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How is it that we've never seen all the bastards in Orlando?1 Most of us have read the novel as a rich text that, even though it has an excoriation of sexual definition at its base, also manages to engage with a wide range of other issues, including time, history, death, writing, and nature.2 But we have not, to this point, considered the bastard, and we should. After all, in the pivotal lawsuit that follows Orlando for three hundred years, bastardy is a crucial factor; the suit claims that Orlando "was an English Duke who had married one Rosina Pepita, a dancer; and had had by her three sons, which sons now declaring that their father was deceased, claimed that all his property descended to them."3 Orlando can only keep the estate because the "children [are] pronounced illegitimate" (Woolf, Orlando, 254–55). This direct allusion to misbegotten heirs and the way the threat of the lawsuit threads its ways through the second half of the novel should alert us to pay attention to the bastards; Woolf uses them to show that primogeniture, race, and nationality—foundations on which English wealth and citizenship were built at the beginning of the twentieth century—were, in fact, flimsy constructs whose boundaries were constantly transgressed. Through the figure of the bastard, Orlando reveals the ways that a supposedly racially pure and monogamously produced English system of authority and control was undermined by those it rejected: bastards, and non-white, non-English progenitors.
To contemporary ears, the word "bastardy" sounds more offensive than "illegitimacy." Nevertheless, "bastard" and "bastardy" were legal terms in England until the middle of the twentieth century, and, historically, these words did not carry the stigma they do today. More importantly, as Jenny Bourne Taylor delineates in her study of bastardy in the nineteenth century, the term "bastardy" has a much richer meaning than the term "illegitimacy"; bastardy's definition also includes that which is adulterated, imitative, and spurious. Taylor argues that legitimacy is based on a binary between legitimate and illegitimate, while bastardy points to the twisted historical basis of the term that is not rooted in a binary. Taylor argues that the bastard is "an identity constructed as an aporia."4 In this light, illegitimacy...