'In Company of a Gipsy'
The 'Gypsy' as Trope in Woolf and Brontë
in Volume 19 (2007): Issue 1 (Mar 2007): A History of Her Own: History and the Modernist Woman Writer. Guest Editors: Mark Llewellyn and Ann Heilmann
Halfway through Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), the title character, who lives for over three hundred years, wakes up and discovers that he has become a woman. Although Woolf evidently does not intend us to take this novel entirely seriously, it is clear from the contemporaneous A Room of One’s Own that she is quite serious about deconstructing the boundaries of gender; in Orlando, she calls its categories into question by depicting them as permeable, even arbitrary. In so doing, she flies in the face of her Victorian forebears, as was her wont, critiquing and complicating the prevailing model of male/female as binary opposition.3 Orlando’s sudden, mysterious transformation from male to female initially appears to reflect this binary: ‘Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman, and has remained so ever since’ (139). However, his/her transition is complicated when Orlando enters into a somewhat indeterminate state, escaping from both Constantinople and gender by running away with a ‘gipsy tribe’ (140).
