Orlando, de Virginia Woolf: desconstruindo as fronteiras de gênero

Abstract

This present Master's Thesis aims to reflect upon the importance of the correlation between Literary Studies and Gender Studies, based on the analysis of Orlando, a biography, by Virginia Woolf, in which the main character, Orlando, defies the borders between male and female, when transforming himself sexually, in a natural way. The plot of the fictional biography allows to trace intersection points concerning androgyny, non-linearity, flexibility and changeability of gender, created by Woolf. For the analysis of Woolf's unusual proposal, which constructs Orlando's metamorphosis, the following studies were used: A room of One's Own (2014), by Virginia Woolf, and Criticism and the Wilderness (1994), by Elaine Showalter. To accomplish the congruency of Orlando, a biography, with Gender Studies, it is essential to comprehend the concepts proposed by Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, v. 2: a living experience, (1967); Jon Scott, in Gender: a useful category of Historical Analysis (1995) and Judith Butler, in Gender Problems: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (2003). The flexibility and gender variations expressed by Woolf contrast with the strict concepts once built concerning male and female, as well as the unchangeable characteristic of the sexuality. In 1928, with Orlando, a biography, Virginia Woolf anticipated the gender issue, so recent and pertinent in the search for respect to the liberty and the extinction of the preestablished forms that insist on determining the most inherent behaviour of the individuals.