Jessica Berman

When Orlando falls into his transformative trance at the mid-point of Virginia Woolf’s romp of a novel, he is an agent of the British Empire in Constantinople, at the moment of receiving his newly conferred Dukedom. The ceremony is a pageant of Empire, which gathers “people of all nationalities” to celebrate Orlando’s status, while the text makes frequent reference to the show of British superiority in this event. Yet, awakening as female, Orlando also awakens to life with the Gypsies, abandoning, for a time, not only the ambassadorial dwelling and its trappings of imperial power, but also his/her national identity. Orlando “dressed herself in those Turkish coats and trousers which can be worn indifferently by either sex” and then rode off where s/he had “often . . . longed to be” (103–04). In the following chapter, upon her return to England as female, Orlando discovers the ongoing disjunction between outward gendered appearance and inward sex, and the narrator remarks that “often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above” (139).