In the works of Virginia Woolf, freedom is an often unattainable ideal. Woolf speaks at length about freedom in her texts, ranging from the broader freedom of the individual to live as they please in her fiction to the creative freedom of the artist in her nonfiction. There are a few instances in his work where freedom becomes a possibility both in the life of the individual in general and in the life of the artist. The main character of Orlando is able to live a life that defies definition due to his ever-changing gender, while in the essay A Room of One's Own, Woolf offers the writer a more creative form of writing and unlimited. These two works present different types of freedom, personal and artistic, but the catalyst for these freedoms is the same: androgyny. Androgyny, for Woolf, is a liberating state, which allows us to distort or escape what she considers to be the most restrictive discourse in our society: gender. In fact, Woolf presents androgyny as the state in which the individual is most free. This essay will argue that Woolf's writing explores a concept of freedom, both personal and artistic, achievable only through a distortion and rejection of gender through androgyny, examining Orlando's subversive life and rejection like that in A Room of One's Own. no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essaySandra Bem defines the androgynous individual as “an individual who does not rely on gender as a cognitive organizing principle and whose personality therefore combines both the masculine and the masculine.” feminine elements.”[1] By asserting that the androgynous individual does not need to “rely on gender as a cognitive organizing principle,” Bem defines androgyny as not simply the mixture of masculine and feminine. Androgyny is rather a freedom and an ultimate rejection of the gender discourse, the mixture of masculine and feminine being simply the product of this freedom. Furthermore, the idea of ​​gender as a "cognitive organizing principle" means that everything about us as individuals is regulated and sorted according to gender: the clothes we wear, the actions we perform, the words that we use; everything about us is gendered. According to Bem's reasoning, to be androgynous means to be free of gender, to defy gendered definition, and to exist beyond what Judith Butler calls the realm of cultural intelligibility: an ordered and coherent subjectivity regulated by gender. Butler writes that “‘intelligible’ genres are those which, in a certain sense, establish and maintain relations of coherence and continuity between sex, gender, sexual practice and desire. »[2] Androgyny is a freedom that allows the individual to challenge and distort Butler's ideas. area of ​​cultural intelligibility. To be androgynous is therefore to confuse and reject the normalized norms in our society, to refuse the defect and to choose an unintelligible alternative. The novel Orlando presents a version of androgyny that subtly challenges the notion of cultural intelligibility. Subtitled "A Biography," the novel uses the form of biography and the narrative voice of the biographer to present the subject's culturally intelligible expectations, only to then contradict that expectation with Orlando's fantastical, amorphous life story. In her essay “The Art of Biography,” Woolf writes that the form of biography “imposes conditions, and those conditions are that it must be based on fact.”[3] Biography as a form, according to Woolf, is rigid and controlling. In biography there can be no room for doubt orinconsistency, and thus the narrative of the biography, the voice of the biographer (which we will assume to be a male voice), is the voice of truth. Orlando opens with a sentence that directly assures the reader that the biographer is the forerunner of the truth: “He – for there could be no doubt as to her sex, even if the fashion of the time had anything to do with it.” disguise it.”[4] This sentence is designed to convince the reader that the biographer can see the truth, that despite what may "disguise" reality, there is "no doubt" that the biographer is telling honest facts. Orlando's biographer is the voice of truth, expectation and norm. That Orlando could be a woman disguised as a man by "the fashion of the time" is not a possibility because it goes directly against the norm that the biographer is dedicated to upholding. Moreover, at the beginning of the novel, Orlando is undoubtedly a man and the biographer thus presents the expectations of the male subject: "From action to action, from glory to glory, from function to function, he must go, his scribe next, until they reach any seat that is up to their desire. Orlando, upon closer inspection, was made for precisely such a career. [Woolf, pp. 11] The biographer has an expected standard for Orlando and as Orlando, at the beginning of the novel, is, "to look at", the archetypal nobleman, there is "no doubt" in the biographer's mind that this expectation will be encountered. The genre, rigid and full of norms, has determined what Orlando's life as a nobleman should be, depriving him of the freedom to choose the life he truly wants, and the biographer, "his scribe", is there to record and define this life. . Orlando's biographer thus comes to act as the guardian of a culturally intelligible and coherent subjectivity. It is the biographer's job to verify that Orlando still exists in the realm of the intelligible and to define Orlando's life as faithfully and robustly as possible. However, as the novel progresses, Orlando defies the biographer's expectations and lives freely beyond the realm of the intelligible. cultural intelligibility. It is their “transformation” from man to woman that frees Orlando from the strict definitions imposed on him by the biographer. Before Orlando's transformation, the biographer's narrative was rigidly assured as to his subject, but during this transformation, inconsistencies arise and the rigidity of this narrative begins to break down. Upon Orlando's immediate transformation, the biographer states, "We have no choice but to admit that he was a woman." [Woolf, pp. 83] “We have no choice but to confess” shows that the biographer, unlike the omniscient figure undoubtedly envisaged by Woolf in “The Art of Biography”, has, in Orlando, reached the limits of understanding. Pushed to the limits of cultural intelligibility, Orlando becomes a paradox for the biographer, illustrated by the oxymoron “he was a woman”. What had hitherto been so clear and clear to the biographer in the novel becomes indefinable, its subject so unintelligible that he declares that it is “irritating […] to see its subject, on whom so much time has been lavished and with difficulty, slipping beyond our reach.” [Woolf, pp. 155] As Orlando grows into his androgyny, they experience greater freedom from the limiting discourse of gender and cultural intelligibility embodied by the biographer. The biographer, for his part, becomes incapable of hiding or disguising Orlando's unintelligibility, of "attenuating, veiling, covering, concealing, enveloping" Orlando's now totally subversive existence. [Woolf, pp. 170] Unable to contain or hide Orlando's unintelligibility, his androgynous freedom, the biographer finds himself struggling to maintain a coherent intelligibility in the narrativeof the novel. As Christy L. Burns writes: "the notion of the essential self [is] comically reduced to a belief that Woolf's incompetent narrator finds it difficult to defend."[5] Orlando's subjectivity is liberated by his androgyny beyond the limits imposed by the role of the biographer. Orlando manages to free himself from the limitations of the biographer by leading an androgynous life. A quest for freedom from convention and expectation is evident in the exploration of Woolf's artistic imagination. In Orlando, androgyny is explored through how the individual can defy definition or confinement. Through an androgynous life, in A Room of One's Own Woolf argues that an androgynous writing style liberates the author and allows him to pursue a more creative and fulfilling form of literature. In this essay, Woolf shows a keen awareness of the limitations imposed by gender, noting how women's traditionally submissive role within society and their historical exclusion from higher education limited their creative abilities. Woolf, however, is not unaware that gender discourse not only constrains women to creativity, but also creates a barrier for men. Woolf writes: "Perhaps a purely masculine mind can create no more than a purely feminine mind."[6] Gender, for Woolf, is therefore a creative block that prohibits artists of either sex from creating more substantial art than an artist of the opposite sex. Gender imposes limits on the imagination, creating a stunted double subjectivity where a clear distinction between man and woman exists: “in each of us two powers preside, a man, a woman; and in the brain of man, the man predominates over the woman, and in the brain of the woman, the woman predominates over the man. [Woolf, pp. 88] It is from this duality of the mind that Woolf proposes a solution to the limits created by gender; androgyny. Mary Jacobus writes that Woolf's androgyny is one where "the split [between masculine and feminine] is closed by an essentially utopian vision of an undivided consciousness." [7] Jacobus interprets Woolf's androgyny as not the individual exhibiting masculine and feminine traits, but rather where the division between masculine and feminine is destroyed. If there are no longer any distinctions between man and woman, as Jacobus contests and Woolf envisions, and gender as a discourse, as Butler writes, exists because of the relationship between man/ man and woman/woman, then gender does not exist; the genre is outdated. Thus Woolf presents a type of androgyny which presents absolute freedom from gendered discourse since gendered discourse no longer exists. When she writes that "Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind which has a particular sympathy for women", she says that the androgynous mind does not is not a spirit that inhibits both the masculine and the feminine. elements, but rather exceeds them. [Woolf, pp. 89] She argues that “the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without hindrance; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. [Woolf, pp. 89] Therefore, the androgynous mind does not exhibit the best qualities of gender norms: the traditional sensitivity of women and the strength of men. For the androgynous spirit, these qualities are an integral part of the artist. As Marilyn R. Farwell writes, Woolf's androgyny allows for a "liberation from the emotional extremes of sexual stereotypes [that] will lead to complete objectivity." » [8] Woolf argues that it is by abandoning genre altogether, by living freely from that particular genre. discourse, which the artist has the possibility of creating and imagining without limits and in complete objective honesty. Woolf argues in favor of a form of androgyny whichvery similar to Bem's: a non-dependence on "gender as a principle of cognitive organization", it turns out that the abandonment of gender distinctions is so easily interpreted by the subjectivities still existing in the discourse. of gender as exhibiting both masculine and feminine traits when in reality it is simply an exhibition of traits without gendered definition. Therefore, in A Room of One's Own, Woolf is not advocating for the celebration or empowerment of one gender or another, but rather for repression or disregard for all genders. Woolf argues that for the woman writer to succeed in her pursuits, she must not liberate the femininity within her but rather destroy it in order to unleash creativity. Gender in this essay, unlike the gender police who control gender in Orlando.biographer, divides. Woolf writes that "no age could ever be so strongly sex-conscious as ours," noting that "the suffrage campaign was undoubtedly to blame." This must have aroused in men an extraordinary desire for self-affirmation. [Woolf, pp. 89] Focusing on gender means for Woolf not trying to free herself from it but rather to reinforce the way in which it divides us. Gender norms are designed to defend themselves when challenged; for a woman writer, declaring "I am a woman writer and I want to be taken seriously" leads a man writer to write only to "celebrate masculine virtues, uphold masculine values ​​and describe the world of men", writing with a “emotion”. […this] is incomprehensible for a woman. [Woolf, pp. 92] Gender is therefore such a divisive factor that it creates poor communication between the sexes. Woolf writes that “it is fatal for anyone who writes to think about their sex.” It is fatal to be a man or a woman pure and simple; you have to be woman-man or man-woman.” [Woolf, pp. 94] For the writer to free himself from the creative limitations imposed by genre, he must abandon his genre completely. Woolf's vision of androgyny in A Room of One's Own is a celebration of creative empowerment and a denunciation of the partisan empowerment of men and women. As Lisa Rado notes, "the empowerment that [Woolf's androgyny] is supposed to produce relies on the repression of her own feminine identity."[9] According to Woolf, subjectivity should not be divided by the labels male/male or female/female. Instead, we should ignore these labels and empower genderless creative subjectivity. In a sense, in A Room of One's Own, Woolf directly challenges the authority of Orlando's biographer. The biographer constantly attempts to rigidly maintain Orlando's cultural intelligibility: "He – for there can be no doubt about his sex" and "he was a woman" are examples of how the biographer constantly attempts to maintain Orlando as a binary being. he' or 'she'. But through the vision of androgyny in A Room of One's Own, the biographer, in maintaining traditional gender roles, fails to see the real Orlando; his creative goal, to honestly record his subject's life, is compromised by his inability to see beyond the genre. His inability to see Orlando as "woman-man or man-woman", but rather as a man or a woman, one or the other, is perhaps the biographer's greatest failure and thus he is denied freedom creative to accurately record life. from Orlando. As Makiko Minow-Pinkney writes: “Androgyny in Orlando is not a resolution of oppositions, but the immersion of both sexes in a metonymic confusion of genders. »[10] This inability to recognize Orlando for what they really are is illustrated in the work ofbiographer. attempt to describe Orlando immediately after their transformation: “Orlando had become a woman, that’s undeniable. But in all other respects Orlando remained exactly as it had been. [Woof, pp. 83] The biographer struggles to resolve the opposition of Orlando's sexed body, because the sex of Orlando's body is a subject in which there has been constant "no doubt" or "denial", with Orlando's subjectivity . For the biographer, Orlando is the same and not the same at the same time, the biographer unable to make any sense of Orlando's cultural intelligibility. By failing to understand Orlando's androgyny, the biographer is denied the creative freedom to successfully write a "fact-based" biography of his subject. Unlike the biographer, Orlando himself seems to inhabit the rejection of the kind that Woolf calls for in A Room. of his. Their lives in England are defined by a collage of performative acts that, for the biographer, signal a constant back-and-forth from man to woman, but for Orlando, these performative acts are not gendered. Instead, they have liberated themselves from gender, so these acts are genderless, they are simply undefined or unregulated actions. The biographer writes that: “Those curious about her sexFor example, if Orlando were a woman, how is it that she never takes more than ten minutes to dress? And weren't his clothes chosen a little at random, and sometimes worn in a rather shabby way? And then, they would say, she still has none of the formality of a man, nor the love of power of a man. She is extremely tender. [Woolf, pp. 111] The biographer notes how Orlando performs acts that, due to his restrictive view of gender, are considered masculine or feminine and are in direct conflict with his sex. She can't be a woman because she doesn't care how she dresses, but she also can't be a man because she doesn't have the necessary severity or formality. She is something between a man and a woman, but the biographer is unable to recognize or name this thing. Orlando, by performing acts that distort the biographer's understanding of him, refuses to pass for a man or a woman. Writer Sandy Stone writes of this that it "means living successfully in the gender of one's choice, being accepted as a 'natural' member of that gender." To pass means the refusal of the mixture. One and the same with the transition is the erasure of the previous gender role. »[11] Not accepting Orlando's case would mean accepting and living up to the expectations of their now feminine sexual body; take more than ten minutes to get dressed and refuse to look shabby. Orlando, by refusing to pass as a man or a woman, accepts that before, they were gendered as men and now that they are gendered as women. By refusing to pass Orlando lives freely from what was expected of them before their transformation and what is expected of them now. By living an androgynous life according to the standards established by Woolf in A Room of One's Own, Orlando lives free from the expectations that society imposes on him, he frees himself from the confines of gender. The freedom to live as you want or want. Writing as best as one can is, according to Woolf, dependent on overcoming genre. To go beyond gender is to live androgynously, to live beyond the limits that gender creates. Woolf often explores the concept of freedom as something difficult to achieve. Perhaps it is only through the fantastical nature of Orlando's life, which spans centuries and treats the genre so casually, that freedom is achieved. Likewise, the idea that gender should be abandoned entirely in A Room of One's Own is perhaps far too utopian or. 231