Critical Article Summary

Meese, Elizabeth. "When Virginia Looked at Vita, What Did She See; Or, Lesbian: Feminist: Woman-What's the Differ(e/a)nce?." Feminist Studies 18.1 (1992): 99-117.
This article focuses on Virginia and Vita’s affair and how it was the Catalyst and shaper of the novel Orlando. Some of her sources are letters back and forth between Virginia and Vita. She refers to the novel as one long love letter. This article, like the last one relates sexual identity closely with clothing choice. She theorizes that Orlando’s duel genders might have been a way for Woolf to write about lesbians in a less radical fashion. I think the background about the affair is important because most every critique of the novel references it. If much of the gender-play is based on how androgynous Vita was, that makes it central to my argument. Also the issue of signifiers and signifier confusion is important to this article. The article suggest this with the differ(e/a)nce business.