Gender, Performativity, and Agency in Virginia Woolf: A Butlerian Reading of Orlando

Abstract

The present paper attempts to closely study Virginia Woolf’s Orlando in terms of Judith Butler’s concepts of gender, performativity, and agency. Woolf examines women, their struggles and positions in literary history, and their needs for independence. Themes in her works consist of gender relations, class hierarchy, and the consequences of war. In most of her novels, she moves away from the use of plot and character and, instead, emphasizes the psychological aspects of her characters. In Orlando, the protagonist lives through centuries and Woolf allows her character to transform into a female halfway during the novel. The novel is directly engaged in the women’s position and mentality through the lines, dialogues, and events. The principal question of the present study focuses on the perspectives through which gender is presented and the way it could be observed in relation to Butler’s theory of gender as performance. The current survey is further concerned with the angles through which the novel reflects gender troubles and identity crisis of the women, conventionally defined as a minor category, according to Judith Butler’s post-structuralist approach to the analysis of identity. Consequently, there is a confluence between the development of Woolf’s female characters in the novel and Butler’s critical notion concerning the subject’s attempts to present performativity in the form of an active agent.