Failure of Androgyny in Woolf's Orlando
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Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Abstract
Critics like Michael Rosenthal agree that Orlando offers a fictional ideal
embodiment of the androgyny that Woolf exalts in A Room of One’s Own. However,
this research argues that Woolf actually relies on stereotypical gender differences to
critique the pitfalls of gender and sexual conditioning in Orlando, which reveals
Woolf’s serious doubt about the potentiality of her own proposed state of androgyny.
Orlando is unable to reach the ideal state of mental androgyny that Woolf exalts in A
Room of One’s Own because of cultural and social conditioning. Pressures and
expectations, both inner and outer, prevent Orlando from developing the androgynous
mind that Woolf idealizes in A Room of One’s Own. In Orlando, Woolf does not
depict an ideal androgyny but actually shows why androgyny is impossible