Androgyny And Orlando

Androgyny, in a narrow sense, refers to the physical uniqueness of possessing both male and female genitals. Nowadays, however, with its wide application in religion, psychology and literature in particular, it is no longer confined to its original meaning and has adopted an additional dimension of blending both masculine and feminine psychological traits of a person. It has been widely employed to explain the sexuality of people and their related behaviors.Virginia Woolf, a major British novelist, essayist, and critic, is the first to introduce this theory into literary criticism. She expands the notion and uses it as a symbol of unity. It is her profound insight into the bisexual quality of nature that sets her apart from other feminist writers, who were aware of the fact but failed to work out a theory to incorporate it. In her opinion, the androgynous consciousness is made manifest through the unification of masculine and feminine principles into the creation of a work of art. It is a creation of a state of mind rather than a creation of biology. In her famous novel Orlando, the protagonist who begins as a man in the late 1500s in England and metamorphoses into a woman while on a diplomatic mission to Turkey, experiences such an ideal state of sex unity in his mind and succeeds in writing a poem with such a quality.Woolf's conception of androgyny is based on the original use of the term in various fields and her expansion of the notion to include the sex unity and self-transcendence greatly enriches the theory. This thesis is an attempt to have a comprehensive, if not exhaustive, review of the theory of androgyny as it is used in different branches of learning and to do an in-depth research on Virginia Woolf's conception of androgyny in relation to its traditional definitions through a close examination of Orlando.