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Abstract: Woolf s Orlando is the only novel in which the author creates real physical androgynous characters to shatter the stability of being, sex and gender - rigid backbones of patriarchy - by inserting her characters, namely Orlando, Archduchess and Sasha, into a state of physical, mental and sexual ambivalence. This article analyses the novel's androgynous characters in terms of mind, body and sexuality and claims that the aim to destabilise traditional notions of individualism and the image of Woolf s concept of androgyny in Orlando are similar to those of Bakhtin's notion of grotesque, which is also based on the idea of instability and constant change.
Keywords: Virginia Woolf, Orlando, Bakhtin, androgyny, grotesque
INTRODUCTION: ANDROGYNY AND THE GROTESQUE
Orlando (1928) can be read as Virginia Woolfs reaction against stabilized notions of being, sex and gender, which have been regarded as the main cornerstones of patriarchal society. Woolf, the name of whom Rado finds "virtually synonymous" with the term androgyny (2000, 138), underlines the sense of continuous change and ambivalence in her characters by throwing them into the abyss of uncertainty - in Nietzschean terms - in terms of their gender and sex. This is precisely what Woolf means when she states in A Room of One's Own - "the theory of androgyny" (Restuccia 1985, 254) - that an author should incorporate both "man and woman part of the brain" (1992, 128).
Androgyny is a term used for the presence of both sexes - Greek andr (male) and gyne (female) - in one body. As Robert Kimbrough states, the "androgynous vision is the human desire to reach a sense of human wholeness" (1990, 17), the state which was valid when "all generation was a unisexual operation" before human beings inherited "sub-division into sex, female and male" (1990, 15). It stands for the desire to return to the state when a human being could make use of her/his complete set of abilities rather than eliminating some of them because of the socially constructed gender roles.
When androgyny is inserted into the feminist context, it is enriched in meaning as seen in Woolf's Orlando. As Rado states, Woolf's use of the androgynous theme makes her be "labelled the subversive, even deconstructive, feminist" (2000, 139). Indeed, feminist...