Intrapsychic Self-redemption

Virginia Woolf(1882—1941)is a British writer and one of the representative practitioners of stream of consciousness.Orlando: A Biography describes a four-hundred-year life experience of Orlando who is an adonis.He undergoes the betrayal of love and setback of literature ambition successively and then transforms his sex from man to woman.After a series of intrapsychic struggle,Orlando acquires her inner peace and dares to confront her desires.Finally,Orlando gets a prize with her poem in modern times.With the creation of Orlando,a character transcending space,time and gender,Virginia Woolf expresses her yearning for a harmonious and consummate love and her expectation to achieve an intrapsychic self-redemption with the life experience of Orlando.This thesis uses Psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud to analyze Orlando,especially from perspectives of Oedipus complex,defense mechanism and Personality structure.Through analyzing “mother” “Queen Elizabeth” “Princess Sasha” and “poet Greene”,this thesis reveals the inner complicated feelings of Orlando: obsessive while alienated feelings toward mother;wants to resist against the Queen while feels guilty about her;love and hate feelings toward Princess Sasha;and blind worship toward poet Greene.All these characters,more or less,bring traumatic memories to Orlando and Orlando unconsciously adapts various defense mechanisms to deal with the traumatic memories.Then Orlando transforms his sex from a licentious young man to a woman who compromises time spirit.Finally,the androgynous Orlando achieves her inner consummation.The three stages of Orlando(male,female,and androgyny)correspond with Id,Superego and Ego respectively.Taking Virginia Woolf's life experience intoaccount,it can be found that there are many similarities between Orlando and Virginia Woolf.Therefore,Orlando is a projection of Virginia Woolf and Orlando can be perceived as a projection of intrapsychic repressed desires and complicated emotions of Virginia Woolf.She drains her repressive desires during the creating process and tries to achieve an intrapsychic comfort and self-redemption from Orlando's androgynous consummation.