In And Out Of Heterosexism:A Comparative Study On The Well Of Loneliness And Orlando

The mainstream gender ideology in1920s Britain carried on the legacy of Victorian age which set the feminine ideal as the "angel in the house" who was emotional, nurturant, asexual, submissive to men and devoted to domestic life. In contrast, men were naturally considered subjects in economic, political and public life, enjoying powers in almost every field. However, under the first wave feminism of the late19th-and early20th-century, Europe witnessed the emergence of the New Woman and the flappers who consistently challenged the conventional Victorian womanhood. Radcliffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, both published in1928, contributed to revealing the complex gender ideologies of that particular era. Though these two novels have received numerous critical attentions respectively, little effort has been made to juxtapose them for a comparative exploration of gender ideologies as implied in them. Thus this thesis will provide a new perspective to interpret these two novels and offer a glimpse of the complicated and volatile gender ideologies of the early20th century Britain. Taking Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity as its theoretical basis, this thesis will combine textual analysis and contextual research to reveal how these two novels give different answers to the following questions:Does gender exist? Is gender identity natural or cultural? Is there any congenital coherence between sex, gender and sexuality? This thesis tentatively claims that, though The Well of Loneliness has boldly disturbed heterosexual norms by figuring fragrantly the first female invert in the English literary history, it is still trapped in the binary heterosexism dominating the gender ideology then. Meanwhile, Orlando, through a mysterious hero/heroine, offers a genderless utopian that jumps outside of the patriarchal heterosexism, anticipating the postmodern feminist thinking embodied by Judith Butler. This thesis helps to interpret identity politics based on the three parameters-sex, gender and sexuality-and reconsider the regulatory power of heterosexism embodied in these two novels.