『올란도』: 울프의 양성성과 새로운 전기쓰기

Orlando: Woolf’s Androgyny and Writing a New Biography

MyungHee Jin

Virginia Woolf tried to revolutionize the genre of biography in Orlando, which is the outcome of a definite and overmastering impulse, planned as an escapade or a joke after serious experimental books, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Orlando runs the passage of centuries from the later of the sixteenth century, when Orlando is an aspiring aristocrat poet of sixteen, through a fantastic change of sex from male to female at the age of thirty, to October 1928, when the protagonist is now a mother and celebrated writer of thirty-six.
Though Woolf thought the book was not important among her works, Orlando seems to be one of her most elusive but profound novels in that the careful balance between truth and fantasy for Orlando’s comic change of sex and long life span goes together with Woolf’s intention to give things their caricature value.
In writing Orlando Woolf demonstrates that she is violating the traditional literary canons dominated by English men of letters and is criticising the ideology of patriarchal society through an androgynous character. With satiric and fantastic devices for a new biographical convention, she subverts the traditional genre of biography and biographical novels with chronological and causal plot developments.
Orlando achieved her social and biological transformation by bearing a son and publishing her book of poems “The Oak Tree” which gave her/him a literary award. This stands for Woolf’s wish-fulfillment as an ideal artist toward the utopian vision of undivided wholesome consciousness transcending the repressive male/female opposition in an imaginary fictional novel.

주제어: new biography, change of sex, self, literary convention, patriarchal society, androgynous vision (새로운 전기, 성 변화, 자아, 문학관습, 가부장사회, 양성적 비전)

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