Spatial Thinking about Orlando and Mimesis
As I re-read (re-heard) Orlando this time, I found myself focusing on how much the novel is a meditation/ reverie on identity—how identity is made through imagination, by language, by social and historical constructs. The malleability of the body seems like a metaphor for the transformative process of identity formation, both affected if not determined by the expectations of the Spirit of the Age. As I read McDowell in particular, I began to understand something crucial about how nature works into this convergence, Nature, like the self, seems like a given, a ground, but like the self it is in continuous process of being created/ re-created, largely through the uses of imagination, especially through language and literature. That is why Nick Greene’s name is what it is: “Green in nature is one thing, green[e] in literature another” (14). Woolf’s assertion that “Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. The shade of green Orlando now saw spoiled his rhyme and split his meter” (14) goes against conventional mimetic theory where Greene mirrors green. Instead green interrupts Greene’s autonomy. For Woolf, literature is not a mirror that reflects nature but its own system of meaning, which is distracted by attempts at mimetic fidelity. As the interlocutor of the metaphorphosizing institution of Brit Lit, (he moves from being a poet to being a critic and an academic) Greene changes with the ages much as the weather and flora do.
This cracking of the mirror phase in the relation between nature and literature is connected to the way that gender and sexuality are treated in the novel, for here too the expected correspondence doesn’t hold: Orlando’s sex is only sometimes reflected in her gender. We are used to the idea that gender is socially constructed and its manifestations and fashions change with the culture and the age; it is much more radical to assert that sex also responds to cultural imperatives. The idea that sex changes is akin to the idea that nature changes; both evolve in mysterious synchronicity with the Zietgeist. The fact that nature is so often symbolically gendered female only adds to this correspondence.
In recognizing this plasticity, Woolf anticipates some crucial aspects of Foucault— particularly the idea that the body and sexuality are also socially constructed.
NOTES ON CRITICS
MCDOWELL
4 “soci-spatial practices…define spaces” -- Is this true of Knole; it seems to be the one place that stays always the same. London continually evolves
7 “Gender may be seen from two perspectives: ‘either as symbolic construction or as a social relationship” -- to what degree is this true of Orlando? It seems to work with Orlando and Ma..
10 “protest against the available fiction of female becoming”
12 separate spheres—to what degree do we see this in O? clear that gender controls what spaces O can be in.
17 is O ever subject to the domestic gender regime?
18 people take pleasure in their subject position… true of O in 19th C
22 Gender is constructed and maintained through discourse and everyday actions.
23 gender already dichotomized… (O’s dilemma, the two options don’t encompass her) challenge hegemonic norms by subversive performances. Exactly O
34 Bodies much more fluid and flexible..
38 transformation of intimacy
41 hexis—inscription of social world on the body
45 land as female
46 idea of one-sex (inverted)
49 natural body doen’t exit.
51 both men and women subject disciplinary regimes.
54 gender performance
55 confusion of categories
FOUCAULT on Heterotopias
Obsessive dread of 19thcà history ; out cent is age of simulataneous juxtaposition. Net that creates its own muddle. Take what has been sequenced chronologically and link them spatially
353 is oak tree and hill Orlando’s sacred space of crisis? Is time with gypises? Heterotopia of the cemeteryà is Knole a heterotopia?
354 heterotopia has power of juxtaposing in a single real place diff spaces and locations that are incompatible—certainly true of Knole, especially at the end of the book. The way that the House is creatd as a timeless place that opens out also into the space of the city makes the House a metaphor or Orlando herself who similarly occupies many times and spaces. Garden is oldest example. GARDEN ALSO HOLDS NAVEL OF THE WORLD—AS O TRIES TO FIND true, capitain self (227). Garden metaphor linked to carpet (threads of association)
Heterochronism.
355 temporary celebratory heterotopias. Fairs, empty zones (The Great Frost)
Beginning to see whole book as set of vacillations from the heterotopia which is home. Knole, the great house to other heterotopias: Home :: Great frost :: home :: Constantinople :::Gipsies ::ship voyage :::Home :: London ::Home :: London ::Home
HANKINS
182 O is a lesbian feminist novel, in which Woolf attempts to seduce/teach Vita the importance of feminism.
183 spotlight various strategies for avoiding censor
184 heterosexual love continually interrupted throughout the book
186 husbands as censors (letter inside a letter)
191 narrator ostensibly male but also female in drag – CUSTOMS HOUSE
197 V as a coded signal btw V & V wild goose: lesbian elopement proposal
Student Insights
SHARON
Mirror breaking in Oà QE (p. 20) Is it a symbol of her broken heart? I can’t help but also read this as having to do with mimeticism—with a certain loss of epistemological virginity, a rejection of the simple idea that art imitates reality. When art is used as a mirror, it reveals betrayal: the promiscuity of a universe that reveals lovers other than oneself.
Heterotopias of time that accumulate=Orlando (see p. 225, stacked plates)
KRISTIE
Love letter— really? She is pretty critical abt Vita, lampooning her frequently
Transformation from male to female (see Hankins for discussion of how this dichotomy is fragmented by book)
Men are presence and women are insignificanceà this is true in London where there is a very clear distinction btw how males and female inhabit space, emphasized by female O’s cross-dressing escapade. But at Knole she seems to be able to be the self which is both.
Does Woolf shows us the sameness of men and women?
MICHAEL
“our bodies are places that can be written on” – and can be created by writing
Foucaultà fluid process of becoming
Bourdieu à memory, social distinctions embedded in unconscious practices
Butlerà gender performance (“heterosexual reflex”)
Dibattista à gynomorphosis: transformation of male bodies into their different female equivalents
Tension btw unfixed nature of gender and identity and pressure to conform to gender norms
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