Reading Orlando: Gender Queerness Across Time

At night: treading water in an existential sea of queerness. Idly lifting Woolf’s Orlando from the shelf. Gender across time, binary across time, colonialism across time; wealth, aristocracy. A horrific opening scene where Orlando is batting with a sword at a “Moore’s” head hung from the attic rafter, for play. The text as violent and disembodied as it sounds. Orlando’s teeth in this scene are described as “perfect white almonds.” Race and gender and class and ability. It is never a question of one of these forces, but their entanglements. How can Woolf be so sensitive to the interior life of a white trans character, and so thoroughly driven by colonial empire? As easily as the sun slipping down, the moon rising up. Whiteness is the puppeteer in such texts. Put Orlando down, read it later.

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In June, to the hair salon. Cut the hair, scissor-slice the lengths of it. Waving strands that have held pandemic, that held a president and his hirelings, that are turning white, one by one. An elfish cut, it looks also like Nero. Like someone history whispers about.

That was then.

Now, standing in a house under the loblolly pines in North Carolina: trim with scissors at the bathroom sink, mirror in one hand, back to the sink. Clip it short across the neck. Let it curl and wave. Let it be both the girl and the boy. Let it boychik, girlboy, Orlando. Let it Vita and Virginia. Let it Amelia Earhart. Let it Wright brother. Let it fly down the sandy dune away from Kitty Hawk. Let it lift by the ears. Let it dance in the speakeasy. Let nothing prohibit. 

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Walking around the house at night with a glass of red wine. A too-sweet California Zinfandel, $12.99. Looking for a book. It could be any night. It happens to be the night before a second mammogram, to look more closely at a lump on my left side. The lump: smooth sides, shaped like an almond, continuous with the grain of the chest tissue (the doctor: “good characteristics”). Probably nothing. Hurts monthly with “water weight” (the doctor: “perfectly normal”). Let’s measure it again in six months. A little more wine. A little more Vita & Virginia tonight. (Must read Orlando with Rhett soon).

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The knife is transformation—for a poem, for a body. I love revision’s knife. But I shrink from medical trauma, inherited from my mother: her mother dying in a hospital from Hodgkin’s lymphoma, told her mother was fine, not at all sick. With this history living in my cells, I avoid and deny the idea of drainage ports in my chest, and binding wraps, and possible infection, even while adoring my friend’s new chest, his nipples flat against his t-shirt. I have looked at double mastectomy scars differently, at different times in my life—what a gift, I have thought, those curving scars.

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Rhett is coming over for a day visit to watch Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I wake at 6:30, make biscuits. As I cut the cold butter into the flour, I think about the mythic excellence of my mother’s dough cutter, with the red wooden handle, flecking paint. I bake half of the biscuits, spread them while hot with strawberry jam and butter, drop them in my children’s mouths before school. I save a daisy of unbaked biscuits on a floured plate—five circles around a center—cover with plastic wrap, place in the fridge for when Rhett arrives.

Rhett and I sit on the couch with tea and coffee, my writing board between us to hold our coffee and ginger peach tea. We begin the film, watch the sea. Watch subtitles. Watch women watching women. Women by the fire, reading to each other of Orpheus’s backward glance. Women glancing at each other.

Rhett leans her head on my shoulder; I lean my head on hers.

I have seen the film once before. This time, I am interested in how Marianne, the painter, carries her body like a man. How Marianne leans against the fireplace, deep in thought, wineglass in hand. Marianne smoking her pipe. Marianne painting a brown background wash on her canvas before painting Heloise. Marianne as Orpheus, Marianne glancing back.

In this wind and sea and fire-crackling drenched film, the women are abandoned to be fully themselves for a set period of time. They take their own advice. They show each other love. They work. They cook for each other. They birth control. They are queerly gendered meaning: they live as themselves.

Before Rhett goes, she hands me a hummus and veggie sandwich she made for my lunch.

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What you need to know about Orlando is that Woolf wrote it about her lover, Vita Sackville-West. Socialite. Aristocrat. Writer. Gardener. Dog lover. Traveler. About Vita’s magnificent life and history, about Vita’s family home Knole, which Vita could not inherit because she was a daughter and not a son. “A Biography” is plainly there, on the cover of Orlando. The photograph of Orlando included in the text, of Orlando in contemporary times (Orlando is transtemporal, transexual—trans from the Latin meaning across, beyond, through), is a photograph of Vita herself.

Orlando was published on October 11, and both Virginia and Vita thought their lives might be over after that date. Instead, Orlando sold better than any other book by Woolf. Orlando is a fiction. Orlando is a real person who took Woolf to bed (for her first orgasm) and was caught by the police cross-dressing as a man with her lover Violet in a foreign city. Tenderness, love, time, wealth, travel, writing and gender are the subjects of Orlando. Also Vita’s perfect legs, which Woolf mentions more than once, and compares them with a racehorse or a stag or a hunter-goddess, striding with eleven elkhounds through her ancestral woods.

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The first time I read Orlando, I am a graduate student at Georgetown. I am gender conforming, and suppose I am straight. I am pregnant, my testosterone levels gently rising. Orlando, as a textual encounter, blows the top off my head. Orlando is genderqueer time. It is queerness itself. It is better than anything I imagined. Orlando does not know herself, as I do not know myself:

“’Heavens!’ Orlando wonders, ‘what fools they make of us—what fools we are!’ And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being she seemed to vacillate; she was a man; she was a woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in.”

I wonder that the book exists. Or that we ever stop talking about Orlando. Autumn geese flew overhead, and honked Orlando.

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Orlando offers us a meditation on the oddness and arbitrariness of gendered social norms—from what a person wears, to who they pursue in love, to inheritance and property, to participation in war, childbirth.

My preference in clothing sides on the masculine side, though I consider my choices neutral: cotton, denim and corduroy; sweaters, trousers, boots, sneakers. But my body curves into the world, loves softness, knits, plush, flannel, blanket scarves—a generously cuffed, champagne-colored robe that I joke is my work-at-home uniform. Orlando, similarly, spends her morning “in a China robe of ambiguous gender among her books.” I prefer “soft pants” to “hard pants”—like Orlando who dressed “in those Turkish coats and trousers which can be indifferently worn by either sex”—and tend to walk like my military father. Not walk at all, in other words, but stride just short of a march, like some captain with insignia pinned to their chest.

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Rhett comes over for a sleepover, and we stay up watching the film Vita & Virginia. There are no dances in the film—but Rhett tells me about her Cotillion days. The antiquated etiquette. The terrible dance. Dance cards. A boy who chose and was chosen last. All within the framework of the white South. Listening to Rhett, I remember the dances of my youth—held in our church, built by a shipbuilder—long, ugly, ark-like, unfloatable, Presbyterian. Line and square dancing was encouraged as a moral and gendered activity. Mrs. Hines was our caller. But there were never enough boys, so something queer had to happen: someone made cardboard signs with MAN printed on them, hung them on string. We would don a MAN card to dance with our friends. I remember my best friend Anna, gaily dancing in her MAN placard—underarm, across, turn, promenade.

A few years later, at my sister’s wedding, the groomsman I was assigned dutifully asked me to waltz, and then complained when I led. You are not supposed to lead, he whispered, annoyed. But I came to dancing this way naturally, by instinct.

::

The moon has a way of slipping in, touching everything, even during a solar eclipse. It is a wet summer in North Carolina, 2014. My partner takes the day off work, drives to Georgia to witness the full solar eclipse. He parks by a pond somewhere to watch the sky darken. In Durham, tiny moons print themselves on our wooden porch, the light shaped as it falls through the tree’s leaves. Our kindergartner stands with a school-contraption in the lower field with their classmates, catching the eclipsing light on a paper plate, marveling. I do not go to Georgia because someone must pick up our child from school. That is my reasoning, anyway. But I remember not wanting to go, already feeling eclipsed, big with our second child. This was what it was like, when I was gender conforming. I was the moon to my partner’s sun. I was the lower half of the binary. I caught the stray ends, all of them. I was the net.

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My favorite moment in Vita & Virginia—that Hollywoodized, American version of their British lives, Vita impossibly small and fey—is when Leonard and Virginia and Vita and Harold travel by train to see the complete solar eclipse together. The two hetero dyads are eclipsed in this scene by the queerness of the two women, watching the darkening eclipse and themselves.

There are always other ways of seeing each other, particularly past and through gender. Wrote Vita of Virginia: “The only time I ever thought of Virginia as being eclipsed was when the sun himself shared her darkening, and I saw her standing wraithlike on a Yorkshire moor while the shadow swept onwards towards totality.”

To be seen as only rivalled by the sun. It takes someone to see you.

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From a genderqueer memoir I have abandoned, two notes on gender euphoria, relevant to what Orlando discovers:

The day I shortened my name—a thought that came to me on a wingbeat—I experienced gender euphoria for the first time. For the first time, I felt like the self I had become. I felt like a twice-evolved animal. Like a chick, hatched from its egg, that then takes off its chicken suit. Freedom.

I pulled a white Oxford shirt from my closet this week, buttoned up. Felt like myself. Felt so deeply like myself, that the feeling went down to my core. Felt as though my outside and my inside reflected each other, were each other. I was boygirl, genderqueer me. The power of the right kind of cloth, buttons. Like hermit crabs on a beach, we are each turning over shells, finding the one that fits, adjusting to our growth, sometimes lured by a glossy finish or tint of blue only to realize that fit—feel—is everything.

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Gender and sexuality. Our understanding of ability and mental health and chronic pain, neurodivergence. The concepts slip around and through each other, like the moon during a solar eclipse, like Vita and Virginia, like Red and Blue in This Is How You Lose the Time War. (In this lyrical, epistolary novella taking place between two cyborg femmes on opposing sides, one of them confesses to the other: “I want to be a context for you, and you for me.”) Our context is change and evolution, in and through and across time. Change has always been the only context for each of us. Red and Blue travel up and down the hanging braid of time, towards and away from each other.

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In the wake and final waves of a migraine—Woolf suffered them, too—everything is larger: light, sound, objects. Yet can mean “still” as in continuing, lingering. I continue to linger with Vita and Virginia in my thoughts. Vita’s legs, Vita’s height—over 6’. Woolf, at 5’8”, was not a short woman herself. Yet (in the sense of “but,” in the sense of a turn), Vita’s height lent itself to dressing as a man—lean and tall, striding. What films and popular narratives want to shrink and dress, dollishly, in nightgowns, both Vita and Virginia break out of, break asunder. Vita as a traveling, human body and muse, Virginia as a writer whose language lived at the edge of sound and consciousness. Avant-garde, a military term, means “at the front.” I’ve heard poetry teachers say military strategy and science (“experimental”) are incorrect metaphors by which to name a newness in language. But Vita and Virginia were Gods, Generals, Scientists. You cannot make them small, reduce their statures. There is something other about them. Like Gertrude Stein, they carry the poetic substance of mountains.

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Writes Woolf of Orlando: “His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace.”

Orlando is trans, is inter, is between. Liminal personhood, being. Existing in and slightly outside several gendered spaces at once. Androgeny. Genderqueer. Classifiable as both/and, if you are a person who insists on classification. Not only fey in body, queer in spirit of presentation, but fey of time, queer of chronology, existing outside of straight calendars.

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I am walking in Philadelphia, at a writer’s conference. I’m dressed in jeans, sneakers, a plaid Dickie’s jacket with a grey knit hood. The hood is pulled up, my short hair barely showing. I’m wearing a mask. It’s lightly raining, and I’m street walking with that fast, firm gait that comes so easily among pavement and buildings. “Hey lady,” says a man, approaching me. I keep walking, but find myself surprised by the “hey lady.” I’ve never been less like one. I’m entirely covered in gender ambiguous clothing. I’m wearing a sports top with good compression. I’m hooded, masked. I could be Robin Hood. I could be anyone. Yet I am a lady in a stranger’s gender projection. Yet something has reached across between the space between us, and the person I do not pause to call a man does not pause to call me lady.

I am thinking that I need to invest in more pauses in my life.

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Time is a thing of magic and—somehow—also doldrum in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. You begin to see how much death makes a life mean—that death is also a life event. That death is also a transition, a beginning—as the tarot Death card reminds us.

When Orlando experiences time, she is physically struck by the clock’s hour chiming. Time is a violence, something our hero must recover from, having encountered time’s blow.

But the bell that chimes—for Orlando and for you—is also the self.

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The poet Linda Gregg wrote that “it is possible to be with someone who is gone.”

Books make it possible for someone to speak to you across a century of time (or more). Such as when Virginia Woolf wrote of Orlando: “—he was a woman,” and I gasped in admiration.

Missives from Woolf make the sound of a letter falling through the flap of the mail slot, landing on the entry floor with the soft drop of paper’s weight. The dog barks.

I look up, and see Woolf and Orlando there.

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“Orlando had become a woman—there was no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same.”

Woolf resists the immediate pronoun shift for Orlando. When Woolf moves into she/her pronouns, Woolf nods to “convention’s sake.” Rather than a stress, there is an unstress, a de-stress at Orlando’s grammatical transformation.

Woolf takes the gendered pressure away not by ignoring gender, but by wading into it.

In the center of Orlando’s transformation: they.

At this moment, Orlando is a grammatical unity of memory and personhood and history, a both/and.

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Woolf’s text recounts:

The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at all. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of 30; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.

I love this moment in Orlando, because it represents one way it is possible for change to be embodied in the body: painlessly, completely.

Others make complicated what is simple.

What you thought was dramatic and revelatory was actually the self you have been all along. All these years, you have been carrying the egg of your identity inside you, like the phoenix carries itself.

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Orlando teaches me—as Emily Dickinson teaches me—that I can choose not to choose.

That life is a list of variants, fluid as the sea.