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Like any writer worth her salt, Virginia Woolf had a giftfor first sentences. Her most fanciful novel, Orlando (1927), begins: "He-for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it- was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters" (13). As an opening, this is on par with that of her most famous work, A Room of One's Own (1929), for its sly wit and rhetorical innovation: "But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction-what has that got to do with a room of one's own?"(3). In each case, Woolf breaks with the conventions of English composition to very different-although theoretically linked-effect, crafting on the one hand an overtly self-deprecating, yet covertly sarcastic feminine persona, and, on the other, a bombastic and ultimately specious male biographer-narrator. "He," Woolf writes, then adds a dash-putting the term "under erasure" syntactically, if not in the strictly Sausserian sense. It is a bold move-as is her beginning her book-length essay on "women and fiction" with a conjunction.
Orlando's first sentence, though, does much more than catch our attention. The gendered pronoun immediately undercut by the typographic violence of the dash both introduces the hero/ine and ironically foreshadows his magical transformation into a woman not quite halfway through the novel's three-anda- half century romp. In other words, Woolf's dash enacts on her protagonist's gender the very sort of violence she describes (as I'm similarly doing when I call him a "hero/ine"). But the genius of the sentence does not stop there. For crystallized in these mere thirty-eight words we not only find Woolf's critique of gender norms and imperialism, but also her indictment of the relationship between them. There "could be no doubt"-the narrator confidently declares- of Orlando's biological gender because...well, look at what he's doing, he's playing with something "the color of an old football," and everyone knows only boys play with footballs. That the "football" was once a man's head is not, in the biographer's deadpan description of this puerile mock-violence, any more remarkable than "the fashion of the time"-because "Orlando's fathers... had struck many heads of many colours offmany shoulders...," as we quickly learn,...