Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

156
Virginia Woolf
artifi ce of gender” (Gilbert 1993: xvii). Again, the Victorian belief in
one essential self is targeted by Woolf and by Orlando’s biographer in
diff erent but converging ways.
In her novels, Woolf plays with the notion of multiple selves inhabiting
the traditionally unifi ed, singular self. For example, in Mrs Dalloway,
Clarissa contemplates her identity while looking in the mirror,
Th at was her self—pointed; dart-like; defi nite. Th at was
her self when some eff ort, some call on her to be her self,
drew the parts together, she alone knew how diff erent, how
incompatible and composed so for the world only into one
center, one diamond. (32)
Such a consideration of the existence of parts of a self refers once
again to the Bergsonian concept of durée, the psychological time that
the self inhabits. Yet in Orlando, a “miraculous” sex change is coupled
with time travel to achieve the unquestionably fantastic nod toward
androgyny. Th e biographer wryly narrates what could be conceived
otherwise as a life-shattering fi nding for the protagonist,
Orlando looked himself up and down in a looking-glass, without
showing any signs of discomposure, and went, presumably,
to his bath. [ . . . ] Orlando had become a woman—there is
no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained
precisely as he had been. Th e change of sex, though it altered
their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. (98)
Th e purposeful use of “their” in the last sentence substitutes the
arbitrary use of the pronouns “he/his” and “she/her” in a society that
endorses the “artifi ce” of gender. If, in Bergsonian terms, the coupling
of intellect (as reason) and perceptive intuition of consciousness (as
exercised in psychological time) account for the existence of diff erent
selves in one individual that “slide” into one another as time progresses,
the sex change of the main character in Orlando could be interpreted
as yet another kind of sliding. As the biographer observers, quite
“inappropriately” for the genre,
Diff erent though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human
being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place and