April 30, 2008
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Maybe if I submit my Final Research paper like this, my professor won't find out how convoluted and terrible it is.
Virginia Woolf and Gender: Her Doubts about the Differences
Much of Virginia Woolf’s writing takes time to explore the notions of sex, gender, and the differences between men and women. Literary critics across the world have taken the time to interpret Woolf’s words about gender, with respect to her novel Orlando. However, few critics take the time to look at Virginia Woolf’s relatively short work, The Mark on the Wall. However, between Orlando and The Mark on the Wall, Woolf manages to point out the difficulties of female gender definition in a male-defined society.
Both works introduce, at one point or another, the notion that men, due to the patriarchal nature of society, define what makes a woman is. Mark does so by questioning “what takes the place of those…real standard things? Men, perhaps, should you be a woman” (Norton 2084). Similarly, Orlando’s role as female is defined “once [she] set foot on English soil… [she would] never be able to crack a man over the head…All [she] can do, once [she sets] foot on English soil, is to pour out tea, and ask [her] lords how they like it” (Orlando, 158). In other words, once Orlando returned to a patriarchal society – she had lived with gypsies since becoming a woman – she was suddenly denied actions that she had performed as a man. Yet her transformation had no bearing on who Orlando was, so long as she did not live in a male governed society. As the biographer says, immediately following her transformation, “Orlando had become a woman – there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained the same. The change in sex… did nothing whatever to alter their identity” (Orlando, 138).
It is relevant, that as Mark continues, the speaker questions the need to discover what the mark on the wall is – the masculine desire to define the world – by questioning the value of knowing. “What should I gain? – Knowledge?...what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits?” (Norton, 2085). Thus, in Mark, the speaker challenges the value of knowledge put forth by men. She states, “the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind grows.” The speaker’s comparison of the male definition of society to superstition is echoed in the falseness of gender distinction in Orlando, and perhaps, had Orlando never returned to England, she may never have discovered any changes in herself at all; the definition of male or female would have remained irrelevant.
Many feminists take the belief that gender – the psychological differences between male and female – is “a repeated performance of socially established meanings” (Watkins, Online). “’Sex’ [is] an artifice, a fiction, constructed by ideologies of gender which impose a biological explanation of gender in order to regulate it” (Watkins, Online). Thus, there exists the idea that, although there is a physical difference between male and female – and in Orlando’s body – there should be none in her mind. That is, unless she chooses to perform as a female or a male. “Woolf’s understanding of gender as performance which, rather than arising from biology actually creates a working version of biological sex for the performer, is apparent in…Orlando” (Watkins, Online). It calls to mind that, after being returned to England for some time, “a certain change was visible in Orlando, which is to be found even in her face. If we compare a picture of Orlando as a man with…Orlando as a woman…there are certain changes” (Orlando, 188).
Yet this contradicts Woolf’s disparagement of the superstitious claims of educated men; they dictate that there are differences between men and women, and they are proved by the changes that occur in Orlando once she becomes a woman. However, Woolf pushes through this contradiction:
The change of clothes had, some philosophers will say, much to do with [the change in Orlando]. Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have…more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us. For example, when Captain Bartolus saw Orlando’s skirt, he [treated her like a woman]. These compliments would certainly not have been paid had her skirts…been… breeches. (Orlando, 187)
Thus, it was the male view and treatment of her that inspired Orlando to perform the female gender, rather than an actual difference in herself. The speaker echoes the power of being seen by others in Mark: “Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears[;] the [self-perceived] figure…is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people…As we face each other…we are looking into the mirror” (Norton, 2084). In other words, our identities are formed in how we are seen – in a male world - which is certainly the case for Orlando.
However, there are conceptions of a world that is not intrinsically male, a world that might allow gender distinctions to fall away. In coming back to the speaker’s musings on knowledge and learned men in Mark, the speaker drifts from devaluing male “standard real things”, into a daydream about “a very pleasant world” (Norton, 2085) – a better one than her own. Lush with images of nature and feminine stillness, the world pictured is a quiet world, devoid of learned men, “a world which one could slice with one’s thought as a fish slices the water with his fin,” (Norton, 2085). This image is particularly striking. It appears that she is using the image to convey not only how she wishes the world were approached, but also how it is not; when a fish’s fin slices the water, the trail it leaves is not permanent. It has left no definitive mark on how one observes the world. In contrast, it seems that learned men effectively compartmentalize the world into knowledge, with the use of such things as encyclopaedias or records of social hierarchy. Thus a feminine world, or feminine view of gender would not leave a change in the one viewed.
What is further interesting to note, is that although women find themselves defined by male society, men seem not to share the opposite burden of being defined by women. The opening sentence of Orlando succinctly establishes that “he – for there could be doubt of his sex” was born male, and his identity, up until becoming a woman, is undisputed. As member of the male sex, Orlando enjoyed the power of The Mark on the Wall’s “learned men” (Norton, 2085), and, as the speaker describes, “the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard.” Much of the gender confusion in Orlando only comes about once she is a woman. As a man, Orlando does not ask the same questions she asks herself as a woman, because as a man she creates the rules. Once she has become a woman, her thoughts follow the same process of the unknown speaker; Orlando asks herself “must I then begin to respect the opinion of the other sex, however monstrous I think it?” (Orlando, 156) and concludes that as a woman, indeed, she must start taking into account what men think of her. That she would start paying attention to “the opinion of the other sex” implies that as a man, Orlando did not give a thought to the opinion of women; she was free of the complications of gender identity. Karen Kaviola’s article on gender in Orlando explains this disparity, by mentioning the “history of incorporating the (female) other into the (male) self.” She argues that Orlando’s character takes on a certain androgyny- lacking a distinction between either sex- yet points out that “gender distinctions are maintained even as they intermix, implying fundamental differences that alternate but cannot be transcended or synthesized” (Kaviola, Online). This is because this form of androgyny “[depends] upon patriarchal ideas of gender difference” (Ibid.)
In both Orlando and The Mark on the Wall, Woolf begins her thoughts on gender distinction by ignoring them; “let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can” (Orlando, 139), is the biographer’s response to Orlando’s change of sex. Similarly, Mark’s speaker initially excuses herself from “saying…[what] are men and women, or whether there are such things” (Norton, 2083. However, the concept of gender in Orlando does not go unexplored – the perfect transition from male to female cannot be maintained, even by refusing to acknowledge it. As Susan Watkins puts it “the [biographer] finally indicates a sense of bafflement at the difficult issue[ of understanding gender] and hastily returns to the narrative proper: ‘Whether, then, Orlando was most man or woman, it is difficult to say and cannot now be decided.’” This ambivalence, rather than closing the subject of gender, only opens it up for further speculation; why is it too difficult to tell? Only pages before, the biographer “[stated] the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since” (Orlando, 139).
Various critics often quote “Orlando showed no such signs of perturbation [upon changing from one gender to the other]” (Orlando, 139), and stop there. One particular critic claims that the work “shakes notions of sexual identity (since Orlando goes on perfectly unperturbed from being a man to a woman)” (Cambridge, 267). The implication is that Orlando has taken down the patriarchal notions of gender rather decisively, but this is not the case. Rather, Woolf has illustrated, as argued above by Kaviola, that Orlando’s androgyny cannot defy male definition, because even that lack of gender is defined by men. Mark’s speaker best reveals the impossibility of defying a patriarchal society. Even nature submits to the will of learned men; “Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you” (Norton, 2086). If Nature, here given a female pronoun and undoubtedly the most powerful feminine thing, cannot stand against patriarchal dictation, “who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker’s Table of Precedency? …. Everyone follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom” (Norton, 2086). Such it is that the feminine must follow the masculine.
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