UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS POLÍTICAS Y SOCIOLOGÍA TESIS DOCTORAL Orlando at the Crossroads of Gender MEMORIA PARA OPTAR AL GRADO DE DOCTOR PRESENTADA POR Alberto García García-Madrid Directora Esther Sánchez-Pardo González Madrid © Alberto García García-Madrid, 2021 UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS POLÍTICAS Y SOCIOLOGÍA TESIS DOCTORAL Orlando at the Crossroads of Gender MEMORIA PARA OPTAR AL GRADO DE DOCTOR PRESENTADA POR Alberto García García-Madrid DIRECTOR Esther Sánchez-Pardo González UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS POLÍTICAS Y SOCIOLOGÍA Instituto de Investigaciones Feministas Orlando at the Crossroads of Gender Tesis Doctoral Presentada por: Alberto García García-Madrid Bajo la dirección de: Esther Sánchez-Pardo González Madrid, 2020 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This journey began many years ago as an undergraduate student who chose a module about British Modernism, taught by Dr. Esther Sánchez-Pardo. There I fell in love with Virginia Woolf’s novels, with Bloomsbury aesthetics and with the way Esther made us look at literary texts. When I graduated, I decided to continue my studies as a postgraduate student in London, always keeping in mind that I would come back to Madrid one day to begin my doctoral studies about Woolf, which I eventually did. Now this is the end of that journey. Therefore, I would like to thank Esther since she has guided me all these years and she has also given me the opportunity to become part of Poetics, where I have also been able to expand my areas of research, to engage in the research activity and to meet amazing people. I look forward to continuing learning from you for many years. Thank you. I also want to thank all the people at Instifem because you have made this possible for me and for my other colleagues who also decided to begin a similar journey. Thank you for having let me be part of this community and for making people’s dreams come true year by year. Finally, I want to thank my family and friends, as they have been supporting me all these long five years (and asking when I would finish). Layla and Sandra, especially you. You have always been there for me, attending the conferences, reading my papers and trying to read Virginia Woolf’s novels. Most importantly, you have been there for me as friends and you have been truly supportive with this project. Adri, thank you for being with me all this time. 4 5 CONTENTS ABSTRACT 10 RESUMEN 13 INTRODUCTION 16 METHODOLOGY 33 SECTION I: SUFFRAGE, ANTI-SUFFRAGE AND FEMINISM IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S BRITAIN 38 Chapter 1: Feminism at the Turn of the Century 1. Introduction 39 2. Suffrage in Britain 41 2.1.The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and the Women’s Social and Political Union 47 2.2.Other women’s suffrage societies in Britain 58 2.3.Women’s suffrage societies: their common and ultimate goal 66 3. Antisuffrage in Britain 67 3.1.Women’s education: a primary concern during the nineteenth century 68 3.2.Traditional femininity and gender roles 71 3.3.The sex war 74 4. Virginia Woolf’s views on feminism and suffragism 75 4.1.Virginia Stephen’s early associations with the feminist cause 77 4.2.Suffragist movement and Virginia Woolf’s pacifist views 79 6 4.3.The People’s Suffrage Federation and the Women’s Co-operative Guild 85 5. Conclusion 92 Chapter 2: Feminist Visions in Orlando and A Room of One’s Own 1. Introduction 95 2. Orlando in the context of A Room of One’s Own 98 2.1.Virginia Woolf’s inspiration for Orlando 99 2.2.Orlando and A Room of One’s Own: the blurred line between fact and fiction 103 3. Virginia Woolf’s feminist discourse in Orlando 110 3.1.A female historiography and literary tradition 114 3.2.The androgynous mind 120 3.3.Legal concerns 125 4. Conclusion 128 SECTION II: PUBLIC AND PRIVATE REALMS 132 Chapter 3: Virginia Woolf’s Private World: Victorian Heritage 1. Introduction 133 2. The Angel in the House: domestic roles and family configurations in Victorian England 137 2.1. The separate sphere ideology 140 2.2. Virginia Woolf’s representations of the private sphere in A Room of One’s Own 143 3. Victorian femininity, female sexuality and marriage 148 3.1. Victorian femininity and female morality 150 7 3.2. Marriage in the late Victorian period 157 4. Virginia Woolf’s private sphere: a space for generation 159 2.3. Reconfiguration of Victorian values 160 2.4. A space for generation and creative genius 162 5. Conclusion 165 Chapter 4: Breaking Barriers, Moving Beyond: Occupying the Public Domain in Orlando 1. Introduction 170 2. Virginia Woolf’s literary scene: the struggle for public acclaim 175 2.1. Fame and creative genius 178 2.2. Anonymity as a transgression 183 3. Trespassing the boundaries of compulsory heterosexuality: same-sex desire in the public space 185 3.1. The battle against censorship 187 3.2. Vindicating lesbianism 191 4. Breaking gender norms: transgenderism, cross-genderism and androgyny in the public space 192 4.1. Transgressing gender norms in public: cross-dressing 194 4.2. Androgyny and changes of sex 198 4.3. Anonymity as transgenderism 205 5. Conclusion 207 SECTION III: GENDER AND SEXUALITY 211 Chapter 5: Orlando as a Modern Text 1. Introduction 212 8 2. The androgyne and the invert: tracking female same-sex desire 214 2.1. Female homosexuality: gender inversion and cultural androgyny 215 2.2. Early accounts of androgynous or masculine women: is it lesbian desire? 224 2.3. Female androgyny and female masculinity as lesbian literary imagination 232 3. Virginia Woolf’s androgynous mind: the fluidity of gender and sexuality versus compulsory heterosexuality and other forms of sexism 238 3.1. Compulsory heterosexuality, traditional marriage and oppositional gender dynamics 240 3.2. Female conventions, oppositional sexism and exceptional gender traits 257 4. Is Orlando transgender? Discussions on the naturalisation of genders 269 4.1. Coming to terms 272 4.2. Biology versus culture: is gender exclusively constructed? 275 5. The Archduchess Harriet: discussions on “real”/cis versus “fake”/trans genders 286 1. Real versus fake genders: cross-dressing and cissexism 288 2. Male femininity and misogyny 296 6. Conclusion 297 CONCLUSION: A MORE INCLUSIVE FEMINISM 301 REFERENCES 312 9 ABSTRACT Orlando at the Crossroads of gender Introduction Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, inspired by her friend Vita Sackville-West and as a tribute to her, unexpectedly became a literary success although it meant for the British writer a break between her more experimental novels To the Lighthouse and The Waves. In addition, while writing the fantasy novel, in which sapphism would play an essential role, Virginia Woolf, who consciously poured in the narrative her concerns on women’s inequality and female stereotypes, also began devising her feminist talks, which would ultimately become her long essay A Room of One’s Own. In this regard, Orlando becomes a necessary feminist reading, in which Virginia Woolf does not exclusively focus on the role of women in literary history, but she also explores the meaning of gender and sexuality through characters that transgress the boundaries of the social conventions of each era. At the same time Woolf reconstructs Vita Sackville-West’s family history and returns her friend what had been taken from her— Knole House—; the British writer exceeds the limits of genre—fact and fiction—and gender—masculine and feminine. My aim in this study is to situate Orlando within the historical context of feminism and women’s rights of the late Victorian period and the early twentieth century in Britain, and within Virginia Woolf’s involvement in the women’s cause. In this sense, the fantasy novel and the feminist essay are enclosed by Woolf’s motivations in these directions, and both works, despite being different texts, become one single project. Only after this analysis 10 and comparative approach between both texts is it possible to read the novel with regard to both the British writer’s perception of the private sphere as a site for artistic creation, and the (literary) public realm, which had been denied to women due to the stifling conventions of the nineteenth century. Orlando constitutes Virginia Woolf’s room of her own, a place to explore her creative genius, but it also becomes both her instrument to illustrate what gender means for a woman of her period and her means to transgress such sexist stereotypes. England is under the rule of patriarchy, as Woolf points out in A Room of One’s Own, and the fantasy narrative explores the limits of gender and sexuality through a protagonist and other characters that represent gender non-conforming traits and exceptional sexualities from the norm. With regard to gender and sexuality, it is also worth noting the multiple readings that Virginia Woolf’s fantasy novel can provide. Apart from the traditional reading of the narrative as a lesbian feminist text, I would like to expand Woolf’s feminist vision and suggest that Orlando also explores questions of sexuality and gender from the point of view of sexual and gender non-conforming individuals. The changes of sex and the androgynous characters also open up the possibility to read Woolf’s text in terms of transgenderism. In other words, the novel demonstrates that it is to some extent in consonance with the way LGBTQ+ individuals experience their gender and sexuality today, and also serves to illustrate how these sexual and gender minorities might have experienced their gender and sexuality during Woolf’s times.