ABSTRACT
Empowered by the expressions of their own bodies, these female characters constituted in modernist fiction become characters that resist and transform their own design. However, these particular female characters artistic women in modernist fiction identified through case studies become more powerful than the authors who write them because they transcend their own constructedness by speaking as the subjects of their own narration. Moreover, this chapter demonstrates how Woolf's theory of "myriad-mindedness" outlined in A Room of One's Own comes to life in Orlando as Woolf draws the character Orlando from her real-life relationship with Vita Sackville-West. It argues for a reading of "The Oak Tree" and Orlando as literary products of sublimated sexual desire between women. The chapter demonstrates how the juxtaposition of these female figures embodies Yeats' increasing interest in imagining spaces for women's desire and pleasure.
