Deconstructing Gender: A Theoretical Approach to Virginia Woolf's Orlando

Abstract

The topic to be developed in this article is the denunciation of gender stereotypes and how they condition our way of thinking and acting. The corpus worked with in this analysis is composed by Orlando (1928), written by Virginia Woolf, which will be treated as a critical-reflexive text to delve into gender fluidity and the feminist discourse of the time. The author imagines the existing possibilities beyond Victorian conservatism and creates a protagonist who transcends the limits of gender binary. By means of this novel, Woolf exposes both an introspective and external portrait of her thinking, she reports the feminine status, not only within the academic world but also in the social sphere, in a subtle but direct way, aiming to examine the multiple difficulties of women. This article highlights the implicit ideas, particularly in relation to women during the 20th century, in the work of Woolf and the gender issues that it addresses, through a hermeneutic analysis, understood as the art of interpretation in which author, text and reader converge. In addition, the concepts of gender by Judith Butler (2005), Monique Wittig (1992) and Marta Lamas (1986) are considered.