Fassler, Barbara. "Theories of Homosexuality as Sources of Bloomsbury's Androgyny." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5.2 (1979): 237
This early article explores the relationship between homosexual behavior and the concept of androgyny pertaining to the Bloomsbury group. Various theories, positive and negative, on homosexuality are listed and discussed. This is the great example of what the term “androgyny” meant in its first wave of popularity. It was trying to shrink the box that defines gender rather than multiply its meanings. First Fassler tries to challenges the idea that Ancient cultures embraced and practiced homosexual activity. She questions traditional gender roles and their origins. Plato has effect of defining sexuality of 19th-20th centuries meaning three sexes, male female and hermaphrodite. Is this one more accurate? The article also questions if sexual orientation is genetic. Many in society see homosexuality as degenerate. Members of the Bloomsbury crowd are totally open about it, however. She lists some current (at the time) scientific research into hereditarily and homosexuality. She mentions the theory that everyone is bisexual to an extent and that people contain both male and female behavior patterns. Notice this still implies that gender difference is something concrete.
The article talks about Freud and the Bloomsbury gang’s interest in his theories on homosexuality. Lytton Strachey made fun of Freudian attempts to ‘cure” gay men. It is problematic that most studies were done on men and male homosexuality. Lesbians were ignored. The feminine man is above the masculine woman in society’s hierarchy. Even in the process of expanding definition of gender, women are subjugated. Vita believed masculine and feminine parts were battling inside her. Interestingly Vita links her first sexual experience with a woman to when she wore male clothing. Discusses fusing men and women parts together to create a united whole.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Critical Article Summary
Knopp, Sherron E. "If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?": Sapphism and the Subversiveness of Virginia Woolf's Orlando." PMLA 103.1 (1988): 24-34.
Knopp refers to Orlando as the longest love letter in history. She asserts that the physical portions of their relationship were very short-lived but very intense. She thinks it cheapens their love for each other when it is called an affair. Woolf spoke like she thought of Orlando as frivolous and almost a joke. Though, she was notoriously self-deprecating about her writing, she was especially hard on this book. People close to Woolf, including Vanessa thought the book was a way of getting over Vita. Some people liked to use the term homoemotionality to desexualize their relationship. “Critical discomfort with the novel mirrors biographical discomfort with the relationship” (25). Critics consider it to closely related to Vita's life story and an interlude between more serious works. Leonard took it more seriously than Virginia. Vita was well aware of Virginia’s madness and was afraid to arouse strong feelings because of it. “It is a fire with which I have no desire to play” 26. According to the article Virginia was very jealous of other women in Vita’s life. So she suggests this novel was to build intimacy rather than to create distance between the two. Virginia was aiming for clear mocking style language. Points out the fact that Orlando and the biographer never have a relationship—makes it less biographical. The truth in Orlando is about sapphistry. Whimsy/truth/ humor are mixed together. Fadermen (critic) uses the whimsy to hide the lesbian content. The flip “puts a strain on contemporary language) (30). Knopp also thinks this is Woolf’s public gift to Vita.
Knopp refers to Orlando as the longest love letter in history. She asserts that the physical portions of their relationship were very short-lived but very intense. She thinks it cheapens their love for each other when it is called an affair. Woolf spoke like she thought of Orlando as frivolous and almost a joke. Though, she was notoriously self-deprecating about her writing, she was especially hard on this book. People close to Woolf, including Vanessa thought the book was a way of getting over Vita. Some people liked to use the term homoemotionality to desexualize their relationship. “Critical discomfort with the novel mirrors biographical discomfort with the relationship” (25). Critics consider it to closely related to Vita's life story and an interlude between more serious works. Leonard took it more seriously than Virginia. Vita was well aware of Virginia’s madness and was afraid to arouse strong feelings because of it. “It is a fire with which I have no desire to play” 26. According to the article Virginia was very jealous of other women in Vita’s life. So she suggests this novel was to build intimacy rather than to create distance between the two. Virginia was aiming for clear mocking style language. Points out the fact that Orlando and the biographer never have a relationship—makes it less biographical. The truth in Orlando is about sapphistry. Whimsy/truth/ humor are mixed together. Fadermen (critic) uses the whimsy to hide the lesbian content. The flip “puts a strain on contemporary language) (30). Knopp also thinks this is Woolf’s public gift to Vita.
Critical Article Summary
Cervetti, Nancy. "In the Breeches, Petticoats, and Pleasures of Orlando" Journal of Modern Literature 20 (1996): 165-75.
Leonard referred to Orlando as the most successful turning point in Virginia’s career, she did not quite agree. Woolf‘s goal for this novel to tell the truth, but also to be fantastic. Woolf wrote very specific parameters for the tone of her novel. "It has to be half laughing, half serious: with great splashes of exaggeration” (2) Mentions critics usually see book as a love letter or biography. Cervetti thinks it would be productive to stop using Woolf’s personal life in critiques of Orlando. She thinks Orlando is made to be so privileged and gifted in every way because it eliminates any struggle that might detract from gender issues. Idea that sexuality and gender as constants are played with throughout the text. There is also play involving costume, the external signifier of gender. She notes that Orlando was indifferent to her new sex until she decided to sail to England. Orlando doesn’t have any identity crises due to his/her sudden change.
But as a woman she refuses to stick to a single gender prototype and the constant flux. What she wears depends on her plan or what gender suitor she is hoping for that evening. Sometimes her gender identification can switch on a dime based on how people react to her. When she is walking with Nell, Nell clings to Orlando’s arm and acts submissive and girl-ish toward him. This instantly causes him to identify herself/ himself as a male. This is an example of how clothing defines the status/ gender/ character the person wearing them. Woolf plays with this concept constantly throughout the story. Costumes have so much power as signifiers, and change the way a character is treated by others. This emphasis on the importance of and constant play with wardrobe is not just a device used with Orlando. It is also utilized with Harry/ Harriet’s character as well as with Sasha
Leonard referred to Orlando as the most successful turning point in Virginia’s career, she did not quite agree. Woolf‘s goal for this novel to tell the truth, but also to be fantastic. Woolf wrote very specific parameters for the tone of her novel. "It has to be half laughing, half serious: with great splashes of exaggeration” (2) Mentions critics usually see book as a love letter or biography. Cervetti thinks it would be productive to stop using Woolf’s personal life in critiques of Orlando. She thinks Orlando is made to be so privileged and gifted in every way because it eliminates any struggle that might detract from gender issues. Idea that sexuality and gender as constants are played with throughout the text. There is also play involving costume, the external signifier of gender. She notes that Orlando was indifferent to her new sex until she decided to sail to England. Orlando doesn’t have any identity crises due to his/her sudden change.
But as a woman she refuses to stick to a single gender prototype and the constant flux. What she wears depends on her plan or what gender suitor she is hoping for that evening. Sometimes her gender identification can switch on a dime based on how people react to her. When she is walking with Nell, Nell clings to Orlando’s arm and acts submissive and girl-ish toward him. This instantly causes him to identify herself/ himself as a male. This is an example of how clothing defines the status/ gender/ character the person wearing them. Woolf plays with this concept constantly throughout the story. Costumes have so much power as signifiers, and change the way a character is treated by others. This emphasis on the importance of and constant play with wardrobe is not just a device used with Orlando. It is also utilized with Harry/ Harriet’s character as well as with Sasha
Critical Article Summary
Visvanathan, Susan. "Women and Work: From Housewifisation to Androgyny." Economic and Political Weekly 31.45/46 (1996): 3015+.
Visvanathan describes how notions of order have defined for women and suggest the the subduing of women's nature was the greatest expression of the hierarchy of gender. She describes the way being a housewife enslaves women. Their job is to creating new members of the labor force it is marked by love and responsibility. Men control property and children while women tend to them. Their labor does not have a value in the marketplace, so they are an invisible sex. Nice quote on dichotomy, “For Rosaldo, the two extremes of this position can be seen in the witch, who sleeps with the devil, and the nun who is the bride of God”. (3018) Women are being identified with nature and became associated with animality, just as the indigenous people were in the colonies. So they must be subjugated and controlled. The androgynous Orlando represents the way the woman figure is created passively by the language of men.
Visvanathan describes how notions of order have defined for women and suggest the the subduing of women's nature was the greatest expression of the hierarchy of gender. She describes the way being a housewife enslaves women. Their job is to creating new members of the labor force it is marked by love and responsibility. Men control property and children while women tend to them. Their labor does not have a value in the marketplace, so they are an invisible sex. Nice quote on dichotomy, “For Rosaldo, the two extremes of this position can be seen in the witch, who sleeps with the devil, and the nun who is the bride of God”. (3018) Women are being identified with nature and became associated with animality, just as the indigenous people were in the colonies. So they must be subjugated and controlled. The androgynous Orlando represents the way the woman figure is created passively by the language of men.
Critical Article Summary
Kaivola, Karen. "Revisiting Woolf's Representations of Androgyny: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Nation." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 18.2 (1999): 235-261. MLA International Bibliography
This is a deconstructive-type criticism. The author is very enthusiastic about Orlando, she says it is “hailed by feminists as one of the most important twentieth century meditations on gender” (235). She also suggest something I hadn’t read before about Woolf’s motives, that she intends to make the reader see how they are like Orlando (236) Androgyny was in vogue in the 60’s-70’s. It was a way to escape society’s imposed gender roles of postwar. But it lost its shine with feminist critics as they started to believe it being used as a device to glaze over these gender conflicts. It began feeding into patriarchal and hetero-normative ideas. She mentions Elaine Showalter, a critic of female literature who saw Orlando as weak. She argued that Woolf's interest in androgyny was “merely an evasive fantasy” (239) Kaivola does not agree.
She discusses the cultural nervousness that existed when someone’s identity was in question. This is because it is the signifiers that define identity that define one’s place in society’s hierarchy. This was a prolific idea in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She doesn’t think the androgyny concept should strictly discuss gender, believes it is more complex than that. She writes “identity is multiple, contradictory, relational, situational and fluid” (238). So to consider gender apart from other parts of identity like race is contradictory to the complicated social phenomenon. The androgen term is multifaceted. : At once it represents a hybrid ideal of both sexes; harmony between the sexes. But it can also have a repressive effect on homosexuality and embraces status quo. Kiavola calls Orlando a playful negative response to these cultural pressures to have a stable singular identity. The symbol of androgyny is used to try and overcome gender distance. But continued male dominance proves that it is impossible to transcend gender roles. Hierarchies based on difference are hard to overcome. She discusses “hybridity” a term first used in a biological context. Suggest this might be a better term and do a better job allowing tensions to exist naturally.
This is a deconstructive-type criticism. The author is very enthusiastic about Orlando, she says it is “hailed by feminists as one of the most important twentieth century meditations on gender” (235). She also suggest something I hadn’t read before about Woolf’s motives, that she intends to make the reader see how they are like Orlando (236) Androgyny was in vogue in the 60’s-70’s. It was a way to escape society’s imposed gender roles of postwar. But it lost its shine with feminist critics as they started to believe it being used as a device to glaze over these gender conflicts. It began feeding into patriarchal and hetero-normative ideas. She mentions Elaine Showalter, a critic of female literature who saw Orlando as weak. She argued that Woolf's interest in androgyny was “merely an evasive fantasy” (239) Kaivola does not agree.
She discusses the cultural nervousness that existed when someone’s identity was in question. This is because it is the signifiers that define identity that define one’s place in society’s hierarchy. This was a prolific idea in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She doesn’t think the androgyny concept should strictly discuss gender, believes it is more complex than that. She writes “identity is multiple, contradictory, relational, situational and fluid” (238). So to consider gender apart from other parts of identity like race is contradictory to the complicated social phenomenon. The androgen term is multifaceted. : At once it represents a hybrid ideal of both sexes; harmony between the sexes. But it can also have a repressive effect on homosexuality and embraces status quo. Kiavola calls Orlando a playful negative response to these cultural pressures to have a stable singular identity. The symbol of androgyny is used to try and overcome gender distance. But continued male dominance proves that it is impossible to transcend gender roles. Hierarchies based on difference are hard to overcome. She discusses “hybridity” a term first used in a biological context. Suggest this might be a better term and do a better job allowing tensions to exist naturally.
Sánchez-Pardo González, Esther. "'What Phantasmagoria the Mind Is”: Reading Virginia Woolf's Parody of Gender." Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos 26.2 (2004): 75-86.
This article is another example of deconstructive criticism. It intends to take apart the traditional gender binary. Sanchez believes Orlando is a parody of Victorian gender stereotypes the novel was meant to be protest. She thinks Woolf creates a “genderless being” to support her desires for a utopian society with complete gender neutrality. (75). Virginia and many critics did not view Orlando as important. The book sold many copies but she was never completely happy with it. Sanchez thinks the commentary on gender and sexuality in the book pushed the envelope at that time. Quentin Bell called it Virginia’s most sexual novel.
Esther believes the serious thought behind the androgynous identity in the novel undermines some of the whimsy Woolf intended. She questions whether Orlando’s androgyny is a perfect unity of the genders, whereby they neutralize each other, or whether one of the two is dominant. She decides that one is always dominate. She believes that Orlando’s genitalia does not change so she must have been a woman or at least a womanly man to start with. Esther believes the text suggest that Orlando has been masquerading all along. She is questions which gender is the disguise. Is the androgen structure in Orlando just a point of departure for exploration of the subject in other novels? This could have been triggered by “Vita’s two- faceted masculine image” (78) Believe clothing can conceal gender, attributes the idea of masquerade being inherent to femininity to Freud. She believes this reflects the world of Elizabethan theater when men disguised themselves to play women.
She also implies that otherness in Orlando is more than just gender, it is a matter of nation and race as well. When it’s the captain’s treatment of Orlando that causes her to think about the implications of her new sex Esther believe this is an example of men defining femininity. Although the crinoline is oppressive it is a sexual symbol, we see this when the crinoline is depicted in the novel as blushing at Orlando’s husband. Love becomes androgynous with descriptions of gender shifts of Sasha and Harriet. This enigma might be a way to avoid censorship of homosexual eroticism. Woolf wants to transcend gender difference as well as mock constructions of femininity. Orlando’s eventual adherence shows it’s impossible to transcend. Androgyny does not mean just one thing its meanings are many and constantly shifting. Gender in the book is a “cultural process that must be learned.” Womanhood cannot be accurately represented as they have been excluded from discourse. Metaphor that the place of women as always been occupied by men. She suggests Woolf might mask homosexuality to represent how it has had to disguise itself through history.
This article is another example of deconstructive criticism. It intends to take apart the traditional gender binary. Sanchez believes Orlando is a parody of Victorian gender stereotypes the novel was meant to be protest. She thinks Woolf creates a “genderless being” to support her desires for a utopian society with complete gender neutrality. (75). Virginia and many critics did not view Orlando as important. The book sold many copies but she was never completely happy with it. Sanchez thinks the commentary on gender and sexuality in the book pushed the envelope at that time. Quentin Bell called it Virginia’s most sexual novel.
Esther believes the serious thought behind the androgynous identity in the novel undermines some of the whimsy Woolf intended. She questions whether Orlando’s androgyny is a perfect unity of the genders, whereby they neutralize each other, or whether one of the two is dominant. She decides that one is always dominate. She believes that Orlando’s genitalia does not change so she must have been a woman or at least a womanly man to start with. Esther believes the text suggest that Orlando has been masquerading all along. She is questions which gender is the disguise. Is the androgen structure in Orlando just a point of departure for exploration of the subject in other novels? This could have been triggered by “Vita’s two- faceted masculine image” (78) Believe clothing can conceal gender, attributes the idea of masquerade being inherent to femininity to Freud. She believes this reflects the world of Elizabethan theater when men disguised themselves to play women.
She also implies that otherness in Orlando is more than just gender, it is a matter of nation and race as well. When it’s the captain’s treatment of Orlando that causes her to think about the implications of her new sex Esther believe this is an example of men defining femininity. Although the crinoline is oppressive it is a sexual symbol, we see this when the crinoline is depicted in the novel as blushing at Orlando’s husband. Love becomes androgynous with descriptions of gender shifts of Sasha and Harriet. This enigma might be a way to avoid censorship of homosexual eroticism. Woolf wants to transcend gender difference as well as mock constructions of femininity. Orlando’s eventual adherence shows it’s impossible to transcend. Androgyny does not mean just one thing its meanings are many and constantly shifting. Gender in the book is a “cultural process that must be learned.” Womanhood cannot be accurately represented as they have been excluded from discourse. Metaphor that the place of women as always been occupied by men. She suggests Woolf might mask homosexuality to represent how it has had to disguise itself through history.
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