of a
woman, so he-she has the opportunity to perceive the world from both perspectives, both
banks of the river, between which flows the stream of love and life.
Orlando, as Woolf mentioned in her diary, was written from Woolf’s desire for fun:
“I want to kick up my heels and be off.” 26
She wanted some adventure after the previous serious poetic experimental works. She
chose the form of a third- person, omniscient narrator and a biographer at the same time,
who shifts the tone to adapt to the highest extent to Orlando, as his-her life goes through
the modifications – concerning the era, the setting, the experience and the gender.
Through the whole novel stretch the passages of metafiction, the reader emerges from the
flow of the fiction, where they were sublimed.
“That Orlando had gone a little too far from the present moment will, perhaps, strike the
reader who sees her now preparing to get into her motor-car with her eyes full of tears
and visions of Persian mountains.” 27
The readers face the problems, thoughts of the narrator, which had to be dealt with while
producing the text. There are slight insights presented into the world of the narrator while
the characters are engaged with the plot.
26
27
Woolf,V.: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol.3: 1925-1930, (1981), p.131
Woolf,V.: Orlando, 2003,p.151
37
“And as she drove, we may seize the opportunity, since the landscape was of a simple
English kind which needs no description, to draw the reader’s attention more
particularly than we could at the moment to one or two remarks which have slipped in
here and there in the course of the narrative.”28
The narrator wants to provide the reader with some facts, that they forgot to write in the
due time and therefore is unveiling them in these lines. They use the time when the
character is supposingly safe and nothing worth mentioning should happen to her. The
narrator is addressing a reader, forces them to react to the written extract and also reveals
own unreliability.
The main character is the transformation of Woolf’s friend and lover Vita SackvilleWest. Woolf wrote to Vita: “Suppose Orlando turns out to be about Vita; and it’s all
about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind? Shall you mind?”
Vita replied: “My God, Virginia, if ever I was thrilled and terrified it is at the prospect
of being projected into the shape of Orlando.”29
Orlando is not only based on Vita, it is also dedicated to her and the book contains the
pictures of her embodying Orlando. Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson writes in the study of his
parents:
“The effect of Vita on Virginia is all contained in Orlando, the longest and most
charming love letter in literature…”30
Orlando is not only an infusion of invention and poetic language into the biographical
form but a genuine fusion of fiction and biography, a mixture of history and art.
Woolf superbly mixed fiction with biography by the incorporation of literary texts,
namely allusions and quotations. Orlando’s verses are based on the writings of the
Sackville family, from the Renaissance Thomas Sackville’s Induction to The Mirror for
28
Woolf,V.: Orlando,2003, p.91
Glendinning,V.: Vita: A Biography of Vita Sackville-West, 1992, p.181
30
Nicolson,N.: Portrait of a Marriage, 1973, p.202
29
38
Magistrates (quoted only in the manuscript but replaced by intentionally trivial lines in
the published text) to passages from Vita Sackville-West’s set of georgics, The Land,
which is the original of Orlando’s poem, “The Oak Tree.” 31
The whole novel is interwoven with literary allusions to other authors – in the Preface is
expressed Woolf’s gratitude to writers from Defoe to Walter Palter – novelists,
biographers, historians, poets- in whose debts she remains. There are references to
Defoe’s Moll Flanders, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Orlando is named
after the character of Shakespeare’s As You Like It or Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, he-she
is watching Othello. Pope and Dryden become characters to be mocked for their lack of
wit, Johnson and Boswell are observed while drinking their tea.
The first meeting between Orlando and Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine is a parody
of the first encounter of Jane and Rochester in Broente’s Jane Eyre. Woolf uses the
intertextuality also to relate to her previous works, and namely The Waves, To the
Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, which even shares with Orlando the negative
character of Nick Greene.
The novel spans from 1588 to 1928 and is divided into six chapters, each marked by the
age in which it occurs. It begins in the Elizabethan/Jacobean age, which is followed by
the seventeenth century, the Restoration, the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century
and finishes in the Victorian and modern periods.
In spite of the variety of centuries, each of them contains the mention of the land, the
oak tree, Orlando’s poem and estate, being the home for both – fictional character and
living model.
The last sentence of the book has a special meaning:
“And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday,
the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight.”32
31
32
Fleishman,A.: Virginia Woolf- A Critical Reading, 1975,p.137
Woolf,V.: Orlando, 2003, p.162
39
It was on 28 January 1928 when Vita’s father died, leaving no male heir. The family
estate Knole, being inherited by her uncle, had been lost to Vita ever since.
On 11 October 1928, an advance copy of the book was sent to Vita in the morning mail.
The same day she wrote to Woolf that she feels Virginia invented a new kind of
narcissism. She felt to be “in love with Orlando” 33.
The book made her cry and laugh, feel excitement and confusion and at the same time
she was losing the idea about where or who she was right then.
In the very same year, the universal suffrage was granted to all women, indifferent to
their age, marital status or property. The year 1928 opens in England the doors to new
options for women. Since then on, the boundaries between men and women, treating the
latter ones as unequal, started to loosen in all spheres of life.
Orlando may be called the first piece of literature in which “the fictional form will be
given biography”34.
Orlando meets during his and her life with important persons of the public life – Queen
Elizabeth is of his kin, he-she is invited to parties of high aristocracy, where exclusively
noblemen gather, becomes acquainted with well-known aces of British literature. Though
famous and wealthy Orlando is, he-she is still searching for love in its deepest and purest
sense, which comes true at the end of the book – Orlando finally finds happiness in
finishing his-her poem Oak Tree and being in the company of her husband.
33
34
Glendinning,V.: Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West,1992, p.202
Fleishman,A.: Virginia Woolf- A Critical Reading, 1975, p.136
40
6.1. CROSSING OF ORLANDO’S SEX & GENDER
“He- for there could be no doubt of his sex…” (ibid, p.5)
In the very first sentence the narrator wants to be read as a voice of a reliable authority,
having no doubts about main character’s sex. The reader stands in front of a rather
difficult task - they have to scan between the lines, discover where is the narrator being
serious and where mocking or using sarcasm. Woolf developed the narrator in the tone –
“Everything I say is naturally true”, so that the reader would have an impression of
confidence, which is simultaneously disturbed by narrator’s occasional inability to
provide the reliable information. By the connection of the antagonistic directions, Woolf
gets the readers where she wanted to have them – in the state of pondering and
reconstructing the images of two sexes, the clichés about their stereotypes, prevailing in
the 20’s and 30’s.
“His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace.” (ibid, p.67)
Orlando, a man, wakes up after a week of a deep sleep and accompanied by a procession
of trumpeters crying : “The Truth!”, as a woman. Since then on, Orlando has the mind of
both genders, operating side by side, hand in hand - Orlando is androgynous.
Her look, her face has not changed, which is even proven by the portraits, which
remained practically the same, whether painted before or after the transformation.
The process of the change of sex is not automatically connected with the alteration of
the identity. Orlando has at that time woman’s sex but man’s gender. Since this turnover
on, we will refer to Orlando using the pronouns She and Her to avoid the confusion
between Orlando’s past and present.
41
“Which is the greater ecstasy? The man’s or the woman’s? And are they not perhaps the
same?” (ibid, p.76)
We enter the process of Orlando’s comparing of bliss between being in the skin of the
woman or in the man’s. The considering is carried to us via “stream of consciousness”,
having the form of an inner rhetorical question. Although it is answered, that the most
delicious is “to resist and to yield; to yield and to resist” (ibid, p.76), referring to female
patterns of behaviour, as rhetorical remains the question for the reader - to decide, which
sex lives in ‘the greater ecstasy’ or if the ecstasy of both is not alike.
In our opinion, the ecstasy of one’s person does not depend on their sex. There are too
many pleasures being a man and too many being a woman – they do not have to occur
simultaneously in the same situations. But since we have experienced the life of a person
of only one sex, we cannot with a 100% certainty insist, that the measure of bliss of the
sexes is the same, so we incline to Orlando’s suggestion, that they are ‘perhaps the same’.
“Lord! Lord! … must I then begin to respect the opinion of the other sex, however
monstrous I think it? If I wear skirts, if I can’t swim, if I have to be rescued by a bluejacket, by God!” she cried,
“I must!”... Candid by nature, and averse to all kinds of equivocation, to tell lies bored
her.” (ibid, p.76)
Orlando comes to a deep disappointment after having realized the situation in England
in the eighteenth century, concerning the position of women. They were treated as
unequal to men, had to yield to men’s standpoint, were not allowed to publicly express
their disagreement, voice contrary judgment or take important decisions in public sphere.
Having been brought up as a boy and having spent over thirty years being, feeling and
thinking as a man, it causes Orlando a rather big confusion, not to be approached the
same way.
42
“Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires,” she reflected, ”for women
are not (judging by my own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented, and
exquisitely appareled by nature.(ibid, p.77)
She now remembers and despises how she insisted that women must obey men, they
must be virtuous, innocent, pure, decent, moral, decorous, modest, must be always
fashionable and dressed in the prettiest way possible. People often do not realize, how the
others feel unless they get into the same situation and have to face the same
difficulties…and this is the case of Orlando.
She is thinking about and mentioning all the restrictions, as well as agreed ways of
conduct, applied in every-day circumstances that women must follow in England. It is
improper for a woman from an aristocratic circle to hit or smack a man, to tell him he lies
straight, face to face, to stab somebody with a sword or it is absolutely excluded to kill
somebody. Representatives of the ‘tender’ sex cannot wear a coronet, take part in
procession, be engaged in legal or governmental negotiations, actions, become a member
of Parliament and lead an army. Orlando now, being of a female sex, will never be able to
sit among her male friends and chat as they used to before, will never be honoured for
some great deed or receive a medal.
“All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour out tea and ask my lords how
they like it.” (ibid, p.77)
Forming these ideas and uttering the words she is shocked to perceive how lowered her
opinion of the sex, to which she used to be once excessively overjoyed and pride to
belong.
Orlando’s gender is now a combination of masculinity and femininity, having
characteristics of both and still not knowing, which one prevails.
Orlando mentions some examples of the absurdity of men’s manners and habits, like
almost falling from a mast-head, because he sees a woman’s ankles. This might have
been true, (even though we access it with a considerable doubt) in the eighteenth century,
43
since it was not common to see any part of a woman’s leg or foot but definitely would not
work as an example of men’s foolishness these days, because spotting an ankle is not
anything unusual and uncovering one is not one of the immoral deeds.
To illustrate other types of men’s inanity, Orlando refers to their showing off and desire
to be glorified: “to dress up like a Guy Fawkes and parade the streets, so that women
may praise you” (ibid, p. 77), refers to the senseless denying of a female teacher lest she
could laugh at them in the morning and then becoming slaves of the fragile girls in
petticoats at night.
And they still regard themselves as “the Lords of creation - Heavens!” she thought,
“what fools they make of us- what fools we are!” (ibid, p.77)
She is censuring both sexes, as if she does not belong to any of them, yet still seems to
equivocate. Is she a man? Is she a woman? If we take into consideration that she has lived
lives of both (although as a female for a much shorter period of time) and knows their
positives and negatives, it is not such a wonder, that she pitties one sex and then the other
and finds both full of imperfections and defects. Only when you are in somebody’s shoes,
can you understand their way of life. To Orlando both sexes are familiar, because she
“knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each.” (ibid, p.77)
Cogitating about the pros and cons of being a male or a female concludes in the ironical
statement, that women are ignorant and poor when compared with men, because the
“tender sex” is not “armoured with every weapon” (ibid, p.78), but men still, as if afraid,
debar women from education. This paragraph hints that something happens to her during
the night and she wakes up pushed more towards the female sex. She is speaking with the
inclination to femaleness and even with a sort of content when thanking Goodness that
she does not have to be in army or enter war, does not have to sentence a man to death.
“Better is it”, she thought, ”to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the
dark garments of the female sex, better to leave the rule and discipline of the world to
44
others; better be quit of martial ambition, the love of power, and all the other manly
desires if so one can more fully enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the human
spirit, which are”, she said aloud, as her habit was when deeply moved, ”contemplation,
solitude, love.”
“Praise God that I’m a woman!” (ibid, p.78)
All Orlando’s loves so far has been women and although her sex has changed, it has no
effect upon her taste. She still loves women and the only attribute that is shifted, is her
emotional side in the affairs. The previous lovers seem much closer, she is starting to
comprehend the way they acted, which has always been a mystery to her. The intensity
of the feelings is deepened, the affections are coming quicker.
We do not agree with the stereotype claiming that men’s feeling are quicker to change
the object of inclination and woman’s love will last longer than a man’s one, because it is
not determined by individual’s sex but by individual’s character.
Talking about men not being as stable as women, their feelings being shallower and
their affections arriving later would be incorrect, disputable and would project human
beings in the black-and-white frame, which is inaccurate, faulty and indubitably wide of
the mark.
We do not want to attribute the period of devotion to lovers, the speed of passions
culminated, the depth of adoration and seriousness of romance exclusively to gender of
lovers. Although there are some differences between men’s and women’s approaches to
the affairs of heart, it cannot be declared, that one sex is quicker in developing affections
than the other and their love is more profound.
Even though it is natural for both sexes to cry (that she knew from her own experience)
to drift away some tiny pieces of sadness, sorrow, misery and grief that burden human
soul, men shed tears usually only when secluded and would do everything possible to
restrain them in the company of others. Also Orlando, bearing this taught pattern in mind,
45
does not let her tears flow, until she realizes that she is a woman and then does not
consider it embarrassing to cry publicly. Above it all, she is becoming aware of the fact
dictated by the English society that women “should be shocked when men display
emotion in their presence, and so, shocked she was.” (ibid, p.88)
The cry is in our society synonymous with pain, unhappiness, suffering and grief. But
why revealing of these feelings attracts such a great deal of attention, when this state,
familiar to all of us, is a part of our lives? Why would we permanently have to be happy,
without worries and glowing with joy? Is not cry as natural as an immense portion of
laughter?...
When seeing the hated Archduchess Harriet and there being left nothing else than to ask
her in, Orlando says to herself:
“A plague on women …they never leave one a moment’s peace. A more ferreting,
inquisiting, busyboding set of people don’t exist.” (ibid, p.87).
She means this in a complete forgetting about her present sex. Orlando looks more
carefully and in the place of Archduchess stands Archduke, which indicates, that Orlando
is not the only character who changes the sex. Was it Woolf’s intention to alter Harriet to
Harry only shortly after Orlando condemns women? Naturally yes, to show, that it is not
solely women or men behaving a certain way but it is a characteristic of somebody’s
personality.
Now having recollected her femaleness and finding herself alone with a man for the first
time, she feels as if about to faint. Woolf is by Orlando’s exclamation: “La! How you
frighten me!” (ibid, p.87) mocking the virginal attitude to men when ending up alone in
the company of a man.
By getting a female gender, Orlando is adopting the socially predicted schemes of
conduct, like one described in Woolf’s Room of One’s Own – it was not typical for
women at that time to write. Suddenly, Orlando, who used to write her poem Oak Tree
46
without regard to servants watching him, has been recently observed to “hide her
manuscripts when interrupted.”(ibid, p.91)
Woolf is presenting some more examples of the stereotypical patterns of female
behaviour – like modesty, vanity, fear. All these attributes could not be spotted in male
Orlando, they come into presence only when the sex is modified.
“Her modesty as to he writing, her vanity as to her person, her fears for her safety all
seem to hint that what was said a short time ago about there being no change in Orlando
the man and Orlando the woman, was ceasing to be altogether true.” (ibid, p.91)
It is now becoming obvious what has been denied before – with Orlando’s sex
transformed, also the qualities has succumbed to the alteration.
“She was becoming a little more modest, as women are, of her brains, and a little more
vain, as women are, of her person.” (ibid, p.92)
The culture and its influence upon individuals are stressed, which injects the diverse
variety of qualities to men and the diverse pack to women.
“The change of clothes had, some philosophers will say, much to do with it…
They (the clothes) change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.” (ibid, p.92)
The clothes could be taken as a metaphor for all the society driven expectations,
demands, requirements it places on people regarding their sex, and these being evident,
for example in social etiquette.
“Orlando curtseyed; she complied; she flattered the good man’s humours as she would
not have done had his neat breeches been a woman’s skirts, and his braided coat a
woman’s satin bodice.”(ibid, p.92)
47
Orlando’s behaviour is modified by the change of sex and gender, it is now as clear as
day. At this moment we would like to discover the cause of her gradually changing
personality.
The converse of Orlando’s sex is not the only factor influencing the traits she is
possessing. Orlando behaves the same way as before the trumpeters cried “The Truth!”
for the last time, and she wakes up, as when, newly transformed into a woman,
accompanies the gypsies in the natural world. The personality has not developed any far
too remarkable shifts from the previous state unless she comes closer to English society,
is touched by it, is pulled into it and fully immersed in it. The culture has formed
Orlando’s gender.
“…it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm
of breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.” (ibid, p.92)
What we wear creates who we are…
It has been known since ages, that clothes make a man, meaning, we are what we wear.
According to the type of clothes we wear – the female or the male ones – we are put into
one of two boxes – the red or the blue one. Today the style of clothes is quite liberal,
there exist unisex clothes, designing for either sex but it has not been common until
lately.
During Orlando’s lifetime a certain type of clothes was strictly and distinguishably
aimed for only one sex and it would be considered unacceptable to contravene this rule.
The proof of the dissimilar culture’s leverage upon its members, according to the sex,
Woolf provides by illustrating these examples:
“The man has his hand free to seize his sword, the woman must use hers to keep the
satins from slipping from her shoulders.”(ibid, p.92) – In the first instance the attention is
fixed on contradictory use of hands. Men hold weapons, women dresses.
48
“The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned
to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion.”
(ibid, p.92)
The second point to be accentuated is the unlike style of male and female perception of
the happenings around. Men are shown as active, brave, fearless almost God-like
creatures, women take their time to regard things, are more sensitive and often speculate
and doubt.
“Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been
the same.” (ibid, p.92)
If people were dressed the same way, not following the clothes’ desiderata laid with
divergence on men and women, they would, according to Woolf, look much more similar
and thus their attitude towards the world around could be the same. By ‘the clothes’ she
does not have to mean solely that what we have on, it might be an umbrella term
embracing a much wider concept. When living in the society, the citizens have to adapt to
its norms, rules and regulations. They encompass an individual all around. If the same
expectations were put on men and women, the outcome would be the similar position to
the globe. Here, the notion of gender is standing in the focus of our intentness.
The gender roles are the clothes sewn for us by our culture .
“Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from
one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or
female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above.”(ibid, p.92)
By the intermixing of the sexes, Woolf relates to her A Room of One’s Own, in which
the idea of androgyny is presented – “…in each of us, two powers preside, one male, one
female…”35
It is believed, that people should be aware of this unity and get to know how to utilize it
to the maximum, because only then can reach complete satisfaction.
35
Woolf, V.: A Room of One’s Own, p.113
49
“For it was the mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the
other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn.” (ibid, p.93)
In androgynous Orlando, both, male and also female principles are clearly noticeable,
which is underlined by her contrastive manners and actions developed in various
circumstances.
Among the examples of Orlando’s female gender, there are the sentences of women,
that could be pronounced:
 “…if Orlando was a woman, how did she never take more than ten minutes to
dress?”
 “…she has none of the formality of a man, or a man’s love of power. She is
excessively tender-hearted.”
 “She would burst into tears on slight provocation.”
 “She was unversed in geography…”
 “…found mathematics intolerable…”
 “…held some caprices which are more common among women than men, as for
instance that to travel south is to travel downhill.”
 ”…all the time prattling as women do, to amuse her lover…”
(ibid, p.92,93,94,107)
Orlando’s male gender is stressed by:
o “…were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather
shabby?”
o “…she detested household matters…”
o “…was up at dawn and out among the fields in summer before the sun had risen
o “No farmer knew more about the crops than she did”
o “She could drink with the best and liked games of hazard.”
o “She rode well and drove six horses at a gallop over London Bridge.”
o “An absent-mindedness about her sometimes made her clumsy…”
50
o “…her walk was a little too much of a stride for a woman…”
o “…her gesture, being abrupt, might endanger a cup of tea on occasion.”
o “…she had forgotten that ladies are not supposed to walk in public places
alone…”
o “She looked, she felt, she talked like one.(man)” (ibid, p.92,93,94,95,106)
These extracts confirm that Orlando’s mind is androgynous, since possessing the
features of masculinity hand in hand with those of femininity. It is not possible to claim
which prevail and it is also not our intention to do so.
“Whether, then, Orlando was most man or woman, it is difficult to say and cannot now
be decided.” (ibid, p.93)
The words of humbleness, gratefulness, obedience and excessive praise for men are with
irony inserted in Orlando’s tongue. The man gives her nourishment and protection, scares
wild animals, terrifies the savages and produces her clothes. According to his image she
pictures God, so that she can worship. The confirmation of his care is omnipresent and so
it should be her pleasure to “serve, honour, and obey” (ibid, 101) such a God-like sex.
In the next sentence her attitude is shifted in the opposite direction. She considers it vain
of a man to think she can worship him. The opinion of some men upon women highlights
the overall tendency of men in the eighteenth century to approach women as if they were
on a lower level. Lord Chesterfield says that women are larger children and a sensible
man “only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them.” (ibid, p.105)
Orlando, as a response discloses that a woman is familiar with man’s mentality and
knows very well that his writing poems for her, praising her judgment as well as criticism
and drinking her tea does not mean that he fully respects her opinions.
Orlando’s bisexuality “she reaped a twofold harvest”(ibid, p.108) displays Vita
Sackville West’s equal love for men and women.
51
After meeting her husband, and thanks to him, she finally acknowledges her gender:
“I am a woman,” she thought, “a real woman, at last.” (ibid, p.125)
“Sex? Ah! What about sex? My sex…is pronounced indisputably, and beyond the
shadow of a doubt (what was I telling you a moment ago, Shel?), female.” (ibid, p.126)
Woolf deconstructs the stereotypes about masculinity and femininity by Orlando’s
implication that tolerance and being free-spoken are not only masculine prerogatives.
Besides women, also men can be described with strangeness a subtlety.
Orlando has been during her life “…changing her selves as quickly as she drove – there
was a new one at every corner –…” (ibid, p.153)
Orlando has been trying to find the real I, to get to know who he-she is. But his-her
situation is a rather difficult one, as he-she has to explore both sexes of a species Homo
Sapiens. Or is it therefore easier, because he-she can understand both sexes?...
Only after investigation of the lives of both, she decides to be a woman. She has been
seeking the conscious, controlling, uppermost, ‘the Key self’, which “has the power to
desire, wishes to be nothing but one self…” (ibid, p.153) and when finding this in being a
woman she becomes “a single self, a real self.” (ibid, p.155)
52
CONCLUSION
We were writing our diploma work with the intention to introduce a notion that reaches
beyond the current perception of reality, yet has still been operating in people’s minds –
the phenomenon of androgyny. Androgyny has been an important figure for the overall
art scene since the 1950’s, but it had to wait to hit its zenith in the 1980’s by Glam Rock
music. The outstanding artists publicly embodied the gender-bending trend not only
through the music and performance but also via their dance and look, including style,
clothes, hair and make-up.
The original concept characterizes the idea, that in all of us, whether male or female,
also the other gender appears. Even though it is not as apparent and usually shadowed by
that one matching with our physical look, it stands side by side with the one synonymous
with our sex. Every individual is different and thus the rate of representation of
femininity and masculinity alters.
Two feministic authors- Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson provided us in their
novels with the excellent examples of the stereotyped behaviour of both genders. The
main characters of the modern as well as the postmodern novels combine the principles
of either sex; Lothario simultaneously and Orlando in the course of time.
Lothario’s identity is veiled, the name, the age, the appearance, the sex is unknown and
the mind is androgynous. Orlando’s male sex changes into the female one after the seven
day sleep but the transition of mind is a much complicated one. The masculine mind is
followed by the androgynous one and only after own decision and approval to become
feminine in mind, Orlando gets one.
The questions we started writing our work with, like: “Is the world divided into two
parts, two poles, the halves? Where is then the border? Is it firm and stable? Does it allow
53
the penetration? What effect has time and era on bending and crossing of genders?” were
tried to be answered throughout the whole diploma work.
We considerably expanded the conception, that although we are born to represent male
or female sex, gender is a much more complex and complicated concept. It refers to
social characteristics associated with biological sex and includes a great number of
characteristics of appearance, speech, movement, action and other factors not solely
limited to biological sex.
On one hand, sex is innate, we are born male and female and do nothing to acquire our
own sex. On the other hand, gender is a social construction, acquired through interaction
in the cultural world, it is learnt to be masculine or feminine.
We do not sustain the idea, that the world is divided according to the sexes into two
groups. Of course, there are many differences between men and women in the
appearance, clothes, manners and behaviour, but these are not as striking as they were
some five hundred years ago. What used to be considered unacceptable for a man or a
woman, like the androgynous look, unisexual clothes along with certain types of jobs or
ways of conduct, is now a matter of everyday life.
The course of time and with it connected the revolutionized perception of reality,
industrial society, feminist movement and all the changes of the twentieth century
resulted in the narrowing of the gap between the sexes but did not eliminate the amazing
peculiarities that adorn every moment of our lives.
54
The circle of connection
the chain of the together
the black Yin in Moon
the white Yang in Sun
And still a white dot in black
and black one in white
and One unites Two and
2
BECAME
55
…
RESUMÉ
Našu diplomovú prácu sme začínali písať s mnohými otázkami na perách, jazyku,
klávesnici, ale hlavne v mysli. Je spoločenský a kultúrny svet v ľudskom ponímaní
rozdelený na mužskú a ženskú zložku? Aké sú princípy a charakteristiky mužskosti a čo
udáva ženskosť? Sú naše rody také rozdielne, alebo sa prelínajú? Kde je hranica medzi
mužskosťou a ženskosťou a existuje vôbec?
Na začiatku sme predstavili dve anglické feministické autorky, o ktorých diela sme sa
v našej práci opierali. Virginia Woolfová je predstaviteľkou anglickej moderny a jednou
z najvýznamnejších osôb feminizmu v celosvetovom meradle, Jeanette Wintersonová
zastupuje literárny postmodernizmus. Venovali sme sa problematike rozlíšenia medzi
pojmami rod a pohlavie, charakterizovali sme, ako je vnímaná mužskosť a ako ženskosť.
Bližšie sme rozobrali pojem androgynity, stereotypov oboch pohlaví, z ktorých mnohé
nie sú založené na skutočnosti. Uviedli sme viaceré myšlienky a teórie, týkajúce sa rodov
a pohlaví od známych amerických psychológov, menovite: J. Lipman-Blumen a J.T.
Wood a tiež sme zakomponovali teóriu švajčiarskeho psychológa C.G. Junga o
archeotypoch a androgynizme.
Woolfovej polemika, v ktorej sa upriamila na feministické myšlienky a otázku
postavenia žien hlavne z literárneho hľadiska, je tiež dôležitou súčasťou našej práce.
V praktickej časti sme rozobrali romány Written on the Body a Orlando. Postmoderné
dielo Written on the Body je napísané z pohľadu rozprávača a zároveň hlavného hrdinu, o
ktorom sú všetky informácie na odhalenie identity zahalené rúškom tajomstva.
Nepoznáme skutočné meno, vek, vzhľad, pohlavie, rod, ale, čo je pre nás podstatné, jeho
androgýnna myseľ podáva mnohé príklady, ktoré podčiarkujú buď Lothariovu/vej
ženskosť alebo mužskosť.
Orlandova identita a rod sa zmení počas siedmych dní spánku a tak sa zaspávajúci muž
Orlando zobudí za sprievodu trúbok a hlasného “Pravda!” ako žena. Orlandov rod pritom
56
zostáva mužské a začne sa meniť až po príchode do Anglicka. Dlhšiu dobu má Orlandova
myseľ známky sto percentnej androgynity, raz myslí ako žena, inokedy sa považuje za
muža. Až potom, ako sa sama stotožní so ženstvom a rozhodne sa stať ženou aj rodom, sa
jej myseľ stáva ženskou.
V celej práci prezentujeme, že hoci pohlavie je kategóriou vrodenou, pri definícií rodu
musíme brať ohľad na oveľa širšie súvislosti. Rod je spoločenská charakteristika spojená
s biologickým pohlavím, ale zahŕňa i veľké množstvo iných znakov okrem fyzických čŕt,
ako sú vzhľad, reč, pohyb atď., ktorým sa od detstva učíme.
Obrovská priepasť medzi mužmi a ženami, ktorá existovala v minulosti, sa postupne
zmenšuje. To, čo by bolo pred tristo, dvesto, ale i sto rokmi považované za neprípustné
pre opačné pohlavie, ako typ výzoru, štýl oblečenia, ale i spôsob správania a pracovné
možnosti, sú dnes úplne bežné.
Beh času a s ním spojené všetky zmeny v spoločnosti spôsobili postupné zužovanie
rieky medzi mužským a ženským pohlavím, ale nevymazali tie nádherné odlišnosti, ktoré
tvoria náš svet takým zaujímavým a skrášľujú a obohacujú naše životy.
57
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