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Serious scholars have rarely taken Virginia Woolfs novelOrlando, 90 years old this week, terribly seriously.
But the story of Woolfs gender-fluid and superhuman heroine is about much more than a single individual.
AboutOrlando, she wrote defensively, I want fun.
I want fantasy, perhaps to preempt dismissive half-praise.
While Elizabeths infatuation with Orlando is feminine, her power is not.
Her favor endows Orlando, as a man, with property and power.
Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same.
After these two sentences, however, the narrator-biographer bows to convention and begins to call Orlando she.
But the glimpse of a nonbinary pronoun is tantalizing.
The characters transition is more gradual than the shift to the feminine pronoun suggests.
She can hardly get a word in, and is ignored and patronized when she does.
But clothing by itself cannot make men or women.
Only power can do that.
No open conversation was tolerated … the life of the average woman was a succession of childbirths.
Even Orlando previously bent on pursuing life!
(And even in our enlightened times, straight biographies of female subjects arein a significant minority.)
Woolf wrote afterward that she began to writeOrlandoas a joke.
