Nell assumes that Orlando is a man because of the way she dresses, and it is not until Orlando reveals herself as a woman that Nell begins to relax. As a woman, Orlando dresses up as a man and visits a prostitute named Nell. This implies it is Orlando’s clothes, not specifically her body, that reflects her gender, and it is largely her clothes that make her attractive to the opposite sex. A sailor catches a glimpse of Orlando’s calf and starts “so violently” that he misses his footing and only saves “himself by the skin of his teeth.” Orlando’s legs haven’t changed since she was a man, but the sight of them in a dress distracts the sailor so badly, he nearly trips and falls. The narrator mentions that Orlando’s legs, which remain completely unchanged from male to female, are one of her best assets. This suggests that people’s view of others, particularly on a romantic or sexual level, are deeply influenced by the social norms of how men and women are expected to present themselves. Orlando is only “curious” about Sasha when he thinks she’s a man, but when he finds out she’s a woman, he falls madly in love with her. But as Sasha skates closer and Orlando can make out the shape of her breasts under her masculine tunic, he knows she is a woman. When Orlando first sees Sasha, his great love of the 16th century, ice skating during the Great Frost, her “Russian fashion serve to disguise the sex,” and Orlando is convinced that Sasha is a man. Clothes “change our view of the world and the world’s view of us,” declares the fictional biographer who narrates the book, and that is certainly the case for Orlando. One of the ways in which gender is constructed in Orlando is through clothing. Through this rather fluid depiction of gender in Orlando, Woolf implies that the dichotomous male-versus-female understanding of gender is merely a social construction, and that no one person is wholly one gender or the other. People are perceived differently in Orlando, and, Woolf implies, in broader society as well, based on what gender they are however, many of the characters in the novel are androgynous and their receptions change with their assumed genders. Orlando-or Vita, for all intents and purposes-possesses both male and female qualities and has affairs with both men and women, completely disrupting popular gender stereotypes along the way. Both Woolf and Sackville-West were members of the Bloomsbury Group, an elite group of writers and artists who questioned and openly resisted traditional assumptions of gender and sexuality. Orlando is the fictional representation of Woolf’s own friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and Orlando’s seemingly easy transition from male to female reflects Woolf and, presumably, Sackville-West’s, own understanding of gender. In one of the more surprising moments of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Orlando wakes after an inexplicable coma-like sleep of seven days to find himself transformed into a woman.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf