ABSTRACT
The opening quotations to this chapter illustrate something of the politics of feminism. Through Orlando’s change of sex Woolf brings ‘to the surface our false associations … [S]he de-natures our assumptions about gender, about nature and the natural’ (Beer, 1997: 90). Her resolution is one of androgyny in which the identities of Orlando as man and woman are encompassed together. Indeed, it is not until Orlando looks into the mirror and sees the physiological changes in his body that he realises that he has become she. As we can see through the sanguine way in which Orlando views the changed body in the mirror, Woolf ’s androgynous subject is one whose mind is ‘calm, stable, unimpeded by consciousness of sex’ (Showalter, 1978: 289). Indeed, Woolf (2000: 88) reflects on the ways in which others might respond to these changes in Orlando by commenting ‘let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can’.
