Racial Alterity as a Grounding for Androgynous Subjectivity: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This article argues that for Virginia Woolf, racial alterity or the trope of race operates as a grounding for imagining androgynous subjectivity. In doing this, I will first sketch out how the author’s preoccupation with the question of race came into contact with the gender issues that she saw as important to address in order to tackle the oppressive, masculinist literary climate of early twentieth-century England. I will then turn to examine how Woolf’s construction of race as a prerequisite for androgyneity is ultimately an impossible task, by a close reading of Orlando: A Biography, specifically, the title character Orlando’s relationships with the unnamed dead Moor, his Russian lover, Sasha, and the Turkish gypsy named Rustum, respectively. Although the concept of androgyneity, as many Woolf critics contend, was intended by Woolf as a means to authorize herself as an aspiring woman writer, a rendering of race as a prerequisite for androgyneity is a task doomed to fail, precisely because identity itself is the contentious space where its normalized and subversive repetitions form and deform each other in constant conflict and negotiation with one another, almost always risking the reinforcement of gender binarism and normative sexuality.
Abstract
This article argues that for Virginia Woolf, racial alterity or the trope of race operates as a grounding for imagining androgynous subjectivity. In doing this, I will first sketch out how the author’s preoccupation with the question of race came into contact with the gender issues that she saw as important to address in order to tackle the oppressive, masculinist literary climate of early twentieth-century England. I will then turn to examine how Woolf’s construction of race as a prerequisite for androgyneity is ultimately an impossible task, by a close reading of Orlando: A Biography, specifically, the title character Orlando’s relationships with the unnamed dead Moor, his Russian lover, Sasha, and the Turkish gypsy named Rustum, respectively. Although the concept of androgyneity, as many Woolf critics contend, was intended by Woolf as a means to authorize herself as an aspiring woman writer, a rendering of race as a prerequisite for androgyneity is a task doomed to fail, precisely because identity itself is the contentious space where its normalized and subversive repetitions form and deform each other in constant conflict and negotiation with one another, almost always risking the reinforcement of gender binarism and normative sexuality.
참고문헌 (26)
- Bardi, Abby, "In Company of a Gypsy: The ‘Gypsy’ as Trope in Woolf and Bronte", Critical Survey, 19(1), pp.41~49 (2007)
- Bazin, Nancy Topping, "Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision" (1973), Rutgers UP
- Bhabha, Homi K., "The Location of Culture" (2004), Routledge
- Burns, Christy L., "Re-Dressing Feminist Identities: Tensions between Essential and Constructed Selves in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando", Twentieth Century Literature, 40(3), pp.342~364 (1994)
- Farwell, Marilyn R., "Virginia Woolf and Androgyny", Contemporary Literature, 16(4), pp.433~451 (1975)
- Froula, Christina, "Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity" (2005), Columbia UP
- Goldman, Jane, "Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf" (2006), Cambridge UP
- Kaivola, Karen, "Revisiting Woolf’s Representations of Androgyny: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Nation", Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 18(2), pp.235~261 (1999)
- Kaplan, Caren, "Questions of Travel" (1996), Duke UP
- Kristeva, Julia, "Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art" (1980), Columbia UP
- Lee, Hermione, "Virginia Woolf" (1999), Vintage Book
- Lovejoy, Laura, "The Bestial Feminine in Finnegan’s Wake", Humanities, 6, pp.1~15 (2017)
- Rado, Lisa, "The Modern Androgyne Imagination: A Failed Sublime" (2000), UP of Virginia
- Sackville-West, Vita, "Passenger to Teheran" (1927), George H
- Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, "Tendencies" (1993), Duke UP
- Seshagiri, Urmila, "Race and the Modernist Imagination" (2010), Cornell UP
- Snaith, Anna, "Virginia Woolf in Context", pp.206~218 (2012), Cambridge UP
- Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, "Outside in the Teaching Machine", pp.179~200 (1993), Routledge
- Torgovnick, Marianna, "Gone Primitive" (1991), U of Chicago P
- Woolf, Virginia, "The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. III: 1925-30" (1981), Harcourt Brace
- Woolf, Virginia, "Jacob’s Room" (2009), Oxford UP
- Woolf, Virginia, "The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol III: 1923-1928" (1980), Harvest
- Woolf, Virginia, "Orlando: A Biography" (2006), Harcourt
- Woolf, Virginia, "A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909" (1909), Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
- Woolf, Virginia, "A Room of One’s Own and Three Guinea" (2000), Oxford UP
- Woolf, Virginia, "Three Guineas" (2006), Hartcourt