Entre texturas e tessituras: construções identitárias de gênero em Orlando: a biography, de Virginia Woolf

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between Orlando: a biography (1928), by Virginia Woolf, and theorizations in the area of Gender Studies, based on an analysis that focuses on the construction of its characters. Considering that clothing is one of the main elements in the construction of their identities, I aim to reflect on the ways the English writer configures them, to the extent that it is by means of the costumes, to a certain degree, that the characters are drawn at odds with the codes of gender coherence, which serve as the basis for dominant ideologies. In order to do so, I consider Judith Butler´s thought in her most famous book, Gender Trouble (1990), more specifically in relation to the performative nature of gender, by proposing an approximation with the problematizations raised by the novel. I also aim to contribute to the reflections on the narrative techniques explored by Woof, with emphasis on the links in the fraying of its writing and aspects of the fantastic in order to stress the subversive quality, both literary and ideological, of this narrative because, viewed as gender and genre parody, it challenges cultural standards. The study also compares selected fragments of the original version in English with the equivalent parts of its translation into Portuguese by Cecília Meireles in order to problematize some of the Brazilian poet´s choices with regard to certain erasures and distortions in relation to the questioning of gender [and genre] provoked by the original text. Thus, it is by means of the analysis of the literary writing of the clothing, as an ideological narrative device; and of the fantastic, as an element that subverts traditional narrative aspects, that I argue that Orlando: a biography is a work composed by the ambivalence of its texture and textual interweaving in the articulation of the political and the aesthetic.