Orlando’s Happy Ending

Virginia Woolf,a renowned British writer,is considered not only as one of the representatives of stream-of-consciousness literature but also an avant-garde of modernism and feminism in 20^th century.Orlando,a fantasy work in the form of a biography,is among many of her masterpieces.While in 1990s American postmodernist theorist Judith Butler proffered the idea of gender performativity by which she means that gender is a set of repeated acts and thus it is dynamic and fluid.This idea surprisingly strikes a chord with characters in Orlando.This essay tries to justify the idea that unorthodox Orlando to some degree contributes to the formation of a more harmonious and gender inclusive society by analyzing the background of Orlando’s and other characters’gender performances,the hidden meaning and influence of those gender performances in Orlando with the aim of uncovering the lie that gender is an essence from the lens of Butler’s gender performativity along with De Beavoir’s theory of second sex and Butlerian elaboration to feminist theories of her predecessors.This thesis is divided into three parts.The first chapter departs from a common presumption heterosexual matrix to show how it is expressed in Orlando.Also,the discussion of men’s and women’s differently unfair situations under such a matrix is involved in order to explain motivations of characters’gender performances.The second chapter is committed to disputing the idea that gender is an essence by mainly focusing Orlando’s masculinity and femininity to explore the hidden mechanism of gender identity.Moreover,the analysis of Butlerian subversive acts displayed in Orlando is also engaged into discussion to further prove gender as dynamic and fluid.The third chapter then interprets the positive effects of Orlando’s gender performances in terms of individual and society.This essay seeks to justify the idea that Woolf’s unorthodox character Orlando to some extent makes contribution to the appearance of a more gender-neural and more harmonious society.